by Matt Toler

Last October, shortly before finishing the first draft of my novel, Treadpath, I attended a talk by Coraline and The Graveyard Book author Neil Gaiman in Chicago. The Q&A session at the end largely consisted of questions about writing and process. When asked whether a new writer should write short stories or novels, Gaiman responded along the lines of: “I’d recommend short stories, because it’s important to be able to finish.” I sat there and thought “Dammit, I’m doing it backwards.”

Treadpath began as an amalgamation of the “what if…?” daydreams of bored college library employee and the sort of tribute that’s sometimes required of someone who has been genuinely moved by an experience. I always tell people that I never cared whether it turned out to be a bestseller or even something that could end up published, it was just something I had to do. So, armed with a bundle of loose concepts and an ample amount of drive, I set out to unconsciously make the journey to a completed novel as miserable an experience as possible.

There’s an exquisite sort of self-loathing that comes from re-editing eighty pages to convert the story from first person to third person. There’s a strange sort of satisfaction that comes from throwing away forty pages that don’t fit the outline that only bothered to put itself together once far too much had already been written. I liken these processes to my chosen career as a graphic designer, where the self-editing is all visual and on-the-fly. I have to have something to work with, a content base, before I can start building the final product. With the novel, this became a labor-intensive process because there was no other source for the material other than what I could put down in a night or a weekend.

I imagine that a lot of people who set out to write a novel end up doing what I did for the first three years of the project. I’d take it out and mess around with it for a few weeks, decide it was too much of a mess in its current state and shelve it again. It could even be that some people can actually finish a book that way. I can’t. I had to really ask myself what I wanted out of the project and what it was going to take to finish it. My answer came in the form of spending two to three hours a night after work during most of 2008 stitching together the old pieces, filling in the gaps in the early parts and then finishing the damn thing off.

I made a couple of promises to myself. I promised to stick to my outline, which I strenuously reworked until all the pieces fit. I promised myself that the hard part was getting the thing down and not worrying about every little detail on the first pass. This was a lie, but it kept me going to believe it.

It became apparent soon after reading my first draft that I wasn’t going to be the type of writer who can generate finished material on the first try. The first round of edits may as well have been a new novel for all of the fixes that took place. Each subsequent round got shorter (I ended up doing four) but there came a point where I became aware of the possibility of overworking the material. That’s where I stopped.

So now I’ve got this manuscript. I consider it a readable, if still somewhat flawed, piece. I don’t see it being taught in English 101 two hundred years from now, but it tells the story I wanted to tell, which was my goal. I’m considering sending it to a literary agent since I don’t relish the idea of paying an editor on my own. I’m considering self-publishing. I’m considering donation-based digital distribution. For the moment, I’m content to send the finished product to my friends and family as sort of an ultimate token of gratitude.

I learned that there’s a momentum to the process that’s almost addictive when it’s working correctly. I learned that reading your words out loud is a quick and painful way to determine whether a passage is working. I learned that there’s a price to be paid for getting the first draft down quickly. I re-learned three quarters of my high school English education. I learned that you have to trust your reader. I learned that there’s nothing in the world like holding a printed and bound work in your hands and knowing that the thing is, for better or worse, yours and may outlive you.

Good luck, fellow writers. I’m looking forward to learning from all of you.

Matt Toler lives and works in Chicago as a graphic designer. He took a break from writing political and social rants on his blog to finish his first novel, Treadpath. It is currently unpublished.

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