When you are stuck in a book; when you are well into writing it, and know what comes next, and yet cannot go on; when every morning for a week or a month you enter its room and turn your back on it; then the trouble is either of two things. Either the structure has forked, so the narrative, or the logic, has developed a hairline fracture that will shortly split it up the middle– or you are approaching a fatal mistake. What you had planned will not do. If you pursue your present course, the book will explode or collapse, and you do not know about it yet, quite.
-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
This has been my situation for Some Time Now.
Okay, not exactly. I don’t regularly enter the room of my book every morning. Not At All. If I’m lucky I enter its room once a month, but Even So. When I do, I find that the situation Annie so aptly describes above is mine.
I can’t go forward with my book At All. What I have been thinking needs to happen– indeed, the revelation that made All The Difference when it hit me this past spring– can’t seem to occur. And despite my busy-ness with Everything In The World that keeps me from the book, I have Really Really Tried.
And then, added to the frustration that comes with all of the above, I have lately redeveloped a Quiet Fear: it will all come to Nothing. This book, on which I have spent Years and Hundreds of Pages, will forever be eclipsed by the work I am now doing and will be, ultimately, Lost.
I cannot begin to tell you how much I Don’t Want That.
But recently– oh, sometime over the last week, I think– the book began to stir again in the dimmer corners of my mind. I found myself mulling it over in quieter moments, something that hasn’t been happening since I returned to teaching. And invariably I would arrive, without realizing it, at the Point of the Problem, an invisible roadblock that shut me down and shut me up and made the story line proceed Not At All.
It has been Awful.
And then, on Sunday morning, Something Changed.
We spent the night at our friends the Tunnell’s house, Sunshadows, deep in the woods of Chatham County. We had spent the evening with them and other friends, celebrating Bill’s birthday. And then we left there at one a.m. and went to the Tunnell’s and stayed– like fools– in the hot tub under the stars until about three in the morning. By the time we crawled into bed, we were Really Tired and Really Really Happy.
But my body, unfortunately, has an excellent alarm clock, and I was wide awake by eight a.m., listening to the silent house, and wishing For All The World that I could go back to sleep. For a while I thought that I might not be able to. The exhaustion would be awful, I knew. Crankiness of the Worst Sort would ensue, and I would be Insufferable.
Then somehow (who knows how sleep comes?), the light began to fade. The pillow softened, my mind grew hazy and, just before I was completely out, a vision for the story line hit me, important factors reversed themselves, and I had the entire story worked out. Then I slept.
I didn’t even realize it until I was fully awake again, at eleven-thirty (!) this time, hastily pulling on my clothes because I could smell Coffee And Bacon.
We ate breakfast outside on the deck, in air so balmy it felt, as Ken said, like a good day in late March. And during breakfast and the ensuing walk through the woods down to the river, I began, Very Quietly and Oh, So Gently, to examine this new revelation. I looked and looked at this new angle on my storyline. I tested it, lightly, against the different points of the plot. It definitely works, and the now Whole World Looks Different.
Who knows how these things come? Homer and Shakespeare both called on their muses; Dante had his Beatrice. We all have Something, don’t we?, that impels us to do what is both Difficult and Unnecessary. I pray about this book. I’ve done it before; I’ll do it again. And today I’m grateful that, if the door is to close prematurely on this story that so fills my mind, it isn’t closing yet.
The poet Saint-Pol-Roux “used to hang the inscription ‘The poet is working’ from his door while he slept.” —The Writing Life
