First Novels, Part 4-The First Veil

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Once you’ve gotten started on your novel, you might think that all you have to do is repeat the process, writing a bit every day (or every Saturday morning, if that’s all the time you have), or lurching forward in huge chunks with gaps of a week or more in between work sessions. In a large sense, that’s true, but…

…but sooner or later—and probably sooner—you’re going to hit the first veil. Or the first wall. Or the first event horizon. Or the zero-visibility point.

Whatever you call it, I don’t know any writers (including the burst writers) who don’t recognize the effect. It’s the point where the author suddenly can’t seem to make any more progress. Much of the time, the writer knows, in a general sort of way, what happens next—the protagonist is going to sneak into the palace and steal the magic sword, or run across the next key clue to the murder, or have a conference with their team to plan their next move.

But the writer doesn’t know enough. They don’t know exactly how the protagonist gets into the palace, let alone how they get out again, and they have a sinking feeling that it shouldn’t be that easy—something ought to go wrong, but what? They aren’t quite sure what the next key clue is—it was going to be discovering the blood-stained handkerchief, but after what happened in the last chapter, that’s not just key, it’s a dead give-away, and it’s far too early for that. They hate writing planning scenes, especially when they aren’t sure what the plan should be…but they can’t see any way of skipping the scene entirely, much as I…er, they, want to.

This is the point where a lot of first-time writers give up. They shouldn’t. Because the first veil, event horizon, zero-visibility point, or whatever you call it is a normal part of the process. It happens to everybody at some point. It isn’t fun, but you can deal with it if you don’t panic and start thinking that you obviously aren’t a writer because you can’t just crank pages out at a slow but relentlessly steady pace.

The bad news is, there’s a reason people call it the first veil. It usually happens more than once per book. How often and exactly where these sticking points occur depends on about a dozen different factors, including the writer, the writer’s normal process, the story, and so on. Which means they aren’t entirely predictable.

For me, the first veil occurs somewhere between the end of Chapter Two and the end of Chapter Ten, or somewhere between ten percent of the way through the word count and thirty percent of the way through. There’s often another one somewhere in the middle, and sometimes a third as I approach the climax. (In one book, there was a veil about every other chapter,  which was awful.) Other writers I know seem to have more than that; a few have less. But, as I said, everybody has it happen sometimes.

There’s a rhythm to the process of writing a book. You write for a bit, and then you stop for a bit, and then you come back and write a bit more, and repeat. For some writers, “write for a bit” means a page or two, and then they stop until tomorrow; for others, “write for a bit” means a week of pouring words on the page for sixteen hours straight every day (with an occasional brief break for pizza), until they “stop for a bit,” meaning they crash for a week and then spend another couple of weeks catching up on the rest of their life before it’s time to “write for a bit” again.

The thing is, rhythms change. Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum is a steady rhythm, but eventually it gets boring unless it breaks into da-dum, da-dum, da-dum-dum-dum, or da-da-da-duuuuum. The breaks in the story process are part letting your backbrain refresh and refill, and part forcing you to take time to think about the next bit that usually isn’t quite as fleshed-out as you thought.

Sometimes, this process happens unconsciously—I know at least two writers who, when they hit a veil or wall, switch to working on something else. One of them routinely has five projects in process at the same time, and rotates a new one in every time one of the old ones gets finished. (I personally can’t work that way, but her system works for her.) I don’t recommend this for first-timers except as a last resort, because it is a really good way to end up with a zillion first-thirds of books with no middles or ends.

What I do recommend is a sort of mental judo, where you let yourself be okay with an unusual break in your writing, but you keep coming back and poking at it (mentally) periodically. Maybe revise some of the earlier chapters. Maybe work on a five-to-twenty-page synopsis of where you think it’s going. Maybe talk to a friend about it. Maybe take a long walk in the woods or a park every morning, or go to the beach, and either don’t think about the work-in-process until you get home, or only think about it while you’re in the woods/park/beach. Change up your rhythm; experiment and see what works.

In the interests of completeness, I do have to mention that some writers can, at least sometimes, power through these awkward times. They continue writing for an hour a day, even though they only end up with a sentence or two, or at worst a couple of words. If that seems to suit your temperament, try it, but if it makes you cranky and disinclined to work on the piece at all ever again, stop and take a walk, and poke at the problem. Because powering through is definitely not for everyone.

Also, sometimes what you hit isn’t a veil at all. It’s your backbrain going on strike because you’ve done something it doesn’t like, and it won’t give you any more words until you find and fix it. If, a chapter or two ago, you wrote something and thought, “This’ll do, and nobody else will ever notice,” that’s probably where the story went off the rails. (Sorry, but that’s how it always seems to work for me.) In this case, the further you try to force the story before going back and fixing things, the more you will end up having to rewrite. So keep that in mind.