How to Face the Unknowns of Your Story by Tashan Mehta

Let me start from the heart: what I will say here may be counterintuitive to writing advice you’ve heard before. It may seem unruly and abstract. It will do less to demystify the process of writing and perhaps more to re-mystify it. But all writing is simply this: you, the author, reaching out your hand to the reader and saying, Take it, please, so I can show you the same wonders I’ve seen. So that’s what I am doing now: reaching out my hand. 

We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.
—George Saunders

How do we navigate the blank page?

When we think about writing—particularly how to write—we talk a lot about the tools of our craft. I understand why: how can you build anything if you don’t have the right tools or know how to use them?

Tools offer heft; they bring comfort. They make us feel as if this large, impossible thing we are attempting—creating universes, building life!—can be chiseled at, step by step, until we have something resembling a short story or a novel in our hands. Tools are ropes that pull us past despair and inaction. As you can likely tell by now, I am all for tools.

Writing takes the time that it takes, and it is never the time you think it will take. This is not a bad thing. Concepts need time to mature.
—Tashan Mehta

But in our desire to tackle this large, impossible thing that scares us, we’ve perhaps stepped away from a simpler truth: an acknowledgement that what we are trying to do is large and impossible; it is beyond us. This is not a failing, but rather an essential aspect of writing. Especially during a first draft. Or indeed, a first book.

Facing the fear of failure

If you’ve read any poetry by Rumi or Kabir, this feeling will be familiar to you. Both poets chase what is beyond them; they do not seek to cage it; they see their failure to capture it not as a reflection on them, but rather as proof of the largeness of what they are trying to capture. Their poetry—which has endured for centuries—is a product of this failure.

In different ways, most writers come to the same conclusion. The brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin wrote the book Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Mariner and the Mutinous Crew—a wonderful, practical guide on how to take apart a novel and put it back together. But the source of her genius lay in her ability to see underneath those tools.

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel like rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.
—Ursula K. Le Guin

In short, you have to listen.

Why you need to listen to your novel

Writing is a craft and it needs its tools, but it is also a conversation: with an idea, with a way of seeing, with a feeling and a thought.
—Tashan Mehta

I speak from experience. I wrote my first novel straight out of university, where I studied English Literature and Creative Writing. I built that book partly on instinct but mainly on tools. I wrote with discipline and a clear notion of what good writing looked like. What I didn’t do, in my panic and fear, was listen. The product is a book of a sentiment I adore, but the shape is wrong.

For my second book, I listened. It took 24 drafts to create a textual body for the soul of the idea, but the result is one I am proud of. Mad Sisters of Esi taught me to pay attention and to embrace unknowability. Above all, it taught me to make friends with my novel.

Today, I watch young writers believe that this unknowability of their work is a failing. It’s a black mark against them, proof that they shouldn’t be writing in the first place. Good writers know what they’re doing, right? Not knowing is awful; not knowing is a sign you should give up writing altogether. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Writing is a craft and it needs tools, but it is also a conversation: with a concept, with a way of seeing, with a feeling and a thought. I want to support you as you have these conversations with your works, and teach you how to listen.

So here, in a delightfully abstract and unruly manner, are the small rituals I’ve found that help me.

Keep in tune with your body, as well as your mind

If you read enough, then your body knows what you like, and your body knows what it wants to put out into the world.
—Tashan Mehta

The mind is usually not a good judge of whether something is working well or not. This is because the mind is used to making up logical arguments both for and against a topic, and it will use that skill to fabricate arguments that ensure you have the least amount of work to do. (Maybe this is just my mind; I am fundamentally lazy. But I find, as human beings, we’re designed to look for shortcuts. The concept of heuristics will agree with me.)

If you’re a new writer attempting your first book, then the mind will also default to your sense of fear. It will create arguments on why you should do something in a particular way simply because it’s been done before, because it feels safe, because you don’t know what you’re doing and that award-winning writer clearly does, so let’s do it their way. (Fun fact: that award-winning writer likely does not know what they’re doing either.)

When I was writing Mad Sisters of Esi, I found, much to my dislike, that it was set in space. I generally don’t like science-fiction stories; something about space and spaceships and tech doesn’t sit right with me. It’s a strange personal preference, but it’s mine. What I love, however, is adventures, particularly ones of exploration, new worlds, ships with canvas sails on open seas, maps and charts and mysterious lands. Those make my heart sing.

But the world I was building was too vast to tie to a single planet. It didn’t work on Earth, even if I created an alternate and strange Earth, unrecognizable as the one we live on. Every time I tried to limit the book to a single planetary ecosystem, it chafed; it didn’t like being caged. But each time I wrote the word “space” or “spaceship,” my body recoiled.

Every time I mentioned space travel, my body shrank from the book; I didn’t like the flavour it evoked. Worse, my book didn’t like it either, and it flattened on the page in protest. (This was extremely rude of it, by the way, since it created the problem in the first place. Listen to your novels, yes, but also, sometimes novels are annoying.) 

The solution, in the end, was simple: it was to recognize the generative power of language and the flavour of words. Everyone accesses a book through language; it’s the basic feature of a novel. If I wanted to evoke a certain flavour and feeling in the person reading—and in me—then I simply had to use language that carried that feeling.

“Space” to me tasted synthetic and futuristic; “black sea,” however, felt ancient. “Planets” reminded me of white observatories, data, and computers; “islands” reminded me of wooden boats pulled onto beaches, sailors kissing sand, notebooks opened as explorers scribbled notes with running ink. I found language that spoke to me.

So listen to your body. It will keep your instincts safe; it will tell you what is working for your book and what isn’t. I wouldn’t worry too much about whether your feelings are “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad”—these are not useful metrics in literature. If you read enough, your body knows what you like, and your body knows what it wants to put out into the world.

Writing is a way of thinking

You can’t listen to your novel—you can’t discover what it likes and doesn’t like, or who it wants to become—without writing.
—Tashan Mehta

Believe me, I wish this advice weren’t true. I wish I could grow the novel in my mind and pour it onto the page, and I’d be free. But writing is a way of thinking—and it’s the type of thinking that cannot be done without writing. There’s a difference between the sort of thinking that happens in your head, in your thoughts, and the thinking that happens when you try and write something into shape. 

The process of writing and creating remains mysterious to me. But I suspect it has to do with the fact that language itself is generative: each word holds myriad interpretations and meanings within it, and we only give shape to that meaning by attaching it to another word, and then another word so that it creates a sentence; then that sentence to another sentence until we form a paragraph; then that paragraph to another paragraph and so on until we form a page; and that page to other pages until we grow a novel.

Here’s a simple way of conceptualizing it: think of it as a relationship. When we begin dating someone, we have certain ideas about them. We attach meaning to their actions.

But the only way to sustain a relationship is to communicate. You must say what you’re thinking out loud and have the other person clarify it for you. You have to conceive a dialogue.

Accept that your first draft is just a work-in-progress

If you’re a new writer attempting your first book, then the mind will default to your sense of fear
—Tashan Mehta

Writing your novel is your way of establishing a dialogue with your book. It’s a chance for your book to speak to you, to step out of the hazy (and often perfect) shadow of it that exists in only your mind and into the real world. A book written (or one that’s being written) is a book that has a voice—and that voice can show you what it likes or doesn’t like. You’ll feel it in the flatness of your sentences, or in the energy of a scene, or the sense of surprise that blooms in you when you introduce a break in structure that helps you look at the novel anew. Writing is how your book speaks, and it’ll take more editing and re-drafting for your book to become more eloquent.

Don’t be scared to break (and reassemble) form

The structure and form of a novel cannot be performative. It’s not a cookie mould to be applied on your idea to cut it into the right shape. Form comes from your novel.
—Tashan Mehta

We’re taught, particularly in the West, that good stories only have a handful of shapes and structures. Knowing those structures can be useful: it can help us refine our thoughts, sharpen the reader’s journey, and deliver on any expectations the reader may have of us.

I’m not entirely asking you to throw those structures out the window. But I am asking you to throw some of it out the window. 

The structure and form of a novel cannot be performative; it’s not a cookie mould to be applied on your idea to cut it into the right shape. Form comes from your novel. It is the shape your idea wants to become. Your job is to pay attention and work towards what that shape might be.

How I faced the unknown with my book Mad Sisters of Esi

Mad Sisters of Esi began as a simple narrative novel about two people in a tower on a quest to find a god machine. It was structured as a quest narrative, with challenges that increased in difficulty, and then a twist. Then the backstory of the novel, about a girl who would later be called Wisa, felt interesting. Far more interesting, actually, than the idea of two people in a tower. 

So I wrote the backstory, again as a simple novel. My main character wanted to make worlds on a strange island. The setting was great, and so was the cosmos forming around it, but the narrative about Wisa—even though she was amazing, I could tell—was boring. The novel simply didn’t like this shape. I introduced academic articles about the cosmos. The novel liked this better, but now the academic articles were too cool (and far more interesting) than the actual story.

I went back to the drawing board. I’d just read Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing, an ambitious novel cut into four novellas. I’d also re-read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, a novel that does whatever the hell it wants whenever it wants. Inspired by both, I realized I could divide the information I knew about the book into four novellas, with academic articles as inserts throughout. The two people in the tower were back, except the tower was now a whale; we had Wisa’s story, but made stranger and sharper now that it was an experimental novella; we had a new island that changed shape, to connect the whale and Wisa; and a whole new part that emerged as I wrote the other three novellas, to give them all a conclusion. It was great! It was everything I wanted and more. It was strange, experimental, alive.

I did many drafts of each novella. Then I put them all together in a book—and the whole book died.

Each novella was fine on its own. But together, they didn’t like each other. They didn’t want to be associated with each other. I’ll admit, I didn’t handle this with a lot of grace; I was miserable. But in the end, I listened: I went back to the drawing board, looked at it as a whole, and reshaped it into a shape that the book could accept.

Knowing what form your book likes comes with trial and error and editing. Finding a shape that does work is simply dedication: we keep trying until we get it (somewhat) right.

Think of time as an ingredient in your writing process

The piece of paper in front of you is not your enemy, but an invitation. Be present for it. It’s not a canvas, waiting to be filled. It’s a magic mirror, like those we read about and loved as children, and it’s asking you to step through.
—Tashan Mehta

Most of us conceive of time as a static thing. It is a backdrop to our lives; it is a space we move through. You can run through time, inch through time, freeze in time. Time is a constant; you are moving through it at a certain pace. What pace is up to you.

The faster you get that draft out, the sooner you can edit it, and the sooner you can publish it or move on to the next thing. Speed is our aim. (This isn’t just new writers, of course; it’s how the publishing community is structured as well!)

But recently, I’ve been thinking more about time as an ingredient—an element that must be added to the work to lift it. I think of it in terms of cooking. If you’ve ever made a curry, then time is as much an ingredient as the different elements you add to the dish. If you throw in your chicken and cook everything too quickly, your curry won’t absorb the juices of the chicken, it won’t lift in flavour and tone, and most importantly, you’ll be eating raw chicken.

I like the cooking metaphor because time here is not passive. It is being used. There’s no point in throwing everything into a pot and waiting. You have to turn on the heat.

Writing takes the time that it takes, and it is never the time you think it will take. This is not a bad thing. Concepts need time to mature. Most importantly, you need time for your idea to evolve, for more good ideas to build on top of it, so that one day, you sit down at the page and find your book is alive.    

Embrace the art of not knowing

Michelangelo apparently once said that the statues he makes were already in the marble blocks; he only had to chisel them out.
—Tashan Mehta

There’s an anecdote about Michelangelo I love (I don’t know if it’s true, and I can’t ask him, but it’s still a comfort). I see writing in the same way. Your book is already there, underneath the empty page, waiting for you.

Doing that requires patience. It also requires inner peace: a belief that this thing you’re crafting is alive, with whims and desires of its own, and the answer may not always come to you in the way you like or on the timeline you’ve sketched out. It also means accepting that, like anything living, it is impossible to capture perfectly. You will fail; any act of translation has some failure inherent in it.

The piece of paper in front of you is not your enemy, but an invitation. Be present for it. It’s not a canvas, waiting to be filled. It’s a magic mirror, like those we read about and loved as children, and it’s asking you to step through.

The Novelry members can find Tashan’s recent Q&A in the membership portal.

Top tips for navigating the unknown from The Novelry

• Embrace the unknowability of your book like a friend: To quote Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Try to see the mysteries of your book as a challenge, rather than an obstacle. Reframing your thoughts of anxiety into excitement could really help.
• Stand up to decision paralysis: Novel writing is full of choices, and too many choices can increase anxiety and stress. But remember that whatever narrative path you pick, it’s always okay if you need to step back, and nothing to do with your writing ability. Try conducting more research into your book’s main themes to remind yourself why you wanted to develop this particular story.
• Be kind to yourself: Practicing mindfulness might not be your sort of thing, but if the mystery of your book is starting to haunt you, try and sprinkle some joy into your day-to-day and normalize these strange feelings. Acknowledge how you feel. A blank Word document is no match for a long shower or a cup of tea.
• Think of your book as something to discover: It’s easy to descend into despair and think to yourself that your book doesn’t exist. But if you twist that perspective and see it as a story waiting to be found, this might help boost your own confidence in developing your book.
• Start writing, even if you’re unsure: If you’ve trapped yourself in planning limbo, why not change things up by writing a sample paragraph, an example chapter, even a stray line of dialogue. Use bracketed placeholders to maintain writing momentum. You don’t need to ask for feedback, you’re just looking for a moment of clarity. Try not to worry. It really will be fine.

The Novelry is the fiction writing school for serious writers looking to turn their dreams into a writing career. Through expert courses, one-to-one coaching with bestselling authors, and a vibrant global community, we guide writers along a clear, proven path: from developing a big idea, writing a first draft, and editing a finished, publishing-ready novel.