A Bag Full of Trouble: How I Found My Way Into My Debut Novel

Bryan VanDyke on the Importance of Spontaneity and Chaos in the Writing Process

Some time ago–a decade at least, but it feels longer–a literary agent read a manuscript that I’d written and told me that she loved it, loved my style, but the book felt too calculated, too much like a math problem. It didn’t lack heart per se, she said, but it felt too much like a clocked thing, too neat.

I carried this criticism around with me for a long time. I did not sell the book that she read, despite a lot of trying, which was disappointing but not all that unusual in the long arc of my writing career to that point.

I had reached a moment as a writer where it was obvious I needed to adjust something, to change my approach in order to get a different outcome. But how does someone whose work is marked by its meditative qualities shed the sense that those qualities are at work without losing, well, everything that makes his voice feel like his own?

I didn’t start a new novel for six years—the longest fallow period of my fiction-writing life. I flirted with and abandoned a few projects, always early in the gameplay of composition. This wasn’t traditional writer’s block. I knew what I wanted to write and how to do it, but that was sort of the problem. The clarity of my intention was a bright sun that burnt off all but what I intended–and I needed something unexpected to take root.

In the spring of 2018 I was on garden leave—a fancy euphemism for laid-off—from my job as a digital strategist at a bank, and I needed to figure out my next professional move. All I really wanted to do was take one more go at novel writing. I was pretty sure that I’d never write a book that got published; still, old habits (and aspirations) don’t go into the night quietly.

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