I’m trying to write a whimsical children’s novel (you know, something in the style of Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket or Dianne Wynne Jones’s oeuvre), because I wasn’t in the mood to write another short story and I wasn’t in the mood to write anything long and complicated. Whimsical children’s novels (WCNs, for short) tend to be pretty short, and I also thought, since I had a pretty robust idea for one, that this would be easy.

I was wrong about that (as I kind of suspected that I would be). Putting together a WCN is just as hard as putting together any other kind of book. And right now, after two weeks of work, I have about 600 words (and thirteen discarded drafts) of an opening chapter.

However, I’m not full of the usual panic and gloom that I normally feel when I’m mired in a novel. I think that’s because no one is really expecting this out of me, and I’m also not working according to any self-imposed deadline. It’ll be done when it’s done. And if it’s never done, then that’s fine too.

Although it’s an unsettling and chancy endeavor, starting off on a novel is also really interesting. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, except that you’re carving and painting the pieces one by one, and each individual piece also has to work as an aesthetic object

When I’m in the process of imagining (for instance) the setting of a novel or the main character of a novel, I can often feel myself getting closer and closer to something that interests me, and it’s always really exciting to find a piece that I think I can work with. But then there remains the task of how to fit it in with all the other pieces.

The temptation is to just hammer the uneven corners together and make them fit. And, eventually, that is what you eventually need to do. There aren’t many novels where everything is perfect: all of them have places where stuff doesn’t quite make sense or things are glossed over. But you generally want to avoid that, because it throws off the whole thing.

The real solution is to go back and sort of re-jigger the edges of the pieces so they come closer to fitting. Often, you’ll need to throw out a bunch of the pieces entirely, because there’s just no way to make them fit.

For me, most of this work takes place without that much writing. Because the first 2000 words of a novel contain so much information—character, conflict, setting, voice, arc, point of view, theme, narratorial distance—they often suffice to show me exactly how things are fitting together. I’ll write a thousand words and then I’ll pull back and say, “Hmm, what’s not working here?”

And then I go back and start moving my pieces around even more.

What’s really exciting, though, is when I get close to the end, and the missing pieces are things that need to be so delicate and so specifically crafted that it seems almost impossible that I can find them. For instance, I was recently writing a story where a hard-working, successful woman was dating a total schmo who’s kind of mooching off her, and at some point I realized that the only question left—the only thing that was keeping me from writing the story—was “Why does this woman want to be with this guy?”

Except it wasn’t just that, because she needed a reason for being with him that: a) the reader would understand and emphasize with; b) wouldn’t make him seem like less of a schmo; c) wouldn’t make her seem like some kind of castrating monster who just wants to be with a weak-willed guy; d) wouldn’t be so strong that it couldn’t be disrupted by the later events of the story; and e) wouldn’t require (since the story was so short) any new scenes.

It seemed impossible that the solution would ever present itself, and I was very tempted to just go ahead and force everything into place with some kind of makeshift solution (i.e. I’d’ve thrown in a few lines of description about how no one else had ever treated her with such grace or looked at her so appreciatively, etc, you know…the kind of stuff that you can say, but which the audience won’t believe, because you haven’t dramatized any of it).

However, when the solution finally came, it felt so good and so right that it felt like there never could’ve been anything else. After that, I wrote the story in a day or two.

Right now, I am at this point with the WGN. Many of the pieces have been created. Many of them are even locked into place. But there’s one major thing that’s missing (an emptiness at the heart of the main character which somehow needs to be fulfilled in a way that will do five very specific things). And it seems impossible that any solution can ever be found.

But I have faith that it will come. Somewhere out there is one extremely odd and extremely specific character trait that will slot perfectly into the space that I have left.

And now I just need to wait for it to reveal itself to me.