I've been thinking a lot about expectations.
Possibly because the writing of the second draft of my novel is so different from how I expected it would be.
When I started working on this draft, my intention was to write what I called "a slow draft." I'd written most of my first draft very quickly, focusing on churning out scenes and hitting a daily word count, and then I spent months working on a very detailed outline using a model from Lisa Cron's Story Genius.
Because I'd spent so much time on the plot and structure of the piece at the outline stage, my expectation for this second draft was I'd be able to sink into each scene, focus on the description and sensory details, and I'd emerge from my writing sessions with not perfect but at least much more complete scenes.
The reality is nothing like my expectation. I still feel like I'm only getting the bones of a scene down, the basic action and dialogue. There's some description, but the page is still littered with square brackets with notes to add a certain beat or flesh out a description or bridge two sections of a scene together.
And sometimes I turn up expecting to write the next scene in my outline, and the story says no, it wants to veer in another direction or I've realized that my protagonist would never do or say the thing I thought at the outlining stage that she might. I've learned to hold the outline lightly because there are things that happen once you're drafting—living inside the scenes, feeling them from the inside along with your characters—that you couldn't anticipate when you're on the outside, building the frame.
At times the process feels discouraging, but if I stop to ask myself why, it’s only disappointing because of what I thought it would be like. It’s only because of my expectations that it would be other than it is.
There are so many things we expect of and from our writing. There are expectations of how the process should go rather than how it actually is. There are expectations around how much time and energy and focus we think we can or should be offering rather than showing up when we can and as we are.
Sometimes we expect to write a certain type of story, inspired by our reading, and we become stuck because we are trying to impose a certain frame or technique on our story rather than allowing it to be what it is. I love stories told from multiple points of view, and I spent months trying to force that device on my novel when really the story only wanted to be told in one voice. Now I often ask myself, is this something the story wants or is asking for or is this a technique I want to try as a writer?
“The state of grace comes when the writing is entirely at the service of the story.” - Elena Ferrante
Often, we hold certain expectations around how much we need to publish or what we need to achieve with our work before we even claim for ourselves the term "writer," forgetting that we have so little control over how and when our work will find its way into the world and to readers.
When thinking about the dangers of expectations, I can't help but turn to Dickens' Great Expectations, and particularly the figure of Miss Havisham, the evidence of her disappointed expectations decaying and rotting around her, a lesson in how our expectations once disappointed can curdle, sour us, make us spiteful.
It's a hard thing because there is an element of wanting things for our creative life, for our process, for the work we're creating—hoping and having (great) expectations can be a way of signalling our belief or faith in our creative work. Like so much else in the creative life, there seems to be a paradox at the centre of this: we have to want things for our creative work, but at the same time we also must let go of expecting them to be a certain way or hold too tightly to the expectation of a certain result.
The magic of the creative process so often comes from what we weren’t expecting, the spark of a new story idea or the solution to a particularly perplexing problem in your current work-in-progress that presents itself when you’re out walking or doing dishes, the story the furthest thing from your (conscious) mind. There is a feeling of both surprise and absolute rightness in these kinds of moments—and feeling too of certainty but certainty in the mystery of the process and our need to surrender to it. These moments can feel like a gift, precisely because they seem to arrive so unexpectedly.
