The Goldilocks Complex: 5 Tips for the Commitment-Phobic Novel Writer
In the early days of conceiving what my debut novel, Atta Boy, might be, I fell prey to something Zadie Smith insightfully calls “obsessive perspective disorder,” what I might also call the Goldilocks complex. It’s the puzzlement, the existential fury, the almost allergic discomfort that comes with choosing any one story in the multiverse over any other, and sitting with it long enough to get it off the ground.
(The Two Kinds of Artistic Doubt.)
Smith talks about OPD as mainly a fixation on literal perspective in a project’s first 20 pages or so, a frenzied “trying on” of different voices and registers, from third person to first person and back again, when nothing seems to fit or flatter, and nothing’s quite right. But OPD can just as easily apply to more general, i.e. non-literal questions of perspective, not just who’s telling the story and how, but why?
These include questions such as, “What’s the point?” “Who gives a damn?” “Why this idea and not another one?” “But what if we set it in 19th-century Russia?” “Do I have to? I used to want to be a veterinarian. Maybe it’s not too late. . . . What a more wholesome and rewarding life that would be, helping little doggies live their best lives, than this miserable and pointlessly self-indulgent profession for which I’m not even being paid.”
OPD is a roiling inner battle, a kind of pained groundskeeping in the writer’s soul. To reach for another metaphor while we’re having fun with it, OPD is an explosion—however long-sustained—of commitment phobia, a psychic bachelor(ette) weekend, except not fun at all, at the end of which you realize how committed, grateful, and in love you really are.
For years I lived in awe and envy of anyone who’d successfully written a novel. Even a bad one felt like a superhuman feat of strength and endurance. How on Earth had they done it? What magic generator had they, for the duration, been hooked up to?
At the time I was writing exclusively short stories, not out of any particular regard for the form, but because they seemed like a faster and more gratifying way to metabolize my interests and my hurts, and certainly a faster track to publication (wrong—I just last week got a rejection from a story I submitted in 2019 . . . 2019!). Still, after a certain point, I knew it was time to approach a book-length work.
I mightily tried to wriggle my way out of it, or at least around it. How about a novel in stories? Linked short stories were a thing, right? How ’bout a novel in verse? Anything to avoid the unholy grunt work of moving a chosen set of characters through time in a convincing way, paragraph after paragraph, day after day.
A teeming Scrivener document was filled, unfilled, and filled again with about 400,000 false starts. Nothing magnetized. Screw it, I said, as spring turned into fall turned into winter, the panic mounting in my heart. You’ll never do it; you must learn to live with never having done it. I made a deal with myself. If I could just cull from this disgusting trash heap of words and half-baked soliloquies a single short story, I could still call myself a writer, and live another day.
So I did. One short story, one workable set of scenes, with a halfway plausible and satisfying arc. Tasked with a more manageable assignment, something weird happened. I started to have fun. That story became the first chapter of my novel.
I had written my way through the OPD phase. You must write through it too. (You wouldn’t be reading this if the path so far were easy.) You must keep putting something down on the page. At a certain point, in my limited (and Zadie Smith’s extensive) experience, something will budge. The commitment, eventually, will be clear and nonnegotiable.
It’s as if, in those months or maybe years of flip-flopping, throat-clearing, tossing and turning, thrashing and futzing about, your subconscious had been doing some very real work for you. The devil was being given his due. The existential questions that undergird your project were, in their own subterranean way, being answered and dealt with and filed away, or otherwise dismissed as irrelevant. Your antibodies—against self-doubt, against the void—are now strong. The unproductive work is over. Now the productive work can begin.
Check out Cally Fiedorek’s Atta Boy here:
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It’s remarkable that writing the first chapter should sometimes be so, so much harder than all the subsequent chapters combined, but that’s how it is for some of us. If you’re one of us, a “pantser” rather than a planner, I’m here for you. Here are a few thoughts on moving through the OPD phase, especially as a native short story writer, a few bits of advice that might help unstick you when the prospect of a novel is too daunting to bear. Some of these are more concerted craft tips, but what follows is mostly an informal pep talk for when the spirit flags.
Break it down.
As mentioned earlier, it was only by starting with a short story that I could possibly conceive of a novel. It’s not the best short story I’ve written, and it might even be my book’s worst chapter, but I knew when I was writing it that it was vaguely publishable as a standalone piece, and that knowledge is what kept me interested enough to finish it. Sometimes you need to have a bone to throw yourself, something detachable from the whole that will be artistically gratifying as a smaller unit; otherwise the satisfaction is too delayed, the bigger picture too abstract, the (perceived) cost to the writer too overwhelming to proceed.
Not to mix metaphors here (bone, stick), but it was only by dangling that little carrot in front of my own nose—the carrot of a completed, 6,000-word short story that worked on its own terms—that I could trick myself into showing up for the book as a whole.
Write from the inside out, or the bottom up.
Never outside-in, and never top-down. For years my idea was to write a super-funny, super-cool, rip-roaring crime comedy about wheelers and dealers in contemporary New York City, fun, fresh, Scorsese-esque, outrageously alive and wonderful. Naturally I crumbled under the pressure of this, and my prose was inert, lifeless, self-conscious, and just plain bad. No one sentence or scene could ever live up to that.
You cannot write from the elevator pitch, or the jacket blurb. You have to find the human voice first, and then work outwards (or upwards), only then beginning to reincorporate some of the features of your original vision. One must be patient, building bit by bit, and wait for the gestalt.
Don’t be afraid of small.
Finding an idea for a novel is hard. You can write anything, but you can’t write everything. You’re going to have to start with one character, in one situation. This might feel dinky or deficient to you (and this is where the OPD comes in). But think about your favorite artists and creators. Do they do everything, or do they just do their particular thing exceptionally well? Did they set out to speak for all mankind, or to speak for themselves?
Springsteen may be the poetic voice of tri-state-area electricians, but he is not the poetic voice of, say, Holocaust survivors, impoverished children on the Oregon Trail, astronauts, or the discontents of communist rule in 1970s Belarus. He can only do his thing. The concerns of his art are apparently prosaic, but they derive their folkloric, universal power from how honestly and affectionately he inhabits his own little corner of the world. Do not be afraid to be prosaic. Humble. Even trashy, if you want to be.
Of course, maybe realism isn’t your thing at all, and you want to conjure a fantasy world so remote even its barest mention will require pole-vaulting ambition and intensive research on your behalf. You’ll still have to start somewhere, with an observable human moment or reality you actually have access to. This isn’t quite the old adage of write what you know, more write what you can. Don’t be afraid to start small.
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Consider dual or multiple perspectives.
We’ve all been there, rereading an early draft of something with growing dismay. It’s just not as good or as alive on the page as it was in our heads, or as it seemed to be yesterday. What the hell happened? We thought there was an orchestra, but what we’re hearing now is ragged chamber music, a small and tinny affair, a wheezing violin.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned, you’re only ever going to be writing with one voice, one set of concerns, one scene at a time, but still—you want to make each scene feel as loud, vivid, and voluminous as possible. You want to feel that, even though we’re in this room now, there’s someone in the room upstairs, maybe pacing the floor, maybe having a party, that the world of the novel is alive and open and a big deal.
An obviously helpful way to do this is to split the narration among multiple perspectives. I used to think alternating-perspective novels were a bit schematic in nature, or a concession, in a way, to a single voice’s insufficiency, but now I’m older and humbler and know better than to cast baseless aspersions. Splitting up the perspective is actually a great way to deepen and amplify the sense that there’s a real world in your book. Character x may be off-screen, and we’re focusing on character y now, but if character x is implicitly moving through the world of the book, and is maybe casually mentioned by character y (with or without some irony thrown in), it adds more credibility and heft to the world overall.
In building scenes, set up firm expectations.
This applies to short stories, too, and is probably the single best (and in retrospect, most obvious) craft advice I’ve ever received. Even if nothing much happens in your story, you have to set up temporal boundaries in your scenes.
I love a good tortured, neurotic narrator, obsessively licking their wounds and going over old conversations and rehashing old furies. A lot of the best work of Bellow and Roth is really just this—very little action, a series of remembered conversations and outrages. In order to earn/keep your audience’s attention, you can either (a) be a genius like Bellow or Roth or (b) set up some firm expectations. Maybe your character is in a car going to their ex’s wedding. Maybe it’s New Year’s Eve, and a massive snowstorm is due in. The only real in-scene action unfolding is the character thinking, worrying, remembering. That’s okay.
In the end, the wedding might get canceled, and the snowstorm might end up having been a false alarm. But that your characters and, in turn, your readers are anticipating a future event is what adds at least nominal suspense or shape to their internal reckonings, that makes the difference between idle musings and genuine psychological drama. If you fear your story has no engine, you needn’t necessarily go crazy on manufacturing a plot. Sometimes just adding some subtle boundaries, a subtle note of anticipation, is enough to fire things up.
I’ve only written one book so far, and I’m sure the next one will, in its infancy, be absolute torture, too, but I hope the above tips can help when the inevitable self-doubt sets in. Not to sound too self-aggrandizing about it, but remember: It’s your job to suffer and freak out at least a little bit over your art. That’s just a fancy way of saying: no pain, no gain.