{"id":28432,"date":"2016-01-14T08:07:14","date_gmt":"2016-01-14T13:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=28432"},"modified":"2016-01-14T08:07:14","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T13:07:14","slug":"jason-gurley-five-things-i-learned-writing-eleanor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2016\/01\/14\/jason-gurley-five-things-i-learned-writing-eleanor\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Gurley: Five Things I Learned Writing Eleanor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Eleanor and Esmerelda are identical twins with a secret language all their own, inseparable until a terrible accident claims Esme\u2019s life. Eleanor\u2019s family is left in tatters: her mother retreats inward, seeking comfort in bottles; her father reluctantly abandons ship. Eleanor is forced to grow up more quickly than a child should, and becomes the target of her mother\u2019s growing rage.<\/em><\/p>\n

Years pass, and Eleanor\u2019s painful reality begins to unravel in strange ways. The first time it happens, she walks through a school doorway, and finds herself in a cornfield, beneath wide blue skies. When she stumbles back into her own world, time has flown by without her. Again and again, against her will, she falls out of her world and into other, stranger ones, leaving behind empty rooms and worried loved ones. <\/em><\/p>\n

One fateful day, Eleanor leaps from a cliff and is torn from her world altogether. She meets a mysterious stranger, Mea, who reveals to Eleanor the weight of her family\u2019s loss. To save her broken parents, and rescue herself, Eleanor must learn how deep the well of her mother\u2019s grief and her father\u2019s heartbreak truly goes. Esmerelda\u2019s death was not the only tragic loss in her family\u2019s fragmented history, and unless Eleanor can master her strange new abilities, it may not be the last.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dumb, blockheaded persistence sometimes wins the day<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s just get this one out of the way, right up front: This book took a long, long time. Nearly fifteen years long. That<\/em> kind of long. And let me be clear: This isn\u2019t a badge of honor. This isn\u2019t Look how many hours I worked this week, did <\/em>you work that many hours? No? <\/em>You\u2019ve probably worked with people like that. And you know that those people probably work more inefficiently than you do. There\u2019s a reason<\/em> you didn\u2019t work seventy-six hours this week. You can get your work done in the usual forty. And that\u2019s exactly the case here. Eleanor<\/em> took nearly fifteen years for a lot of reasons, most of which had to do with my inexperience, my inefficiency, my tendency to be derailed by shiny objects\u2014like the nearly two years I spent adapting it into an amateur comic instead of working on the novel\u2014and some of which were more practical, like:<\/p>\n

Sometimes you aren\u2019t ready to write the book you\u2019re writing<\/h2>\n

I was twenty-three when I began working on this novel. I wasn\u2019t a newcomer to the idea of writing books\u2014I\u2019d already written and shelved three of them\u2014but it was immediately apparent to me that Eleanor<\/em> was the first personal<\/em> novel I had attempted. This was a book that was going to answer some big questions that I had about life, the universe, et cetera. There\u2019s a problem with that, though: when you\u2019re twenty-three, you don\u2019t know the answers. Or if you do, your answers are pretty damp and unformed, not yet tested by age and experience. In my case, Eleanor\u2014<\/em>at least in those early, long-ago drafts\u2014was struggling to reconcile some major questions I had about faith, belief, the existence of god. I grew up in the Pentecostal church, where questions like that weren\u2019t only dodged, but discouraged. In my early twenties, I was finally trying to face them head-on, using Eleanor<\/em>, my novel-in-progress, as my tank. I didn\u2019t know how to drive a tank then, and still don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I chipped away at this novel until about 2010\u2014the comic detour\u2014and then again until late 2012, when I put Eleanor<\/em> aside entirely. My wife had found a novel-writing competition, and suggested I enter. It seemed disingenuous to try to rush Eleanor<\/em> to completion for the sake of a contest I probably wouldn\u2019t win, so I wrote something else, and finished it in record time\u2014about three weeks. I skipped the contest altogether\u2014I never win contests anyway\u2014and self-published this lark of a novel. It found some readers, and gave me a high I\u2019d never experienced. People were reading my work! It was as if a dam had burst: in the next eight months, I wrote and self-published three more novels.<\/p>\n

I returned to the lump that was Eleanor<\/em> after that, having restored my writerly confidence, and to my surprise, discovered another major impediment to my earlier progress:<\/p>\n

Sometimes the book you\u2019re writing wants to be a different book<\/h2>\n

Remember all those big questions I was asking? And how I was using Eleanor<\/em> to try to answer them? Yeah, well, more than a decade had passed since I first started down that road. I\u2019d gotten married; I\u2019d become a father. When I returned to the novel in 2013, I realized that not only was Eleanor<\/em> a failed self-help book masquerading as a novel, I\u2019d long ago stopped asking those big questions. I\u2019d already resolved my personal opinions about faith and belief and god and such, and here was my old book, still throwing pebbles at that hurricane. I couldn\u2019t relate to it at all. I expected this to depress me, I think, but instead, it was utterly liberating. I didn\u2019t have to write that book anymore.<\/p>\n

But the characters stuck with me. I\u2019d known Eleanor and her family for more years than I\u2019d known most of the tangible, real human beings in my life. Giving them up wasn\u2019t that appealing. So instead of throwing them away, I just threw away the story I\u2019d constructed for them, and began looking for their<\/em> story, one that wasn\u2019t my own. And it turned out that the story I discovered was way, way more interesting than my own derailed, earlier draft.<\/p>\n

Writing is fun (sometimes), but revision is magical<\/h2>\n

Okay, writing isn\u2019t always fun. Most of the time it isn\u2019t fun, even. There are good days, but mostly you just have to do<\/em> it. It took several novels for me to learn this particular truth, but once it finally sunk in, it stuck: you don\u2019t have to write a perfect draft the first time out, or the second, or the ninth. You just have to make each one better, a little at a time.<\/p>\n

Revising a book is pure, unadulterated magic. You step back, you look at what you\u2019ve made, and suddenly, if you look long enough, you start to see the threadbare parts, or the areas where too much fabric piled up. It bunches too tightly in this area; it\u2019s too taut over there. You tug here, snip there, and suddenly entire sections of the garment begin to hang just right. In the case of Eleanor<\/em>, the biggest themes emerged after<\/em> I\u2019d finished writing the new draft. Once I saw them, I could work my way back through the book, drawing them out a little more.<\/p>\n

Beware, though: once you fall in love with the editing process, you might have a hard time ever stopping<\/em>. Eventually, you have to put your hands up, push away from the table, and call a thing done. There\u2019s always something more you could tweak. You\u2019ve got more stories to tell, though. Right? I definitely do.<\/p>\n

There are, like, seven thousand ways to get to the finish line<\/h2>\n

When I was eighteen years old and I wrote my first novel, I set a goal: by twenty-five I\u2019d be a big literary star. (Oh, those heady teenage dreams.) Five years later I started Eleanor<\/em>, not knowing I\u2019d be approaching forty before the book was complete. (And boy am I grateful that self-publishing wasn\u2019t as easy and accessible when I was eighteen years old. Hoo, boy.)<\/p>\n

When I finished Eleanor<\/em>, I half-heartedly sent it to a few agents and editors, but then I did what I knew how to do: I self-published it, in the summer of 2014. If that\u2019s all that had happened, it would have been enough. People were reading the book, sharing it with their friend. It found an audience, and that audience connected with the book in ways I genuinely didn\u2019t expect. I was surprised when the book shot up the Amazon bestseller list\u2014I think it peaked at #25 or so, to my amazement\u2014and even more surprised when an email arrived from a Hollywood producer who was interested in the film rights. That was a conversation I wasn\u2019t prepared to have on my own, but it helped me find an agent who could help. And then things just kept going: the agent helped me sell the novel to a major publisher (Crown), and then several foreign rights sales followed. Months of additional editing came after that, and then my first journey through the mechanisms of the publishing world began. I\u2019ve crossed so many different finish lines with this book now that I\u2019ve lost track. I\u2019ll be thirty-eight this year, though, and I feel like I\u2019ve just crossed the starting line.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Jason Gurley is the author of Eleanor<\/em> (Crown, 2016) and the fiction collection Deep Breath Hold Tight<\/em>. His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed Magazine<\/em> and various anthologies. He lives and writes in Oregon.<\/p>\n

Jason Gurley: Twitter<\/a><\/span> | Website<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Eleanor<\/em>: Amazon<\/a><\/span> | Penguin Random House<\/a><\/span> | Powell\u2019s<\/a><\/span> | B&N<\/a><\/span> | iTunes<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eleanor and Esmerelda are identical twins with a secret language all their own, inseparable until a terrible accident claims Esme\u2019s life. Eleanor\u2019s family is left in tatters: her mother retreats inward, seeking comfort in bottles; her father reluctantly abandons ship. Eleanor is forced to grow up more quickly than a child should, and becomes the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-28432","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-7oA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28432"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28435,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28432\/revisions\/28435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}