How to write a novel

1) Imagine the beginnings of a scene: The narrator, driving to another city with his half-sister; or maybe an artist at the cusp of her first encounter with Society and its machinery of Approval.

2) Meditate on the so-called "themes" that the scene will embody. Think of subtle ways to "mediate" them. Discard these ways for more bombastic ones. Remind yourself of James Wood, and his injunction that a theme not be too "legible", which is to say visible, and visibly awkward, to a critic of his stature. Then see that your closeness to your novel prevents your ever grasping exactly how "legible" your themes are. (Besides, isn't it better---especially for a tyro novelist---to be legible than obscure? Or is that too fraught a question to ask? Who the fuck knows?)

3) Return to the scene. Describe a perfunctory specific. "The rise and fall of her hair was inevitable; it was like dusk on the steady plateau of my ardor." Laugh at the florid sub-Nabokovian stupidity of what you have just written. Erase it. Affect sincerity. "Her hair. The slither and collapse of it. Its unashamed brownness. The way it slides, unsupervised, into the suggestive folds of her breasts." Allow yourself an outfaced smile at the epithet "unashamed". Wait for the querulous voice inside you that says: "But breasts are always suggestive. And haven't you heard that "slither and collapse" somewhere else before?" Panic. Flip to page 29 of The Folding Star, in which the object of the narrator's fantasy, Luc Altidore, is described thus: "Through the coming hour I would see that tumbling forelock dry from bronze to gold, and get to know the different ways he mastered it, the indolent sweep, the brainstorming grapple, the barely effectual toss, and how long the intervals were between forward slither and lustrous collapse." Tear your hair out. Spend the next few hours with your heart in your mouth, scrolling endlessly through lines you've already written, surveying them for other instances of unconscious plagiarism. Cringe at the odd hackneyed phrase. Sit back in your chair and look upwards in a conscious mime of someone who has a big problem.

4) Watch youtube videos of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3, 3rd Movement, until a time in the early am. Go to bed.