“Do not hurry; do not rest.” — Goethe
Here’s news– or is it?: I did not make my Thanksgiving deadline.
There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being that, while Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, preparations and their busy-ness for it begin Well In Advance of that, which meant that I was doing nothing like writing those days.
And then there were the days of Thanksgiving itself: those three beautiful days on eastern Long Island, with my parents and my aunt and some cousins and my sister and her family. Nothing could induce me over those three brief days to steal away– even if only for an hour– to work (by myself) on a book.
So, no, I didn’t make my Thanksgiving deadline to finish my novel. And that’s fine. It really is. The entire goal was, to be honest, probably somewhat foolish, or bold, or both. Aren’t they often the same thing?
*sigh*
I made myself a new goal, which was Christmas, and which Lynne wisely pointed out was likely unlikely due to all the Everything. She’s right about that.
“It takes years to write a book– somewhere between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out suchbooks?”– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Still, I am plugging away, sitting down for an hour or two (or more, if I can manage it) to churn out the words, making my incremental progress, telling this bit, discovering that, uncovering for my own self what the means of this story are. Sometimes it’s dreadful (the silence, the idealessness, the yawning blankness of my laptop screen). And sometimes it’s like holding to the end of a firehose while it’s letting loose with full force in my hands. Then it’s allIcando to seize an idea and jet out a paragraph, full of fear lest the next realization escape me.
It’s good work and hard work, and I’m getting used to it– to its claims on my energies and brain, to its constant insistence.
What’s troublesome about it much of the time is its lack of beauty. There. I said it. It’s not the novel’s fault, and repairs– I tell myself– are on the way. But for now I am just telling it, getting it down, doing what I imagine those wonderful NaNoWriMo people do: spitting it out. The edits (I tell myself, I comfort myself) will come later. I can’t wait for that– but I have to.
My brilliant advisor in grad school said as much about my thesis: if you can’t say it the way you want to now, just write the idea down badly. You can always go back and fix it.
Of course, he was Far More Eloquent than that, and his was excellent advice.
So for now I am being obedient to my craft and I am writing it down badly– but at least I am writing it down. I try not to wish for Something Else, like a sudden giftedness in writing poetry, say, which is ohsoefficient a medium. No. What I’ve got to work with is sentences and paragraphs, chapters and even (gasp!) the occasional dialogue. Thomas Mann comforts me:
Each separate unit of a work requires its special bulk, a certain mass of reequisite significance for the whole. — Doctor Faustus
It is taking a Very Long Time.
As my friend Rachel said to me recently, “You are writing a novel.”
Indeed.
