"How Do You Begin?"

On starting a novel, and a newsletter.

My sixth novel was published just a few weeks ago. So for the past couple of months I’ve been promoting it as more or less a full-time job. This job involves a steady stream of Q&As, whose most frequently asked Q is: How do you begin a new book? Is it the main character, the setting, the opening, the plot, the twist, the ending, or what?

My A is: none of those, exactly. And also: all of them.

It’s not simple. It’s not something I can explain in a clever sound bite. But it does seem like the perfect subject to begin a new newsletter: at the beginning.

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A Freezer Full of Duck Fat, Getting Fuller

I’ve been maintaining a “Book Ideas” file for so long that it has migrated with me across five laptops and as many homes. At the moment there are maybe twenty distinct projects in there. Some are as scant as a title (though the right title is no small thing; an important subject to be discussed another time). Some have a one-sentence digest line too, or tag line, reading line, log line, whatever you want to call it (including blurb if you’re in the UK, but absolutely not if you're in the US). Some of these ideas are a paragraph long, or two, or ten. Some would be more accurately described as a situation than a story; some are really just a character. Some should be combined with others. Some might be better as short stories, or feature films, or TV series, none of which are forms I have much (or any) experience creating. Some should be written by someone who is not me. Some are, no doubt, garbage.

The only certainty is that I will never write most of those books. It takes me two or three years to write a novel, and during that span this list always grows by much more than one idea. The math is inarguable. Like the supply of rendered duck fat in my freezer, which I keep around largely to make duck confit. I begin a batch with a lot of duck fat, and I end up with duck confit, plus a lot more duck fat.

My repository of literary duck fat is something I open regularly, adding to it, combining projects, fleshing out things that occur to me while I’m driving, or on the subway, or at the gym (to counteract all that duck). When an idea starts to take on the full-ish shape of a novel, it graduates out of this cluttered shared document into its own space. At the moment I have four of those, the projects I see clearest, occupying their own little word-processing apartments, which I’m gradually filling with furniture.

When the moment arrives to begin a new novel in earnest, I start to concentrate on fully furnishing these apartments, trying to figure out which one is right for me to live in, now and for the next few years. A big part of figuring this out is writing. But what I’m writing is not the text of the book. I’m writing about the book, aiming to produce a very specific thing: a single page.

That’s how I begin.

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The One-Pager

Here’s something crucial I’ve realized about any book idea of mine, or maybe any idea: it’s not a completely clear idea until I corral it from jumping around in my brain, and translate it into specific, well-organized, coherent words on a page. Until I can describe a book, I don’t actually have a book, no matter how much I believe I do.

Maybe I have a lot of individual elements. Maybe I know that the setting is going to be a fancy apartment house in New York City, maybe I know that a central character is going to be a doorman, maybe I know that the themes are going to be race and class and money, maybe I know that the novel will braid together a few stories whose relationship will gradually clarify, maybe I know that there will be moral ambiguity to the ending, maybe I know that at least one character will die violently. Maybe I know a lot, or think I do. Maybe.

But I don’t, not for certain, not all of it—not enough of it—not until I write a description of the thing. It’s this exercise of describing a book that forces me to focus on all the necessary elements, how they fit together, and what makes this a novel and not just a setting, not just a character, not just a predicament.

What’s on this page? Whatever it is that defines the book—main characters, central tension, antagonist, themes, setting, plot, twist, ending. All of it, ideally. Is it hard to get all this onto a single page? Of course it is. But it’s a lot easier than writing a whole book only to realize that I can’t describe it. If I can’t justify why a book should exist in the world, then it shouldn’t.

When I’ve managed to wrangle this one page that describes a book I want to read, that’s when I know I have a book I want to write. Producing this page isn’t merely my way of describing the novel; it’s how I figure it out. Writing is not just for communicating, it’s also a method of thinking.

This is similar to why wine tasters use seemingly ridiculous vocabulary to describe wines—cedar, tobacco, chewy. By translating the taste into language, and writing words on a page, we’re moving the experience from the sensory part of our brains to the language part, which is where the memory becomes fixed. You describe a wine as barnyardy not to deliberately sound pretentious; you do it because that’s how you cement the experience into memory, and allow yourself to retrieve that memory later. This is also why it’s useful to take notes in a meeting, even if you never look at those notes again.

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To be clear: I don’t sit down one morning and bang out this page before lunch. This is something I work on for weeks or months or even years before I begin writing the manuscript itself. And then it will serve as my guide for the two or three years that I’m writing and editing the book, then the year or more that I’m out in the world, talking about it.

Along the way, this is not a static document. I revisit and revise it plenty, ensuring that as the manuscript itself evolves, it still fits within a compelling description of a novel that I’m writing with intentionality.

Why one page? That may sound arbitrary. It’s not. A one-page description is the length of a hardcover’s flap copy: 300 words, give or take. This one-page description will evolve into many other functions, in many other situations, for many other people, for many years. In fact, every book exists in the world largely on the strength of a single page. Those other critical functions are something I’ll talk about another time.

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This New Newsletter

In 2008, when my family moved abroad, I started a blog, “Living in Luxembourg,” as a way of staying in touch; this was before social media served that role for everyone. A decade later, after I’d published a few novels, I launched a newsletter, “Dispatches,” about writing and reading and travel and cooking—about, fundamentally, me. This subject grew increasingly tiresome to me, and not particularly useful to anyone.

I want to be useful. For the better part of two decades, my everyday utility was clear to me: I was a parent, the dinner cook, a Little League coach. But my kids have been away at college for three years now, and I’m no longer useful in that way, and I feel that absence. It’s not the most acute absence I feel, but it’s maybe the most easily solved.

One thing I’ve realized about the publishing world is that a lot of writers don’t understand how the book business actually works—advance earn-outs and P&Ls, production schedules and selling cycles, bestseller lists and conference panels, the implications of Kindle Unlimited (which I must admit: not only do I myself not understand it, I haven’t found anybody who truly does; I’ll be investigating that). I’ve stood at bars at far-flung festivals and listened to other authors—accomplished, professional authors—spewing misinformation like 12-year-old boys talking about sex in the schoolyard: armed with enthusiasm and rumor and an air of authority, but very little in the way of facts.

I’ve spent three and a half decades working in publishing in a variety of capacities that I think gives me a unique angle of both expertise and access. The “About” page on Substack explains the goal of this newsletter, and why I believe I’m a good person to write it, but here is the shortest, most straightforward answer: I hope this is an opportunity for me to be useful.

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The Doorman & The Road

The Doorman has appeared on some local bestseller lists, from SoCal to Portland ME, as well as a national one, plus a few subjective best-of roundups—Amazon, Esquire, Apple Books, the New York Times’ what-to-get-dad listicle. Reviews have been positive, word-of-mouth loud, sales brisk (though never brisk enough). Bookstores are selling out, reordering, selling out again.

Could I be more pleased? Absolutely; always. But that may not be entirely rational. This book is probably going as well as a reasonable author could reasonably expect, and I like to tell myself that I’m one of those. Though it’s possible that I’m wrong, and there’s no such thing as a reasonable author.

I still have upcoming events. Some are not for the faint of heart—the whole ThrillerFest shebang is nearly $1500, not to mention next week, and Aspen is, well, Aspen. A couple are rosé-soaked fundraisers featuring dozens of authors, which most of us will spend begrudging the long signing lines in front of Christie Brinkley and Robert Caro. Two are, in a bizarre coincidence, in South Carolina. If you’re wondering whether any event is right for you, please don’t hesitate to ask:

• Wed 6/18 at 9:00 a.m.: CraftFest class at ThrillerFest, New York Hilton

• Fri 6/20 at 12:40: ThrillerFest panel & signing, New York Hilton

• Fri 7/18 at 5:00: Bridgehampton NY’s Hampton Library, talk & signing

• Fri 8/1 at 4:45: Sharon CT’s Hotchkiss Library, group signing

• Sat 8/9 at 5:00: East Hampton Library’s Authors Night, group signing

• Sun 8/10 at 7:00: The Back Room virtual panel

• Fri 9/26 to Sun 9/28: Aspen Literary Festival, talk & signing

• Sat 10/11: Morristown NJ’s Book Festival, talk & signing

• Sat 10/25: Beaufort SC’s Pat Conroy Literary Festival, talk & signing

• Tues 11/11: Charleston SC’s Literary Festival, talk & signing

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Wally

Writing newsletters for 17 years, on and off, I’ve been reminded again and again that I’m far from the only person who loves pictures of other people’s dogs. First it was our old cocker spaniel Charlie Brown, then our now-old Australian Labradoodle Wally. Not everyone, of course, which is why I’ve always put the dog photo at the end. But there are many different ways to be useful in this world, and one of them is providing small doses of joy, and for some people that can take the form of a smiling dog: