I love a neatly-pressed, crisp shirt about as much as anything. For years, I’ve found myself lapsing into a fantasy that there’s a machine into which I can insert one of my old wrinkled shirts, press a button, and in a cloud of steam it would open to reveal those razor-line sleeves and a perfectly smooth placket; kind of like a pants press.

But here’s the problem—unlike simple pants, shirts are complex creations. They have lines that go every which-a-way, seams that zip off in all directions, buttons that pop up in most inopportune places. The shape that makes them so appealing when ironed is the very thing that makes them so hard to press in the first place. A novel is a lot like that.

When I’m not daydreaming about the world’s crispest shirt, I’m thinking of how easy it would be to write my novel if I only had a good watertight outline. If I knew when everything was going to happen, and to whom, I’d be in high cotton, boy. I could write that sucker in no time. So, I sit down to craft such a beast. Inevitably, halfway through the second act I start to get antsy. “This is nonsense,” I tell myself, “I’m stifling my creativity.” The next morning when I sit down to write, I just dive in and let the chips fly. I ignore my outline, relying instead on that shakiest of constructs, my “writer’s intuition”. Before long, I’m wishing I had a good outline again.

Novel writing is a particularly wrinkly shirt. It’s got miles of pleats, hundreds of buttons, and it’s made of linen. It’s not going to lie flat without a heavy, hot iron and a lot of elbow grease. There’s no magical machine to make light work of it.

I have a notebook that I started when I began this manuscript. In it are notes on characters, storylines, ideas from real life that might prove useful to the tale. Whenever I’m getting particularly stuck, I return to the notebook and try to abstract my story to a few simple paragraphs. Doing this, I reason, will show me the bones of the story that lie beneath the words. The notebook is now full of the same few paragraphs repeated ad nauseum. Each time, I lapse into too much detail or get hung up on describing a scene and forget that I’m abstracting. Next time, I tell myself, I’ll get it right.

Until that time, I toil away amidst my notebooks teeming with dogeared pages. The rewrite is on page 50 now, and I’m resigned to just putting it down one scene at a time. On quiet afternoons, I still find myself staring past my monitor out the window, dreaming of that marvelous hissing shirt press. Wouldn’t that be a thing to see?