Matt Bell

An Accumulation of Small Efforts: A Conversation with Matt Bell

Interviewed by C.Connor Syrewicz

Editor’s Note: Matt Bell is the author of several titles and, most recently, of the novel Appleseed published by Custom House in 2021. His book on the craft of novel writing, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, was published in 2022 by Soho Press. It can be purchased here.

We are sincerely grateful to him for his willingness to crawl into the weeds of the novel-writing process in this conversation with our current Editor-at-Large, Connor.

Connor: A lot of books on the craft of writing include the words “How to” somewhere in their titles. These often have a lot to offer the aspiring writer, but in my experience, many of them are not so much how-tos as what-tos; they’ll often describe what supposedly “good” writing looks like while providing relatively little guidance on how one can actually write something “good” for themselves. Compared to these other books, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts is, in my view, somewhat unique in that it really is far more concerned with teaching people how to write a novel than with telling them what kind of novel to write. In his recent book on the craft of fiction, George Saunders writes that,

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. . . . The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

This makes me curious about the thinking that led you to write Refuse to Be Done: How and why did you develop all of the wonderful “tactics” for novel writing that you described in the book, and how did you manage to discuss your writing process so truthfully despite it being, as Saunders observed, such a pain in the ass to do so?

Matt: One of the lucky things about my own growth as a teacher of writing is that I have very little interest in convincing people that the kind of novel I write is the best kind to write: my first novel was such an odd book—an invented pocket universe of a setting, ghost children, a talking bear, a labyrinthine memory palace dug beneath a house, a second moon sung into the sky, all rendered in an invented archaic vernacular—that saying everyone should write such books would’ve been a ridiculous stance to take. So from the first it’s always been about helping others writer the kind of books they want to write. So that’s part one.

The other part is that Refuse to Be Done comes out of my own needs as a writer. In fiction workshops, I was always required to revise but not necessarily taught how. When I wrote the first draft of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, I realized that I didn’t really know how to revise so much material at once. Some of the cornerstones of the process in Refuse to Be Done—the reverse outlining of the first draft, the rewriting/retyping the second draft toward that outline, the layered approach to the polishing stage I call the third draft—were all discovered while rewriting that novel. They then became the basis for a craft talk that was my “traveling show” for almost a decade, where I tried to share as many practical, nuts-and-bolts revision tactics as I could. Not everything that works for me will work for others, but a lot of it has turned out to be universally doable, or at least something that can be tried on the way to each writer discovering their own best practices. (And of course best practices might change from project to project, so we’re always needing to learn new things.)

Connor: In the passage that I quoted above, it’s fascinating to me that Saunders considers the artistic process, something that he has evidently mastered, to be so “mysterious.” Stephen King said something similar when, in one of the forewords to On Writing, he wrote,

Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.

Given that the writing process is still thought to be so “mysterious,” what do you wish people better understood about the actual process by which novels get written (or, at least, the process by which you write novels), and what did you hope to teach readers about it by writing Refuse to Be Done

Matt: One fundamental truth is that writing a novel is not really a single task called writing a novel. That’s both too daunting and too vague. Writing a novel is effort expressed over time, an accumulation of small efforts that eventually meld into a hopefully seamless whole. We also become the person who can write the novel we want to write by writing it: there’s no way that I know to do that work in advance. So while the big task is daunting—writing novels is hard—the individual steps are much less so. Even the sheer typing is almost trivial: if you write 500 words five days a week for a year, you’ll write 130,000 words.

One thing I hope Refuse to Be Done does is to make more of the individual steps, choices, and tasks visible, so that it’s easier to imagine moving through the process.

Connor: Speaking of the writing process, one of my little pet theories is that established creative writers tend to put a lot of thought and effort not only into writing “good” texts but also into engaging in “good” writing processes. For example, in a study in which two researchers asked some published poets to think aloud as they wrote poetry, one of the poets said this:

What I am trying to do is actually, umm, not think and just look at the words and let the words spill on the page without thought. . . . Hoofs of the horse drumming the box you running across the fields hoofs of a hoofbeats hoofs of a horse hoofbeats hoofs hoofbeats beats of a horse.

What’s interesting to me is that, in this moment, this poet’s stated goal—to “let the words spill on the page without thought”— had nothing to do with text they wanted to write and had much more to do with the kind of process with which they wanted to write it. Similarly, in Refuse to Be Done, much of your advice (especially in the first third of the book) is aimed at helping people to cultivate more productive and fruitful writing processes. For example, you write,

Always go to where you energy is the highest. Your excitement will generate more excitement—and you will avoid the alternative, where your boredom generates more boredom. . . . The pleasure of the author is one of the best guides that you, the author, can follow. . . . Move toward pleasure, excitement, joy.

This makes me wonder what you think of my little pet theory. Do you think that some writers would be helped by putting a little more thought and energy into their writing processes? And if so, what kind of writing processes do you think they should be trying to create for themselves?

Matt: It’s so hard to speak for what other people should do. But speaking only for myself, it does seem that studying writing and paying attention to my own process has done nothing to diminish the magic, or to prevent me from reaching useful states like Barthelme’s “not knowing” or Robert Boswell’s “half-known world.”

 I do think that reflection is part of what enables both artistic growth and retention of information. I think there’s a fair bit of research that suggests that once you reach what’s sometimes called the “Okay Plateau,” where your practice is “good enough,” is to reflect on what you’re doing and then address what needs addressing. It’s what athletes do when they watch tape of their own performances. Keeping a process log or project journal is one way a writer might do the same.

Connor: That last passage that I quoted from Refuse to Be Done exemplifies the strong emphasis that you place throughout the book upon the author’s joy, pleasure, interest, and excitement. Creative writers are sometimes thought to be a bit of a moody, gloomy group of people, so it’s striking to me that much of your advice is directed at helping writers to enjoy the writing process more. What role do all of these positive emotions have in your writing process, and why do you think it’s important to take some pleasure in the process of writing a novel?

Matt: Writing is challenging but it shouldn’t be joyless. Life’s short. People shouldn’t do things they don’t want to do, if they can avoid it: there’s enough drudgery imposed on us already, at work and elsewhere. I’m not sure there’s a single person in the world being forced to write novels. If you don’t like writing, stop. If what used to be joyful no longer is, figure out why and change what can be changed. Even in the most serious, emotionally wrenching, intellectually difficult novel, there can and should be a sense of play and pleasure, in the writer and on the page.

Connor: I’ve been reading a lot of research on creative writers lately, and unsurprisingly, much of it suggests that creative writers are a diverse, varied, and stubbornly individualistic bunch. That said, one of the most obvious similarities that I have noticed between them has to do with the way in which they describe their ideal writing process: overwhelmingly, they tend to describe their best writing experiences in surprisingly passive terms. For example, in one of my favorite sections of Refuse to Be Done, you write,

I want to be guided by what appears on the page as I write, by the emerging desires of characters and the dramatic demands of drafted scenes. . . . Following any individual writing day’s whims and interests, I pay attention for inspiration filtering in from my daily life and from the books I’m reading and other media I’m consuming. Then I try to put that inspiration to work in my draft, letting it flourish where it will. . . . Pay attention to your own desires, but listen to the pages you’re accumulating: as you play on, writing your story, sooner or later the pages begin to play back. That’s the moment a draft comes to life, if you’ll give it room to breathe. (emphasis added)

I’d love to hear about what’s actually happening in your mind when “the pages begin to play back.” Is it that the story appears to be arriving in your mind without any effort or deliberate thought? Is it that your characters appear to be acting and behaving of their own free will? Is it that the text itself appears to be in the driver’s seat of the writing process while you are merely a passenger (or even someone locked on the trunk)? Some mix of the three? None of them?

Matt: Lucy Corin talks about how you should look at your material to find your material, arguing that every part of your story has a story you can learn to read. That’s really the heart of it: you write a sentence or a paragraph or a scene, doing the best you can at the time. When you reread it—or, even better, rewrite it—new ideas occur that you couldn’t have come up with the first time. Where do they come from? The drafted page or from you? Both. In something as long as a novel, you’ll inevitably forget most of what you’ve written, most of the time: I know I can only hold thirty or so pages of prose in my head at any given time. When I go back and reread pages outside whatever I’m currently holding, I have to encounter them again, as the person I am now, who isn’t the person who wrote them. There’s a kind of back-and-forth that happens between the many versions of you that work on any given page that ideally feels like collaboration. The reason great books feel like they were written by superhumans is that they’re the accumulation of many selves working together, not the one self a writer is any given day.

Connor: Throughout the first third of Refuse to Be Done, you discuss a number of tactics for writing an exploratory first draft or, as you call it, “a sort of one-to-one scale model . . . of what the novel could be,” but I’d love to hear more about the process by which you initially write new material. Another one of my little pet theories has to do with what’s going on in a fiction writer’s mind as they are writing a discovery draft. Specifically, I think that, when a fiction writer is attempting to move their story forward in time, they are engaging in a lot of what psychologists call “mental simulation,” which is “the imagination of alternative, counterfactual realities.” In other words, I think that they are taking everything they (think they) know about their storyworld and everything they (think they) know about the world generally and then using that information to imaginatively reason about what is most likely to happen next. I imagine the actual process of writing a discovery draft is far more complicated than this, and I don’t want to by any means suggest that this is the only tactic fiction writers use to write it, but I’d love to know what you think that my pet theory. Do you use this kind of “mental simulation” to write your discovery drafts? If so, what do you think “good” mental simulation tends to look like? And if not, what are the tactics that you do tend to use to move the world of your story forward in time?

Matt: Your mental simulation hypothesis doesn’t sound wrong to me, although it also doesn’t sound that much like what it feels like to draft. Mostly I don’t think I’m holding that much knowledge at once, although probably some of what you describe is happening subconsciously.

I was trained in two different kinds of drafting, I’d say. The first is the more typical “trying to figure out happens next” kind of process, which is probably where your mental simulation mode would apply most closely: it proceeds from character want, from plot, and from genre tropes and personal observation. The second comes from Gordon Lish, who edited books by and taught so many of my favorite writers, and who I took a class with in 2010. His process emphasizes recursion and consecution and what he calls the swerve, all of which are ways of staying with the material, going backward to go forward, not being guided by your ideas but by the language already on the page. Garielle Lutz’s essays “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” and “The Poetry of the Paragraph” are probably the best public description of this style of composition.

Connor: On the subject of imagining a storyworld, a passage from the beginning of Refuse to Be Done led me to an interesting thought. In the passage, you write,

In my mid-thirties, I moved from Michigan to Arizona. For the first year that I lived in Phoenix, I struggled to write, and only months in did it occur to me why: nothing in Arizona made me think of home. . . . That year made it clear to me that I’m a Midwestern writer and that I should lean into that rather than try to avoid it. Midwestern flora and fauna, Midwestern weather, Midwestern people with their emplaced patters of speech and thought—no matter what I’m writing about, these are the things my minds reaches for first.

Sometime after reading this passage, I happened to be writing a scene, and I noticed something interesting: I had, without quite intending to, set the scene in the living room of a friend’s house. I was not intending to write about my friend or their house, but the scene had to be set somewhere, in some living room or another, and so my mind just so happened set it there. Thinking back, I realized that I do this kind of thing all the time, and it made me wonder if other writers do this as well. Am I right to think that the “local triggers” of the Midwest, as you call them, are helpful to you because they provide your mind with easily accessible material upon which to base your imagined storyworlds, or is something else going on here? And what other purposes, if any, do these local triggers serve in the context of your writing process?

Matt: It’s my firm believe that what we call “imagination” is really memory. All we have to draw on is our lived experience and our art experience; every writer drains those two wells in different proportion. It’s possible to write a novel that relies almost entirely on other books or other kinds of art. It’s equally possible to write one drawn entirely from personal experience, with no literary forebears. The extremes are rare though. Most of us wander the middle ground.

Related to this: most of what feels most unique simply has the most diverse set of influences, skillfully recombined and progressed into somewhere new. All the most innovative writers I know are the best-read people: it’s not that they have no influences, but that they have so many that individual influences are harder to spot. (Conversely, a writer with only one influence is extremely easy to spot.)

Connor: As Saunders observed, people tend to talk about the writing process as if the writer formed an intention first and then the text followed clearly from it, but in Refuse to Be Done, you seem to talk about the process in reverse order: as if the text is formed first and the intention follows from it or, perhaps, as if the text and the intention create each other. For example, you write,

One of the surest dangers a novel faces in its early life is a writer too eager to be sure of what it is.

And much later, when discussing the process of writing a second draft, you write,

That’s the goal of the rewrite: to work until the book you’re writing becomes the book it wants to be, uniquely itself, fully alive.

Throughout Refuse to Be Done, you place a lot of value on making lots of tentative, provisional choices, on approaching your own work flexibly, and on rethinking and reconsidering what the text is up to—which is to say, you place a lot of value on finding your intentions in the process rather than establishing them at the outset. Obviously, there isn’t one, single “right” way to write, but in terms of your own process, why do you prefer the former way of writing to the latter?

Matt: This goes back to what I was saying before, about layering and manifesting. The results on any given day are a lot thinner than what comes from returning to the page repeatedly over a significant period of time. As you said, it’s not the only way, but for me the results of this process are so much richer and more complex than anything I could do if I relied on my first drafts—and that goes double for what would happen if I had to stick with what I could conceive of in advance, which is almost nothing.

Connor: After reading Refuse to Be Done, I walked away with one big question: Where does voice enter the writing process? On the one hand, you say that you always try to write the best sentences you can, but on the other, you save an explicit discussion of language for the final third of the book and say that,

allowing for a productive looseness in the prose during early drafts is one of the most mentally demanding parts of novel writing, particularly because we often emphasize the pure quality of our prose as a marker of being a “real” writer.

It sounds to me like you are thinking about the book’s voice throughout the entire process but that your attention to the details of language increases significantly toward the end of the it, when the “bigger concerns” as you call them are out of the way, but this account still leaves me with a question: Where does the initial sound and character of a novel’s voice originate? Do you have a particular kind of voice that you tend to initially use across all of your novels and that you then modify in the context of writing particular novels, or is the voice of the book something you discover in the drafting process along with other aspects of the book like the plot, setting, and characters? Some mix of the two? Neither?

Matt: I don’t know that I have a catch-all answer for this. Voice is constrained by so many other choices you make: point of view, setting, genre, the vocabulary you have available to you, and so much else. Lish once told me something like, “Aim to be the best writer in the voice of your time and place,” which makes sense to me—I love so many writers who seem to be doing this—but I don’t think it’s my goal. I do think the voice of the novel tends to get discovered as I go, like so much else. One way I know this is that the prose that gets written first tends to be the “weakest,” and eventually to not even fit that well with the rest. This is one of the reasons for rewriting instead of revision: Amy Tan says you write the second draft in “the voice of all that happened,” the voice you discover by living through the story you’re inventing. Rewriting/retyping a novel in the second draft allows me to try to render it all in that better, truer, discovered voice—but even in that draft the voice tends to mutate and grow stronger again…

Connor: Finally, to finish up, I’d love to address one of the other aspects that makes Refuse to Be Done unique: its emphasis upon the process of writing a novel, specifically. Plenty of craft books discuss writing fiction generally but far fewer of them focus on the novel writing process. Why was it important to you to focus on writing novels specifically? Do you think that the demands of writing long-form and short-form fiction are different? What did you gain from focusing on novels, and what, if anything, do you think there is to be gained for craft writers in tightening the focus beyond the generality of genre labels like poetry, fiction, and non-fiction? 

Matt: Sadly, this isn’t that complicated: I talk about writing novels first and foremost because that’s primarily what I write, and because it’s what most fiction writers I know are trying to do. I love the short story, but most of my students are trying to become novelists, as are most of the writers I meet outside the university. (Most of my undergrad students would never have even read a short story, if we didn’t insist on teaching them the form.) I also think novel writing—as an extended process that typically lasts for several years, from conception to publication—is simply hard to teach and hard to learn. The fifteen-week class isn’t nearly enough time to see it through from start to finish, for most of us. Even the kind of year-long incubator programs that I admire so much are probably only getting most writers through a single draft. But hopefully a book like Refuse to Be Done can be a companion to that long process, offering encouragement and aid along the way.

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Geoff Wyss