That little book by Marie Kondo entitled The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up? Have you heard of it? It has sold three million copies worldwide and was a NY Times Best-Seller.
I came across it the morning of January 1, 2020, while I was looking at discarded belongings in the recycling room in my apartment building. I might have passed the book by had I not watched Marie Kondo being interviewed on my favorite Sunday morning show some weeks before.
As I was sifting through the pile of stuff, I was engrossed in thoughts about finishing my novel; mainly I was thinking that the considerable task that lay before me in the year 2020 was the editing of the novel to arrive at a final draft.
Perhaps it was no more than a case of propinquity, a number of random thoughts coming together: Tidying up is sort of like editing, isn’t it? And it being New Year’s Day and finding that book being one of the very first things I did in the year 2020 (besides sleeping) and my New Year’s resolution being, Finish that novel already! Get done with it! Get it out into the world where it belongs!
So as I plucked that book out of the junk pile, The Life-changing Habit… , all those thoughts did come together and out popped the notion that perhaps it might contain some wisdom for me.
If there were a way I could finish my novel before midnight of December 31 2020, it would certainly change my life. I was open to my life being changed, very open to it. Something good was already happening: The thought percolated in my brain: Hell, if it’s only a matter of tidying up my novel, I can certainly do that and finish before New Year’s Eve, couldn’t I? Of course I could! Perhaps her magic was already working? That was my state of mind as I began reading Kondo’s little book.
Of course as a novelist I couldn’t help but believe there was an untold story here: Had the previous book’s owner thrown Kondo’s out in a fit of rage on New Year’s Eve? Was he or she enraged at how unhelpful the book had been? Or did that person learn how to tidy up her life to the point there was no longer a need for this book on her bookshelf? I hoped she had read the book, gotten out of it all she could, and then discarded it because it had become clutter. And so the untold story might be that what was the end for her was a new start for me.
Within the first few minutes of cracking open this little tome, a world of parallels between tidying up and editing my novel opened up to me. Kondo’s advice is to “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go.”
Likewise with editing: Look at all the chapters in your novel, setting aside all the chapters that don’t directly support the story you set out to tell. There is no “nice to know” information about your characters that should wind up in the novel. Only those events described that put across the story belong.
Once you’ve paired down your chapters, you can look at pacing and overall story structure within the remaining chapters: Does your chapter support a rapid escalation of tension and character development, so that as the story continues, we see the main protagonist in conflict and/or in danger or in a state of development. By the end do we see a new person emerging, functioning as people function in real life?
Then you can look at individual chapters; make sure each of them contribute to a chapter story arc. You can discard anything unnecessary and fill in gaps.
The other key thought that Kondo advocates and that I can attest applies one hundred percent to editing a novel is this: gradualism doesn’t work. You can’t organize a kitchen one day and the living room the next, and hope to ever escape the grind of continuously organizing; nor can you edit the first chapter one day and a middle chapter the next day and hope to wind up with a comprehensible, cohesive, and a single engrossing work.
That means you must edit the whole thing, the entire thing all at once, in the blink of an eye. Like Michelangelo, you must look at a large hunk of marble you’re about to start carving and see your finished sculpture within it. That happens in an instant. The concerns expressed on page one must be the same as on the last page, although obviously what the principal character learned from living the story must also be present. The basic style of writing should be the same or very similar. The manner you use to tell the story must be consistent. The tone (the attitude behind the writing) should be different but must be reminiscent of the tone that you use on the first page. It certainly should serve to acknowledge how far the character’s consciousness has been transformed by living the story.
Some might say, “My character has changed by the end of my story. Is it any wonder that the style of writing has changed by the end?” While that argument might seem plausible, I’ve found that pulling it off in a novel is extremely difficult without inadvertently giving the impression that the end was written by a different author.
In order for your story to have emotional impact and credibility it has to work as a single, unified artistic whole. It truly must give the impression of being told by a single voice.
Kondo equates tidying up with putting one’s house in order and that it shouldn’t take that much time. It should happen all at once. She advises, “Start by discarding. Then organize your space, thoroughly, completely, in one go. If you adopt this approach… you’ll never again revert to clutter again.
Next month, more about what I learned from reading John Irving.
