Wining about Writing

Forty plums, a massive bucket, yeast, and three pounds of sugar can produce four bottles of sweet, delicious plum wine. I’ve done this from using plums from my plum tree in my yard. It doesn’t really take much by way of ingredients. But how many people would know how to combine these to create a drinkable wine?

Novel writing is like that. You take a stack of paper, a pen, and that’s basically all you need to write a novel. But if you hand all of that to the first person you meet at happy hour or in your economics class, you’re probably not going to get that novel you’re looking for: not even if they actually do try to write one. Why not?

The secret is in the must. No, not the “you must do this or that.” The must is the mixture of wine, sugar, yeast that you pour into that bucket, and what you watch diligently for two months or longer. For a novel, the ingredients are the characters, the story, the setting, the tension, and the writing style of the author. The author takes all of these elements, pours them into a page, revising, self-editing, and sometimes screaming and crying (that may just be me), creating the must of a novel.

Afterward, the diligent author will let the work sit for a bit after the hard work of preparing the must is done. Just like wine-making, the “mostly finished” work still isn’t ready, even if all of the major pieces are there. How do I explain this next part?

Wine still works, actually. In wine, there are two fermentation phases. The first does the majority of the production of the alcohol, changing what began as syrupy fruit juice into something that can give you a buzz. The second fermentation is when the winemaker samples the wine, tests the alcohol content, and makes changes to the sugar level to get to the right desired content and flavor. Sometimes this means adding water, sometimes it means adding sugar, sometimes adding yeast is necessary.

Similarly, after a period of time, the author comes back to the story, a second writing if you will: removing words, adding words, sometimes removing entire characters and story arcs like I had to do in Human Pride, the second novel of my in-progress Virtual Wars series.

Unlike wine, the novel isn’t finished after round 2. There’s a third phase in novel writing: the editing. This is perhaps the most feared phase of the process. If wine had a third phase like this, it would be getting a sommelier to taste your wine and tell you everything they hate about it, and expect you to fix it immediately.

…when you purchase a novel from an author, independent or otherwise, what you’re actually buying is…months of a person’s life…

So when you purchase a novel from an author, independent or otherwise, what you’re actually buying isn’t a three-hundred to five-hundred page story with an appealing cover. What you’re actually purchasing is months and months of a person’s life, packed in between a front cover image and back cover blurb that will hopefully get enough attention so that someone will crack them apart, sample the contents, and decide: this one is mine.

I love a good red wine. In part, it’s the complexity that sells me, from the smooth start to the almost-dirty middle, through to a crisp tannin after the finish. And, of course, I love the flavor. Knowing how wine is made, and how easily it can go badly, I’ve learned to appreciate a well-brewed bottle all the more. And now you know what it takes to go from a paper and pen to a novel, so I hope that this knowledge enhances your appreciation of the contents therein.

Just like you can’t really tell a good wine from the image on the bottle or the description on the back, remember: the same goes for the finished novel. The only way to appreciate a good novel, or even know if it is a good novel, is to pull the cork and pour a glass…or something like that.

So when you’re scrolling through the pages and pages of authors’ lives on Amazon or Kobo, or even while browsing through your local bookstore, know that there’s sacrifice in each one of those works. And maybe, take the time to go for an ugly cover, or something with a weak blurb. You might just find the perfect novel that you never knew existed.

And I may have taken that analogy about as far as it will go. Happy reading!