Few things in this world are perfect, but my name is one of them.

It’s not an easy name. I’m constantly repeating it and spelling it out (Bee-Ell-Ay-Eye-Are, no E). Nine out of ten introductions, the script goes “‘I’m Blair.’ ‘Nice to meet you, Claire.’ ‘Actually, it’s Blair. With a B.” But I could never have been anything but a Blair (though my boyfriend’s father affectionately affords me the dignity of a definite article—I am THE Blair, for there shall be no others!) Being known by any other name may have had no effect on my relative olfactory sweetness, but I, me, could not have been called anything but this: five letters, two vowels, one syllable. When I was a kid and learning to type, I put a p at the end, I presume for decoration—Blairp, why not?—but beyond that, I have never wanted another label, appellation, nickname, or tag.

If you know me or follow me on Twitter (aren’t those just the same these days?! Har har har! #millenials), you will see that I keep an OHSA-style countdown of how many days since some well-meaning writer has proposed a book to “Mr. Blair Thornburgh.” I take more amusement than offense at the mistake—it’s my canary-in-the-coal-mine, no-brown-M&Ms litmus test for writers doing their due diligence (because a glaring inaccuracy in a query letter speaks poorly of their abilities to, I don’t know, write). I’m not trying to make fun of anyone, and I’m not trying to be unfair, either. My name—insofar as it’s mine—is weird. I get that. Facts of Life and Gossip Girl notwithstanding, male Blairs do outnumber we ladyBlairs 3-to-1. I know because I was named for one.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that Blair McKillip, Jr. was my grandfather, because he and I never were at the same time. What he was was my mother’s father, a brilliant lawyer, a cutting wit, a deer hunter, and a deeply, tragically troubled person. He left behind a wife and three children—including 11-year-old Becky, who would one day become my mother—and a raw hole in their lives I’d never thought I could imagine.

#

I know the exact moment that I graduated from being merely Blair. I was just out of college, working at a newspaper, wobbling home on the J train in heels every night to sleep on a sublet mattress. New York was an expensive place to be lonely and I was doing okay.

A story came in: a man had drowned. The more details that filtered in, the worse it got. A pediatric surgeon, Chinese-American but a Jewish convert for his wife, three kids, swimming out into Lake Michigan to save another who wasn’t his, by all accounts an impossibly kind human being. The worst kind of person to die, in other words. He worked—had worked—at the hospital attached to my alma mater, and so I was tasked with dredging up details. I hated it. Regular, benign interviews about banal things like foie gras and 501(c)(3) documents already sent me to the bathroom to shake and breathe deeply, and this was infinitely worse. Phone calls went unanswered—obviously. I squirmed with every redial, bothering people at the absolute last time people want to be bothered.

And then, one morning, my inbox pinged: his daughter. Her GMail icon was something bright yellow and happy—a bee, a sun, I don’t remember—and her message was an essay, a beautiful and intelligent remembrance of her father, her hero. She was thirteen years old.

The paper picked it up immediately. We published it in the next print edition with photos from her Bat Mitzvah—big paternal hands on resting newly adult shoulders, a smile more joyful than any I have ever seen. I mailed her family five copies of the paper and sent her an email to say thank you for sharing.

“Ms. Thornburgh,” her reply began, “Thank you so much for this opportunity. It has always been my dream to be a published writer.”

That evening, I made it across the bridge into Brooklyn before I started crying. Because somewhere I was still Blair, age thirteen, wanting desperately to be a writer; somewhere else another girl had gotten that same wish in the most fucked-up way possible. Here I was now, Ms. Thornburgh, a few bylines under my belt, big city girl. Ms. Thornburgh kicking off stupid high heels that never fit, denting the wall beneath someone else’s posters, and crying ugly sobs. Ms. Thornburgh, pressing her phone to her face—Rebecca Thornburgh on the glassy surface, the minutes ticking up and up with nothing but gasps—begging “Please tell me this girl is going to be okay. Please tell me she’ll be okay” and not even needing to hear anything back because the very fact that she is, and that she is Blair’s daughter, and that she is my mom, and that I am Blair mean yes. Yes, because we name things that they might not die. Yes, some things remain.

#

I did not know Blair McKillip. But when I say I have nothing of him but his name, I do not say it lightly. That name is everything to me and everything that is me. Humans are creatures of words, and names are the most proper and holy of those. This name is conscripted to me for common and sacred use, transfiguring from a barcode I bubbled in to the SATs to a sticky square on the front of my sweater to whatever—if any—essential quality there is to the flesh-and-blood being who types this stuff. B-L-A-I-R, past and present. And one day, it will be everything there is of me.

Last weekend I went to a beautiful wedding—this is not redundant; not all weddings are beautiful—and I cried six times. The last time wasn’t even at the ceremony; I was just looking at the wedding-day pictures of parents and grandparents set up at the reception and quietly weeping into my placecard. I realized that getting married is basically telling someone “If the only thing that survives about me for time immemorial is my name stuck to yours with a little equals sign in the front of the family Bible, that is okay with me. That is what I actively choose.” Everything else of you will fall away until you are a nothing but nodule in a string of who-begat-whom, a line of letters, a name.

If there is any magic in the world, it is in words, because they are what conjures for us things that are not there. And if for humankind there is life eternal, it is in and of and through our names.

So. It’s Blair, girl Blair, with a B. Nice to meet you.

Once, I got subtweeted. Or I think I did; the thing about subtweeting is that You Never Know (also, it doesn’t stand for “subtle tweet,” as I initially believed. Nor does #nofilter mean that a post is real-talk honest). I had just fired off some cheery ~140 character missive about how trying to get people to like my novel is like begging strangers to love my imaginary friends—which, okay, not the smartest thing I’ve ever said, but it’s the internet—and then, a few tweets later, an online acquaintance (“Follows You”) quipped something about—and I’m paraphrasing—how painfully earnest some people can be.

Twitter is weird. My own digital nativity notwithstanding, I don’t quite get what it’s for (whence my tweets of John Dowland lyrics, jokes about paleography, and the inexplicable #seachantyoftheday). If it’s supposed to be my platform, I don’t do enough self-promo (as in “UM HELLO MY BOOK IS ON AMAZON“), and if it’s supposed to be for friends only, well, I can’t shut that gate once the Twitter cows have gone. I follow a hodgepodge of actual IRL friends, nifty news sources and blogs (hello, @Medievalists!), and writereditoragents who seem like they’re up to cool things.

Which: earnestness. Am I earnest? Sure. I really love writing. I like my job a whole hell of a lot, too. And I love what I write, which is where it gets weird. Some stuff I write ends up on blogs that are so super-cool that they would probably never use a compound adjective as dorky as “super-cool.” Sometimes I’m canny and ironic and au courant with zeitgeisty satire. But the larger portion of what I write—by an order of magnitude, wordcount-wise—is earnest. Imaginary friends, playing in a Scrivener jungle gym and getting up to adolescent hijinx. I love it! I love doing it! I want to share it and make it happen so much that I will do even dorkier things like go to bed early, not live in Brooklyn, and just generally enthuse. It may be hip to be agnostic, but I’m a believer. I always have been.

Okay, so, quo vadis with all this, Thornburgh? Just some hope, since hope goes hand-in-glove with earnestness: I hope other people are equally afflicted. I hope Huey Lewis was right. Because when people believe in stuff, I lend them so much credence I don’t care if I ever get it back. I’m subtweeting the whole world! Please keep on caring, because I care about people who do care. #nofilter #earnest

In the Roman d’Enéas, a 12th century adaptation of the Aeneid you’ve never heard of, the queen of Latium gives her daughter Lavine a really long talking-to when handsome bachelor Aeneas heaves up on shore to carry her off as his fated bride. To make a long-winded series of admonitions short: love hurts. Lavine learns that there is to be sighing, sleeplessness, heart palpitations, obsessiveness, and gobs of self-doubt—but not to worry! These are just signs that the love she feels is truly noble and worthy.

Lavine! Girl, I feel you.

This is technically from the later German Eneasroman but it’s close enough for armchair scholarship

I’m not trying to say that revising a novel is endless pain and suffering, because that’s terribly, ickily precious. Woe-is-me wordsmiths are about as artificial and outdated as, well, courtly love. But at the same time…revision is hard! (Let’s go shopping!) What started as a story guided by the gut must now be broken down and rewritten by the brain, and when those too don’t agree you end up kind of seasick.

Had I had my own personal queen of Latium, here is what I wish she had imparted.

You can’t coast, smartass. A lot of the first draft was pretty good. There were clever, snappy snips of dialogue and…well, that’s about it. For whatever reason, though, I thought this was enough. Sure, there were weak scenes, and maybe I hadn’t really thought about character arcs, but those I dismissed with some mental handwavery.

No! Do not past go! Do not glide so blithely by on the heelies of your back-patting self-satisfaction! A few (and I mean few) good parts do not a novel make. Hold up everything—everything—to the bare-bulb light of scrutiny, and if it doesn’t work—and you have to let yourself admit that lots of it doesn’t—tear it out.

It will unravel. Corollary to the above: I had a fear that if I dared to pluck at my weak plot threads, the whole story would come undone, Weezer-style. And then what would I do?! Rewrite the whole thing?!?

Well, yeah. If it isn’t working, it doesn’t work. You, in turn, must put in more work to get it going.

You are a citizen of the rules, just like everyone else. I have an uncanny ability to read writing advice and think it doesn’t apply to me. This won’t work. You can’t shrug off ideas about characters needing motivation and telling-not-showing just because you think you know them—you have to practice them, every sentence, every day. Don’t get sticklery about it—leges sine moribus vanae—just don’t flout.

You need a critique partner. Or several. You are too deep into the forest to see the trees. Someone else must read this. Toughen up.

You need Scrivener. You just do.

You need to let yourself obsess. All those awful, obnoxious affectations about “process” that you hate to hear from other writers will suddenly and viciously become true. You will sleep less. You will drink too much coffee. You will make playlists for your characters. You will spend an entire weekend writing, not going outside until a 6 PM Sunday grocery run where you will stare at tomatoes for five minutes trying to calibrate your eyes. You will make plot notes in dark movie theaters and write scenes on your phone. You will walk down Market Street to the train listening to LCD Soundsystem, kind of crying, and wondering if you’re up to fixing this.

It takes as long as it takes. It’s hard to come from the insta-satisfaction of throwing up a zinger-laden blog post and getting a few quick digital thumbs-up to the long, long, year-and-a-half-plus enterprise that crafting a good novel should be. Don’t rush, and don’t be impatient to get the thing “out there” before it’s ready. The play’s the thing.

It will happen. Once you’ve torn the thing apart, pinned up every new scene in Scrivener, and finally stare down the blinking I-beam, it will feel like you have forgotten how to form sentences. Move your fingers—it works! I don’t know how (alchemy, maybe?) but it does.

You must work hard, but you can work hard. Use a cocktail of perfectionism, masochism, and the low-grade hypomania of late, light summer nights to write from 8 PM to 12 AM five days a week. Wake up every morning and think about how badly you want this book to be good. Know that only you can prevent its nonexistence. Type, type, type, type, type.

Bros are the best. The bros! Oh, the bros. It’s amazing how much you can like your second-tier characters when you give them actual personalities.

Good writers get words; good novelists get people. Your witticisms will not redeem you. Your introspection will. Tell the truth—the specific, detail-focused truth that springs from what characters see and feel. Don’t hide behind the abstract. Don’t write long diatribes. Don’t panic and worry that you’re doomed to either poetry or copywriting. Don’t fret, little squirrel.

The thing is, though, that even if someone had lectured me with these talking points, Lavine-and-queen-style, I don’t think I would have gotten it. There’s a reason that didactic swaths of dialogue are unreadably archaic-sounding (even if you have to read them for your undergraduate thesis): they’re telling, and we all know that’s bad. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does make process, and that’s, ultimately, all writing is.

So: I’ve got a better book. I hope you get to read it soon.

BONUS EXCITING LEDE-BURYING NEWS: come March 2014, I will be a published author! I wrote a book about college. It will teach you how to do your own laundry and make a sandwich with an iron. The introduction quotes Cicero and Animal House. I think it would make an excellent gift.