I recently came across the term Vomit Draft. It’s a term taken from screenwriting, in which you metaphorically vomit out everything you have in your mind onto the page. You don’t worry about the quality of the prose or the structure of the piece, you just get it out, from beginning to end.
There is something about this method that jars. I write in a more careful, roving and circuitous way: editing as I go, revisiting, making wholesale changes two thirds of the way in. I am a slow writer, a slow drafter. The thought of the Vomit Draft makes me bristle: the necessity of getting from point A to point B. When talking about the concept with a student recently, I was even moved to use the word phallocentric for the first time in my life.
“You know if it’s a Lara Williams book,” one of my friends once said to me, “there’s going to be a lot of vomiting.”
There is a lot of vomit in my writing, but that was not something I was conscious of, or ever intending. Even the first post of this Substack contained vomit! I can’t get away from it.
I think this is partially because I am a prolific vomiter. I was a teenage bulimic, something that feels wildly shameful to admit. But also, thinking of who I was then feels so unrecognisably divorced from who I am now, it is hard to really see them as connected to me in any shape or form. I worry that because I abused my body in that way during my teens, it is permanently broken: still prone to both symbolically and literally being sick.
My son is of the age where he has a vomiting bug what feels like every other week, and they can be debilitating to me in a way they are not to others. I have a relatively low tolerance to alcohol, because after more than a few glasses of wine I just throw up. I also spend a not insignificant portion of my life feeling nauseous. Many things can trigger nausea or sickness for me. Too much garlic. Too much coffee. Car journeys. Certain shades of grey.
Ottessa Moshfegh has an essay called How To Shit intended to offer advice to aspiring writers. In it she says: “...in writing, I think a lot about how to shit. What kind of stink do I want to make in the world? My new shit becomes the shit I eat. I learn by digesting my own delusions. It’s often very disgusting.”
I just finished the first draft of a novel I have been working on for almost two years. It’s the first novel I have written since becoming a parent, something I wasn’t sure I would be capable of doing, having abandoned my first novel-writing attempt. I wrote it all in very controlled little bursts, sitting with an idea for a long while, before venturing to write it down.
There is something that I recognise, in what Ottessa Moshfegh says, about writing. Ingestion and expulsion. What I imbibe becomes what I excrete. But still, writing as shitting doesn’t feel quite right to me. It does feel closer to vomiting. But perhaps the difference is, I can hold it in my stomach for a very long time, then choke it up at will.