How to (Prepare to) Write a Novel

I know that we artsy-fartsy types (as we were called in the 1960s in an era when reduplicative words were making the rounds) are not supposed to go anywhere near those subjects clustered under “science”. I guess the idea is that developing hypotheses, using logical reasoning and gathering experimental data might contaminate our imaginations. So I was aware of taking a risk when I registered for the recent A Taste of Research: Enduring Discoveries at the University of Regina, as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations.

Truthfully, I had no idea what to expect. Dry statistics? Monotone presentations? Coded language even the initiated could barely decipher? I prepared myself for the worst and hoped for the best, as the saying goes. What I didn’t expect was what I can only describe as the theatre of the sciences (including one actual theatre piece by an associate professor). In all, the evening consisted of seven presentations including a psychologist who has helped develop online therapy lessons for those unable or unwilling to take part in face-to-face sessions, an environmentalist who studies pollution levels in Saskatchewan lake systems (they’re getting worse), and someone who explores ways to identify pain in dementia patients unable to speak or otherwise express themselves. As one of the speakers said, the presentations raised a few goosebumps.

Okay, so what does this have to do with writing a novel? Or more specifically, preparing to write a novel? Well, aside from the imaginations at work here (using hypotheses, logical reasoning and experimental data), the seven presenters – be they at the start of their scientific careers, mid-career, or planning on soon winding things down – had something else in common. A bunch of things, in fact: intelligence, of course; passion, no doubt; intense determination; a clear-eyed sense of purpose; objectives to be achieved and hopefully surpassed.

But most important of all, they had what I would call iron discipline. The kind of discipline most armies can only wish for. Discipline that comes from within. How else to explain one presenter’s 30-year research program? That more than matches James Joyce’s 16-year odyssey in writing Finnegan’s Wake!

Putting together a novel is a lot like a scientific research program. It requires all the attributes mentioned here (with the ability to endure solitude as an added bonus). Like these programs, the finished product can lead to a great discovery. Or a so-so discovery. Or it can fail miserably. Whichever way it falls, the discipline needed will come in very handy for the next attempt. For like good scientists, writers of novels never give up, seeking inspiration with their dying breaths.

And again like that of the scientist, a novelist’s work can go on and becomes something more, something greater than what’s on the paper or in the experimental data. So let me end with a quote about “the work” that I like to use a lot (even though I don’t think I grasp it fully):

The work is mind, and the mind is the passage, within the work, from the supreme indeterminacy to the determination of that supreme. This unique passage is real only in the work—in the work which is never real, never finished, since it is only the realization of the mind’s infiniteness. The mind, then, sees once again in the work only an opportunity to recognize and exercise itself ad infinitum. Thus we return to our point of departure.
    —Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

-Michael Mirolla, 2024-2025 Writer in Residence 

PS: If anyone is interested in my own discipline techniques (and how I once managed to put down close to 75,000 words for a novel in a three-month period), contact me at: wir@reginalibrary.ca.