Notes from a Novel Hermit: I’m here.
I usually spend my summers on the west coast of Newfoundland. That’s where I was this time last year, holed up in my office, trying to push through to the end of the first draft of my novel.
But this place, one of my favourites in all the world, is full of distractions. In addition to the natural beauty, some of my dearest friends live here, friends I only get to see for a few months each year. But last year, I couldn’t afford to be distracted.
In a community in which the general policy is to enter friends’ homes without knocking, I knew that I needed more than boundaries. I needed a campaign. “It’s Novel Quarantine,” I told my friends. “I’m not allowed to do anything but write, until my working day is done.”
My office in Newfoundland is a closed-in porch on the second floor, which means that one of the walls is old wood siding (which I painted over in a bright coral) and the other three are made up of windows. Looking up from my computer last summer, I often had to remind myself that the characters in my novel are moving through the grime and glamour of 19th century Pittsburgh, and the countryside of Muskoka, Ontario with its lakes and granite. My view from my desk was very different: a field, and houses, and on beyond them to the saltwater of Bonne Bay, with Gros Morne Mountain on the other side.
But until last year and my enforced isolation, I didn’t realize that not only could I see out, but that people could see in. The house next door is on an angle, facing the intersection, revealing two whole walls of my windows to people walking up the road. Which, it turns out, meant that I was also visible, like some diorama of a writer at work.
“I can see you working,” my friends told me in the early evenings when I determined that I had done all I could for the day. Or, “You were working late last night!” they said on nights when I’d decided to return to my desk.
And that—beyond my friends’ respect for my boundaries, and my commitment to the work—was what kept me in my chair. They could see me. They could see me at work.
When you’re a writer, most of the time your work is invisible. And that can feel especially true when you’re working on a project as long and gruelling as a novel. When you’re not publishing (in my case, for years), it can seem that you and your writing are invisible.
“What are you working on?” friends ask.
When I answer, “a novel,” I always feel like I should add, “Really, I am!” How boastful to give this thing in progress a name of what it someday wants to grow up to be. So usually I just say, “The same thing I was working on last year. And the year before that.”
And the year before that.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling low about how long it’s taking, I can’t even see myself working. I get convinced that I haven’t been putting in the time, or the effort, because I have nothing public to show for it. I know some writers like to hit goals of words or pages in a day or a week. I haven’t found these goals motivating, but I really wish that I did. Because most days, when I put away my work, my overwhelming feeling is simply, “I’m not finished.”
I’m not in Newfoundland this summer. Newfoundland and Labrador has closed its borders to non-residents in an effort to keep that small population safe from Covid-19. I have beloved friends living in my house. Looking out those windows. Making art, and being seen at it.
Actual quarantine has kept me in my house in Hamilton, Ontario. It’s in this office where I actually finished the first draft of my novel, some weeks after I’d returned last summer. This year, I hope to finish the rewrite here.
Out my window, the leaves are lush and thick, and I don’t know who, if anyone, sees me. The work is long, and the work is slow.
But I’m here. Doing the work.