Regular readers of my column may well recall how I tend to stress the importance of Keeping at It. The writer who gets things done, I've pointed out, is the writer who shows up for work day in and day out. Regular hours and regular production are the keys to productivity. The hare may show a lot of early form, but the smart money's always on the tortoise.
I've argued, too, that not only one's productivity but the quality of one's work is enhanced by this slow-and-steady modus operandi. When I work every day?or six days a week, say?the book I'm working on stays very much in mind. I think about it during the day and let my subconscious work it over at night. I don't have a chance to lose my grasp of it.
Why, then, don't I start the teakettle going at seven, get to my desk by eight, and nail down the Pulitzer Prize?
I suppose because things don't always go as I would have them go. My best-laid plans, like those of other mice and other men, gang aft agley.
But perhaps a little background on my present situation might be instructive.
Couple of months ago I started work on a very intimidating project, a novel that's rather more ambitious than anything I've undertaken in the past. It's going to be a fairly long book, probably running four to five hundred pages in manuscript, which would make it twice as long as the mysteries I most often turn out. It will also cover a lot of ground temporally and geographically, and although I know the general shape of the plot I have no outline for this book, and don't want one. The plot is going to have to disclose itself to me as I go along.
The writing went very well at the onset. In the first month I worked five or six days a week, wrote five or six pages a day, and completed the first section of the book, a chunk of one hundred thirty pages. Then I had to switch to a different viewpoint character and pick up the story at another time and in another place. I took a week off to give myself time to get out of the first character's head and into the second's. At the week's end I hurled myself once more into the breach and wrote every morning for three days, and on the fourth day I got up and realized I could not go on.
This realization has since become a way of life, repeated each morning with subtle variations. It would be nice if I were at least enjoying this non-writing time, but of course I'm not. I constantly beat myself up for it, accusing myself of self-indulgence and sloth, and that certainly doesn't help.
What does help is if I am able to regard this time off as a part of the creative process. I'm able to take that stance when I look at some of the time-outs I've called in the past.
Last fall, for example, I sat down on schedule and wrote the first sixty pages of the fourth Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery novel. Somewhere around page sixty I got the nagging feeling that something was wrong, although I had no idea what it might be, or what to do about it. I resolved this dilemma by lapsing into the sort of paralysis I'm in now, albeit of a different style. I was then able to avoid work without staying in bed, simply by setting up dates to resume work.
I'll get back to it after Thanksgiving, I told myself. Thanksgiving came and went, and I realized that I had the auction of the paperback rights of Ariel coming up in mid-December. Well, I'll wait until that's out of the way, I allowed. Who can work with all that hanging fire?
Who indeed? Not I, certainly. Once Ariel had gone under the hammer, the holidays were upon us. Who would initiate a project at such a time? Again, not I. I decided to get back to work when the new year started.
And I did. New Year's Day I took the subway clear to Riverdale to scout a location, one I did not wind up using in the book, as it turned out. And on January 2 I sat down at the typewriter and started the book over on page one, and I swear the thing flew. I wrote the whole book in five weeks flat and was delighted by the way it turned out. The prose flowed like water from a well. The plot evolved very neatly. All I had to do was show up each morning and type it out.
What this suggests to me is that the time I spent goofing off was not wasted time at all, that those two months away from the typewriter were somehow a part of the process of literary creation. I'm sure I could not have done as good a job on the book, or had as good a time with it, if I had forced myself to hammer away at it back in October.
Why, then, can't I regard this present period of inactivity as more of the same? After all, I did the first chunk of the book quickly and easily, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. (Or at least I was, until this current indolence led me to regard everything through mud-colored glasses.) It's not illogical to supposed that my subconscious needs time to gather its forces before springing forward again. I take substantial intervals between books without second thought. Might it not be equally important to take time off between the sections of a long book?
Of course it might. Furthermore, I've been going through a lot of personal aggravation during the last two months of a sort that could in and of itself throw one's literary productivity off-stride. Isn't it fair to assume that I'll be more capable of resuming work after this emotional ferment dies down a bit?
Of course it is.
I think the first step in getting through these dry periods is one of acceptance. I don't see how we do ourselves any good by beating ourselves up for our inability to fulfill our own excessive expectations. I can always devise a schedule for myself that I am incapable of carrying out. One's reach does exceed one's grasp, inevitably, and one's life never goes quite according to the script one has written for it, and thank God for that.
Acceptance is easier said than done, however. I can accept stretches of inactivity much more easily after they're over than while they're going on. Those months of not writing last fall?I can now regard myself as having made a brilliant decision, and I have to force myself to remember what a different view I took of it all at the time. It's a lot harder to see the picture when you're standing inside the frame. Once the writing is going well again I'll very likely see my current lethargy as having been valuable, but right now, even while I'm typing these lines, I have the ambivalent feelings of a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. I want to believe, but I'm starting to get scared.
I think there are ways to avoid making a period of inactivity worse. Besides acceptance, I think it's helpful to avoid letting everything else go to hell along with the writing. This too is easier said than done, and my current miasma has been exacerbated by a stubborn refusal on my part to do anything else that might make me feel better or might render my life more manageable. I've fallen hopelessly behind in my correspondence, for example. I've let my bookkeeping slide. And I've had a difficult time keeping up with my normal routine. I always feel better, for example, after one of my thrice-weekly visits to the gym, but it is a part of my present malaise that I haven't felt like going to the gym.
I've been making myself go anyway. I don't want to go there, and once I'm there I don't want to be there, and I can't for the life of me see any point in picking up heavy iron objects only to return them to the place I found them. It seems an utter waste of time and energy. But I do it anyway, even though I don't feel like it, and then I take a sauna and a shower, even though I don't feel like that either, and afterward I feel better.
And I do tell myself, from time to time, that I'll get back to work on the book eventually, that I'm not finished forever with writing as a profession, that I'm ahead of schedule anyway and the book will get done when it gets done, and?
And sometimes I believe it.
It's not fun. One thing I've found to be true for most of us is that, whether we enjoy writing or not, one thing we enjoy a good deal less is Not Writing. Unfortunately, it seems to be true that Not Writing is occasionally a part of the writing process. And it's a lot more tolerable, and probably better all around, if I can learn to trust the process.
At least I've written this month's column?which, like everything else lately, I've stubbornly avoided doing. Like my gym workouts, I've gritted my teeth and done it in spite of all inclinations to the contrary, and whether or not it was worth doing is something I'm not equipped to judge.
But I feel better for it.
CHAPTER 17
Do It Anyway
I'VE GOT a friend who's been calling me almost daily for the past couple of weeks. Some time ago he contracted to write the libretto for an opera and he's having a miserable time of it. He fell behind schedule, missed a deadline, and is being gently hounded by those to whom he is responsible. My experience in this area is, to say the least, limited. I've never gone to an opera, let alone written one. But we're friends, and opera librettists are evidently in fairly short supply, so I'm one of several people he calls regularly when he wants to gripe, moan, cry, beat his breast, and solicit the odd word of encouragement.
Of late my words of encouragement have grown increasingly predictable. He'll natter on about how the words won't come, how when they do come they're terrible, how he can't stand to look back at what he's written, how every time he writes something he wants to tear it up, how just sitting at the typewriter has become an anxiety-producing activity, and so on ad nauseam.
Do it anyway, I tell him. Put your behind on the chair and your fingers on the keys and get the words onto the paper. They don't have to be good words. They don't have to be the right words. You don't have to like them. You don't have to enjoy writing them and you don't have to be proud of having written them. You don't even have to believe that the whole process is worth doing. Do it anyway.
But it's no good, he'll sometimes say. It's wooden, it's lousy, it's bad.
Fine, I reply. Write a bad libretto. Do it anyway.
I don't invariably proffer this sort of advice, either to others or to myself. Sometimes when a book doesn't feel right the best thing I can do is put it deliberately aside for a while and return to it when my subconscious has had a chance to sift through it and work things out. Writing, after all, is not like factory work. You can't necessarily be productive?and get paid for your efforts?simply by showing up for work and performing your allotted task. Sometimes persistence and perseverance don't amount to much more than banging the old head against the wall. The immovable wall.
There are times, though, when it is demonstrably more important to get something done than to get it done well. This would seem to be the case with my friend. His choices are not between writing a good libretto and writing a bad one, but between writing something and being relieved of the assignment altogether or failing to fulfill it.
The daily newspaper is often held up as a great training ground for writers, and there are certainly innumerable members of the profession who had their start in newspaper journalism. While newspaper experience will not in and of itself guarantee success as a fiction writer, one can't have spent much time in the game without learning to get things written and get them in on schedule.
In the newspaper business, no story is a good story if it doesn't get into the paper. If the courthouse burns down tonight, my story had better be in tomorrow's paper. It may not be a great story, it may not have the last word on the subject, and it may not be so written as to make Hemingway eat his heart out, but it's got to be in print. Otherwise it's no good to anybody.
Any daily newspaper contains innumerable stories that might have been better if their authors could have devoted more time to them. But they do their job. Sometimes awkwardly, sometimes incompletely, and almost always imperfectly, they deliver the news while it's news.
Deadlines are considerably more elastic for the free-lance fiction writer. Often the only ones that exist are of his own making. Even when all of our writing is done entirely on speculation, it's common procedure for most of us to set little deadlines, to plan to finish a particular story by a particular date. Empires will not fall if we fail to do so. More often than not, nobody but us will know.
Of course that's generally punishment enough. Most of us who manage to function productively as free-lancers tend to be quite hard on ourselves, demanding rather more than a boss would dare to demand, and beating ourselves up whenever our grasp falls short of our reach.
Thus when we set arbitrary deadlines for ourselves, we generally work mightily to meet them. However we can usually keep a saving sense of proportion on the matter. If I've decided to finish a piece of work on Tuesday, and if that's going to be achievable only at jeopardy to the quality of the work, or the state of my health, or the considerable inconvenience of others, I'm flexible enough to extend the deadline to fit the circumstances.
When our deadlines are not arbitrary ones of our own making, and when the time for flexibility has come and gone, then it's time to Do It Anyway.
A couple of observations make this particular task a little easier. First of all, let's examine the single most paralyzing element in this sort of bind, the conviction that what one is writing is beneath contempt. How can we force ourselves to go on writing when we know that what we're writing is no damn good?
It helps me to recognize that I am by no means the best judge of my own work?especially when I've just written it. There have been times when I've thought a piece of writing was coming along very nicely, only to find out when I'd finished that there was something wrong, most often a lack of tension overall that had not been apparent page by page as I was writing it.
More often, though, it's the other way around. Writing that seems unutterably labored while it's coming out of the typewriter turns out to be perfectly adequate.
Certain experiences have even left me suspecting that how I feel about what I'm doing may be the least important variable in my fiction. Some fifteen years ago I once wrote two-thirds of an adventure novel while living in marital harmony in a New Jersey city. Then my life turned abruptly and dramatically upside down, I lived through a car wreck and a capsized marriage and other trauma the report of which I'll spare you, and some weeks later I found myself in a bed-and-breakfast in Dublin with a deadline approaching.
And so I went to work. Everything was different, including my rented typewriter and the long narrow sheets of paper they sell over there. Certainly my view of everything was different. But I did manage to realize that it was more important that the book be finished than that it be perfect, and I whacked away at it every day until it was done. The publisher accepted it without revisions and published it as Tanner's Twelve Swingers, and when I read it for the first time after its publication I couldn't determine where the break had come. There was no seam. My life had a seam in it, all right, that was a long time smoothing out, but the book was all of a piece from first page to last.
Even when the circumstances of a book's production are less dramatic, it's a rare book that doesn't have a spot of slow going in it. Once in a while I'll write something and it'll flow like water from a well all the way to the end, but more likely there'll be occasional days?and hence occasional chapters?that come like dental extractions.
Long-distance runners say that every race has a bad patch in it. Everything hurts and the whole process seems unendurable and the runner wants nothing so much as to drop out of the race. At this time, what one has to do is call upon his previous experience, recognize that what he's going through is a bad patch, and get through it with the foreknowledge that things will get better shortly.
Books have bad patches of just that sort. The important thing is to get through them, to get the words down however ill-chosen they may seem. For myself, I find more often than not that what I write on a bad day isn't demonstrably worse than what I write on a good day, though it seems so at the time. But when I'm going through a bad patch I could type Hamlet's soliloquy and deem it stilted and wooden. I have to discount my feelings about what I'm doing and just go on doing it.
One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or ten pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing?writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off, and I'll have avoided guilt and at least kept my fingers limber.
Once in a great while I do wind up tearing
up the day's production, but even at those times I'll have gained by testing and working through one approach to the material. Almost all the time, though, what I write (and loathe) one day looks just fine the next. I may not love it, but I can recognize it as adequate. Sometimes it may need slight revision. Often it can stand exactly as written.
When I'm really having trouble with a particular piece of writing, I can marshal extraordinary arguments against going on with it. Like my friend, I can tell myself that it's the wrong sort of thing for me to be writing, that my talent is not equal to the task, that I'm just beating my head against the wall, and that I ought to abandon the thing, cut my losses, and turn my talents in a more appropriate direction.
All of this is generally translatable as I-don't-wanna-write-this-thing-cuz-I'm-scared-I'll-screw-it-up. This kind of fear of failure is paralyzing, and there's no way to tell in its course whether or not it's justified. Sometimes it may be. My talent, such as it is, is certainly not equal to everything I aim it at. Now and then my reach exceeds my grasp by more than a couple of furlongs.
I can only find this out, though, if I get the thing written. I sometimes sustain myself by pitting one fear against another and reminding myself that not finishing the thing at all is far more to be dreaded than finishing it poorly. This seems to be a way I can acknowledge fear and harness it to my benefit.
As I said, sometimes the fear is justified. A couple of years ago I contracted to write a book, and once I started writing it I found myself very much at a loss. It was manifestly not my sort of book. I was uncomfortable with the kind of characters indigenous to such a book. I was at sea in the plot and unfamiliar with the sets. I regretted having had the idea for the book in the first place, and wished I'd let it wither on the vine.
Manual For Fiction Writers Page 11