It’s funny, if you would have asked me 10 years ago if I would ever write a book, I would have said “yes” and then immediately been terrified at the daunting nature of such a monumental task. For a while now, I have had this feeling like I had books in me (i.e. conversations that I have been having in my own head for decades and felt the need to put to words). But feeling it and doing it are different things. To actually start writing a book, to put pen to paper (finger to keyboard) and actually do the damn thing was still a huge obstacle.
But here I am, 33 (my Jesus year), with a dissertation (which is a kind of book, albeit, one that mercifully, no one will read) and now finished with my (second) novel again again. What? Let’s take one step back.
Writing a book is a weird process. This may be true for everyone else, or no one else, but this is true to me. My first foray into actually seeing if I could write something on the order of tens of thousands of words was, objectively, my PhD dissertation. It was, obviously, not written for narrative flare (though I like to think I try to write my academic work with care and an eye to aesthetics, when possible), but it was proof of concept for actually having the capacity and attention span to pound out a whole heap of words that made any sort of sense.
While working on my dissertation, I also felt the need to start working on a novel that I had been bouncing around in my head. It is, and will always be, the first official “book” that I wrote. And sweet baby jesus, let me tell you, it was rough.
I had this crazy huge idea: that the biosphere was connected by fungal mycelia, creating a planetary interweb that a private company had learned to hack and program and control. Fucking sick, right? But the problem for me was that the story kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Things didn’t resolve. Whole scenes, whole chapters became unnecessary. Not to mention, none of it was chronological. I added a rebel group and a secret underground city and cybernetic wolves and pretty soon the 150,000 word novel became just the first in what, I was convinced, had to be a two novel series.
For a reader (which often happened to be Rachel, to her everlasting credit) it must have been a wild ride. For the writer, it was so much fun. It was a fantastic exercise in my creative capacity, in my ability to solve narrative problems, and in developing a voice in my prose. Still, not all books are meant for the world to see and this book, my first, The Codex Amanita, will never see the light of day.
After that, I decided to start a different kind of project. One that was smaller and more self-contained. So my first idea for The Maw came about. It would be a simple story: only a few characters, one main literary conceit (i.e. what if ________ happened?), and one timeline. The premise was this: what if one day, a normal suburban family woke up to find their neighborhood had been replaced overnight by a massive, forested wilderness? For me, the interesting elements would be the family dynamics that would arise as well as the lack of practical skills they would have to survive.
And so, about three years ago, I started writing The Maw.
It took me about a year to write the first draft. Weighing in at around 60,000 words, I finished it during the summer of my last year in graduate school. Rachel has a picture of me the day I finished it for the first time. I look exhausted. For me, when I finish a draft of something that big, I never want to see it again. In that moment, the relief of having it off of my shoulders and out of my brain was better than almost any other feeling. But the thought of having to dive right back in made me shudder.
But over time, as I sat with it and let it bug me, I slowly realized “god fucking dammit, I am not done with this thing after all, am I?”
So after my first draft of The Maw, I eventually decided to go in for round two, which I was convinced, would be the final round. I ended up adding something like 30,000 words on the second go round (bringing it up to over 90,000 words total) and it took me another 8 months to do. That’s alright, I thought, it’s done now anyway. I started to reach out to agents to see if I could actually sell the thing, but didn’t have any luck. I kept trying and kept thinking and and kept getting rejected (which is never fun, but oh well, that is the world, isn’t it?) and eventually I realized, yet again, that either I was not done with the book or it was not done with me. Either way, I had work to do.
Here’s the thing: this book was supposed to be simple. It was supposed to be a story about other people in a crazy context. Sci Fi. Dystopic future shit. Not about me, not about all of these weird pieces of myself. But somewhere into the first draft I started to realized that each character was a different facet of myself. Werid. Almost like I wasn’t writing the book and instead, the book was writing out the parts of who I am in an insane situation and playing them out to see which parts survive and which ones do not. (Its fucking crazy inside my brain sometimes). Because of this, at some point, I inevitably had this interesting thought: well, if this book is about me, and if my grandfather and his influence was so profound in my life, how come he is nowhere to be seen?
It bugged me. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want this book to be about my family, or about my Cuban heritage, or about any of those complicated elements of personal identity. It was supposed to be a simple book, remember, a few characters, a single conceit, blah blah blah. But no matter how I tried to spin it, I couldn’t get past the thought.
Then there was this other thing to consider: despite my name, which is about as Hispanic as it gets, I nevertheless look and sound and read like a white guy. And I am. My heritage is mixed, on one side I am the product of an immigrant family, my grandmother from Austria and my grandfather from Cuba. On the other side, I am the product of a farming family from rural Wisconsin. I am incredibly proud of all of these things. But because of my uniquely close relationship with my grandfather, I am especially proud of my Cuban heritage, which I have spent much of my life exploring and nurturing. I spent the past decade plus living and traveling in Latin America, re-connecting with my family in Cuba, learning Spanish and how to cook my favorite Hispanic dishes from when I was young. It is a huge part of who I am personally, regardless of what it means to society and the weird ways (especially nowadays) that it vetts people for their identity like checking boxes.
My whole life, I have always felt complicated in the ways in which I claim a right to my Cuban identity. After all, I only read Latino on paper of if someone says my name out loud. How then, does this part of myself fit into my life?
It is a difficult question, and one that I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life thinking about. But in working on The Maw, I realized that this was the part of the story that was missing, because this was the part of myself that was missing. Once I realized this, I changed the main character’s name on the first page, which was both incredibly white sounding and also the first words of the story the are read. I changed it from Mike Tanner to Miguel del Campo, and re-read the first page. The entire feel of the story changed immediately. It sounded more like I had always imagined it.
I started developing this angle, adding my grandfather into the story almost exactly as I remembered him (some of the details of him in the book are embellished, but his character is very true to his affect). The whole book suddenly felt like it began to click into place. The motivations and perspectives of the main characters made sense in a way they did not before. The mystical realistic element of the book was drawn out and in a way to counterbalance the more sci fi elements, and the result was something I couldn’t have predicted, but which felt as true and authentic to me as anything else I had ever written.
Last week, I finished writing The Maw again again. I am very proud of how it came out and I would love to publish it and see it in the world. But if nothing else, writing it has helped lead me to a better understanding of the world and of myself. If that is not the point of writing, I do not know what is.
My advice to anyone out there thinking about writing a novel is this: do it. Don’t even think about it. Make space in your life, even if only a hour here or there, or twenty minutes. Start small. Let the story reveal itself. Writers are more like archaeologists than anything else. The story already exists. Your job is just to peel back the layers, bit by bit, until we see enough pieces of the whole to understand how this all fits together. And most of all, have fun. Because the world is a chaotic fucked up nightmarish hellscape. But if you take some time to think about and write about beautiful shit, or at least write about the fucked up shit beautifully, things can feel a little less bad.
hasta la victoria, siempre.
-mario