I went back to work today. No, not housework (ha!). Not curriculum writing (that’s coming along). Not reading Thomas Mann.
I had a writing afternoon.
I entered into this event not as a dog returns to its vomit, nor with my tail between my legs. No. I went to it like a Labrador retriever to water, full of eagerness and enthusiasm and a willful ignorance about the inconveniences and stink of being wet.
Yes, thanks to the generosity and kindness of Paul M., my children were cared for and happy. Thanks to the generosity and graciousness of tworivers, I had an empty and quiet house in which to write.
So I packed my laptop, my notebooks, my pen and, for encouragement, Annie Dillard:
“Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, and slide your desk and chair out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair float thirty feet from the ground, between the crowns of maple trees…. Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples’ crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.” The Writing Life
My time away from this project had served me well: I had nearly forgotten how awful this business of writing can be.
Let me just say that it is one thing for me to write in this blog, and It is Another Thing Entirely to be writing a book. Honestly. I recently took a look at what I’ve done so far, and let me just tell you right now so that you have no doubt in your mind: It Is Awful. If I had no hope of editing, adding, deleting, correcting, I would burn it all Immediately, Forthwith, and with No Hesitation.
Moreover, the new sentences aren’t any better. I cringe as I write them; I refuse to read them over. I read them over anyway. Nightmare.
Help me, Annie: “There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”
The truth is that I have Absolutely No Idea what I am doing. I know where I believe myself to be going; I have an end-point in mind. But how to get there?
This has happened to me before. In fact, during the writing of the several hundred pages I have already written, this happened to me over and over again. But now, in retrospect, the story line and how it developed all make perfect sense. I can’t understand what my problem was. “That was easy,” I tell myself. “You were such a whiner, but it was all So Obvious. Now is the time for whining. Now you’ve got problems. Now you don’t know what you’re doing.”
And I’m right.
All I have is an idea of a next sentence, and a next, and then another one. So I write one down, and then the next one, keeping one hand free to swat at the mosquitoes that buzz around my pen.
In the end I wrote several pages. I have an idea to go with and the possibility of possibilities, which is far better than nothing, because it means there’s room for hope. And at some point during my drive home I remembered these words, attributed to E.L. Doctorow: “Writing a novel is like driving at night with your headlights on. You can only see what’s right in front of you, but that’s all you need.”
