a work in progress

By the week's end, it will be November. Writers the world around are gathering themselves for National Novel Writing Month, and I, like I've done for years, am circling it. I've already started my new novel, and it doesn't fit into the 50,000-word template. I know my own process well enough to know that trying to bash through beginning to end in thirty days isn't going to work. I write big, then pare down, and that takes time. The National Novel Writing Month frenzy isn't about writing big—it's about finishing a draft. I'm not worried anymore about not finishing. 

But, like I've said before, I'm a huge fan of getting high off everyone else's NaNoWriMo fumes, and I'm always in favor of energy turned toward writing.

The novel I'm working on now was revolutionized during my time at the American Antiquarian Society, and I've spent a good bit of the writing time since my residency re-envisioning it. Some of that is in my mind: having to think of a novel with a different opening and some different central premises than those it's had for two years is difficult, and having so much more—and better—research in the balance is having similar effects. Some of it is quite literal: I'm setting up this project in Scrivener because of the sheer amount of research I gathered and because Scrivener allows me to see all of the pieces that I need to see at once. I can also hide things when I don't need to see them, and I can do it all without the kind of window-swapping rage inducement Word causes me. (Also, my last manuscript in Word started to take nearly twenty seconds for each save, during which I couldn't continue working. Yes, it was long, but just a pile of perfectly plain text should never require so much fuss. Thus far, with more than a hundred pages of notes and so on, I've had no such issues with Scrivener.)

Apologies for the software commercial, but this project is quite different from my last. The cast of characters is still gargantuan, but the timeline is a challenge, and since the work is historical, making sure I don't get things flat-out wrong is important to me. But the real reason I'm sharing this now, on the edge of the NaNo bubble, is that the energy devoted to that novel-in-a-month project does get at something I've been thinking about a lot with this project: consistency. Presence. And I think of Annie Dillard and one of my favorite passages from The Writing Life:

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!"

A project like this really does go feral overnight. I've already found that to be true, even when the time away from the actual writing part was productive (actually giving the work time and thought to reconsider its structure) and necessary (packing, moving, starting a new job). The details drift away, and the details, for me, are everything. The every day necessity of NaNo, the staying-in-the-room, helps to keep that wildness in check.

It's also much more difficult to be scared of or intimidated by a large project if I'm seeing it every day. A week into it, the sense of even writing a novel fades away. It's simply spending time with people I like. I can see the work growing, and the work becomes its own living thing, a plant to water, rather than a finish line to reach. Yes, the NaNo push is toward a very definitive finish line of fifty thousand words and a full draft, but the writer who can hang onto the NaNo habit even after reaching that line (or despite not reaching it) will be able to keep the project in hand.

In the coming weeks, use the ambient writing push to help you. You don't have to sign up. You don't have to be a novelist. You don't have to do fifty thousand words of anything. But show up to your keyboard or notebook or recorder. The thrill's in the air. Breathe.

what comes after the draft?

On December 20, I finished the first draft of the novel I've been working on since June. The euphoria of it lasted for about as long as it took to print a copy, stack the pages evenly, and bind it with yarn because it was too large to fit in any manuscript box that I had. I put it in the mail to Laura, e-mailed it to a few more readerfriends, and that was it.

We should bind more piles of paper with string. It's a theory.

The draft was done, and it was time to start the mellowing process before revision. Most writers will say they need a cooling off period before doing a thorough revision, some emotional and intellectual distance, and I generally agree with that. It's probably wise (to try) to fall a little out of love so I can look dispassionately at the narrative and characters before I make the hard decisions.

It was good to get the draft done. I got on a plane to visit family for the holidays less than thirty-six hours after I finished. The trip was part of the imperative to complete the book: if it wasn't out of my hands, it would have been in my hands through that whole trip, to the exclusion of the people I flew two thousand miles to see. I tried to leave it all behind, actually, but couldn't. I put a complete printed copy in my carry-on. I read my own draft on the plane, in airports, and even in the rare stray moments between visiting mania. I called it line-editing, and that wasn't a complete lie. At my parents' house, I was an insufferable prat who dropped the whole brick of it in front of my brother, onto the floor, so he could hear it. The physical shape and heft are things that everyone gets, even if talking about the weight of a novel means something quite different on the inside of this writer.

I have (mostly) stopped carrying it around. I have feedback from each of my readers, and as of the end of January, I've begun the actual process of revising. I even rearranged my desk to accommodate that.

Drafts to the left of G, drafts to the right, but he's stuck in the middle with Blues (versus Kings, which totally didn't fit into the lyric I was going for).

But between late December and late January, without the anchor of working on the novel, I nearly flew to pieces. I don't know what actual mania feels like, but maybe it was like this. I picked up knitting again for the first time in nearly a year. I didn't just pick it up--I tore back fifteen hours of knitting and started over, eclipsing my previous ending point in half the time. I spun several hundred yards of laceweight yarn. I completely disassembled my spinning wheel, re-treated all of the wooden pieces, and put it back together again. I've had it for almost six years and have never done that. I spun some more afterward. I made a lot of bread. I tried new recipes. I went to the gym. I reorganized my spice cupboard, cleaned the oven, listened to minor league hockey games, and tried to teach myself Russian. I agonized over whether to join a fantasy hockey league and decided I was too emotionally compromised by hockey to add an additional dimension to that. I applied to more residencies, I wrote some pieces of essays, I started working on the next novel in the queue. I cleaned all of my fountain pens and turned to writing everything long-hand for a while. I bought a brush pen and tried to learn to use it. I found an opportunity to teach in Romania for two weeks this summer. I prepped a brand new class I'd never taught before. I planned a road-trip and a vacation.

And I went back to the manuscript, over and over. I couldn't help myself. No matter what else I tried to put in those hours, there was no staying away. I looked at the first set of comments I'd gotten and made notes, questions to ask my other readers. I cheated and started fixing details and continuity blips; I rewrote the first chapter entirely because I'd decided to do that anyway. I spent the week after New Year's with a friend (who was in the process of reading the draft) and explaining to her what the characters thought of the music we listened to, the food we ate, the scenery.

There was, in sum, no clean break, and I couldn't figure out how to actually take time off. The only way I can conceive of getting that real distance, the editorial coolness and indifference that other people talk about, is infidelity. I will need to fall faster and harder in love with the next thing, and it isn't happening now. I don't want it to, either: the revising is getting done. In the past, I've gotten that distance because familiarity bred enough contempt that I didn't want to look at the piece anymore. Then I came back to it, weeks or months or even years later, when it had ceased being mine in any significant way. The contempt for this project hasn't come, and the revision is getting done because the trail is still fresh, still compels me to follow. The metaphor has gone from romance to the hunt. They are, of course, the same thing: both about blood, which is the vehicle for desire.

Annie Dillard writes, in the first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. (13)

I'm following the blood on this book because the trail is still fresh, and it feels like an open wound in that I'm always conscious of it, like something's carved open and dripping red if I'm not working on it. That's new for me.

Gregory Orr, a lyric poet, and John Gardner, of Grendel and The Art of Fiction fame, talk about writing as coming from a wound, as trying to stitch together what will never heal. Both of these writers have some concrete experience with an extreme version of this--Orr shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident, and Gardner's brother was killed in a farming accident while Gardner was driving the tractor. I understand that every word may pull toward those kinds of moments because how can they not? But I don't think the wound is always tragic. I don't think the wound is always even real, insofar as to mean an event or a happening, but I cannot help but think of writing--any writing--as something in the blood or of it, even the raw flesh sting of a hangnail. Maybe that's the crux of it, really: it doesn't have to bare anything to the bone in order to exist.

I have a triangle of broken skin at the edge of my left thumbnail. It's not even a proper hangnail. It scabs flat and thin and my idle worrying at it makes it bleed without even hurting. The blood follows the line of the nail, pools under the short white rim of keratin before I can get a Band-aid. It's been this way for long enough that I can't picture this hand without it. Certainly there was a time, and not so long ago, but I don't remember it. The feeling, the vague itch, presents itself as forever. So it is with this book and revision. I can show you on a calendar when it became a part of my life--June 4, 2012--but it feels like always because imagining before, where there must have been some empty space that has become so filled, is too dire to contemplate. And for the three or so weeks that I tried, really tried, to make it not be present, there was a small, raw place on my thumb, my brain, my heart, my left ankle, just above the hard jointed knobs.

I'm still working on that knitting, but I haven't cooked much of anything since the Superbowl.

The pattern is Catkin by Carina Spencer. It's a cracking brilliant design.

My phone has two Romanian flashcard apps on it, but I haven't looked at them in a while. My Russian dictionary is beside my desk, but it's only there for the book. It's even been a little over a week that I've been to the gym, but I'll tip the halfway point on revising tonight. There's still a red seam on my left thumb, but both hands have been too busy to worry it.
 

now is the only answer

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” 

~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Yes, Dillard again, and a Dillard quote that is one of those things that I know, that I have known since the first time I read The Writing Life, something that has been comfortingly true since that class at Lycoming College. That doesn't mean that I don't forget it sometimes, and I had one of those moments tonight, working on the novel.

I've come to that heady and dizzying place with the manuscript: the end is in sight. How that breaks down in any kind of temporal way, I certainly can't say, but I can say that I can hear it now, and it's not an echo. I'm doing a pass through from the beginning of it right now, ironing out the wrinkles for the elements it has taken me all of these pages to properly understand, to finish the scenes that I skipped because I had no idea what was really happening in them or I didn't feel like writing them just then (sometimes, I don't want to deal with conversation, in person or in print; some days, there is no stomaching a second more of interiority, mine or a character's) and onwards was always better than grinding hours of stalemate. I need to see what may now need to flex and change.

Among those points of flex and change was a scene percolating in my mind, one that's been saying you need me while I kept saying, "No, not yet. Not yet. Surely not yet." And then I hit this flat spot in my read-through, about forty percent of the way through, a plateau that extended on into the distance because it was also one of those unfinished places. Unfinished because it wasn't going anywhere, and I didn't want to write it because it wasn't going anywhere and I didn't know what direction even to point. 

Tonight, a fair bit of it got pointed directly at the book's scrap heap: cut and paste, right out of the proper living text and right into file that's a kind of dry dock for me. I don't actually delete very much. I wrote the sentences. Yes, sometimes they are truly trash, but more often, they're the back of my brain telling me something I'm not ready to hear yet. I'll come back to it. 

I can't tell you how useful a scrap heap or graveyard file is. It's the thing that lets me cut with impunity (yes, paring away is ninety percent of my editing process and no one at all is surprised). It's the thing that gives me the correct spaces to see the work, too: if I can't see past one of these dead zones, I tear it out. Maybe I don't need it at all. If I can't understand what that pile of words is doing because there's too much gravity pulling at the befores and afters, I put it on blank pages in the scrap heap, read it alone. No matter what, that text is not lost. I can (and do) go back to that detritus later, when I am searching for something that feels familiar, something that feels caught on the tip of the tongue (or the fingers). Chances are, I already wrote something of it. I just put it in the wrong place. 

That may be the best lesson I've learned while working on this book: trusting my own process. Not worrying forward or backward, but feeling reasonably confident that the pieces I need would reveal themselves in time. It's been working. (The scrap heap is good insurance. Trust, but also keep records.)

But now comes the point in the process when everything must be in the present. If I want to finish, I am past the point of "deal with it later." 

(I do want to finish.)

And tonight, it became incredibly clear: to hell with not yet. Now is the only answer. Put in the scene I've been saving. 

In the process, too, I had to ask why I was holding it back, and the only answer to that is that I wasn't sure what it would lead to, wasn't sure where else it could go. I was thinking of the side-to-side movement, of shifting, like eyes, like my narrator rocking foot to foot when the only thing to do is to climb. I have given her a new hill.

Tomorrow, I trust that something else will arise after. She'll have new places to put her feet.

The Return of the Light

It's not the end of winter. I live in Wyoming--the third week of February is nothing like the end of winter. And it's still dark early enough. So what is this light my title speaks of?

The return of baseball. Opening Day is still a little more than a month away, a bit longer than that for Opening Day in the States, but today was the first proper day of Spring Training. The rest of the teams join their pitchers and catchers in Florida and Arizona and other sun-kissed places, assembling with new and old teammates. There are, of course, the dramatic (and frankly tired) stories regarding last year's scandals and heartbreaks; I'm a few hours of coverage deep in the season, and I've already heard enough about Manny and more than enough about Rallybeers/Chickengate in Boston. Those kinds of narratives are inevitable.

But they're certainly not everything, and they're certainly not where my interests lie. Nor, even, where the anchors' and sports talk show personalities' interests lie. That much is visible. It's that, for those of us who love the sport, baseball is back. It's in the childlike joy that's been percolating in the breasts and brains of baseball fans since November, or, if you gave up on the playoffs because your team didn't make it or you simply decided that there was no way to top the last day of the season, since the end of September. And maybe that's a little hackneyed--"childlike joy"--but I can't think of anything else that really gets close. Last week, The Classical ran a piece by Matthew Callan about Gary Carter that really holds up that sense of joy as not something just pertaining to the fans, but to the players themselves. And that's sometimes strange to think about for career players, and it certainly doesn't hold true for everyone, all professional athletes. Major League Baseball is a profession, and there is an emphasis on the professional. I'm a Phillies fan, and my husband and I are still trying to decide if Chase Utley is people or a baseball-playing robot. My jury's still out; Utley's a blank wall for fans like me who love the colorful personalities. And there are all the jokes about Roy Halladay being a baseball-bot, but that's derived from the mechanically indefatigable nature of his arm, from his near-legendary work ethic. Halladay doesn't need to sleep and to rest like normal mortals. But looking at Roy Halladay's face when he's pitching--that's pure humanity. That is sheer drive and a little bit of rage and more focus than I can think of applying to anything. He might be super-human, but he's definitely human because his prowess all about desire. It's all about want.

And that's what this week is about, too, for fans: being perched on the edge of desire. The season looms, the narratives start stitching themselves together. And we wait. We wait and watch and hope: how will it happen? How will this season reveal itself? What are the stories in the wings? This week (and during the whole off-season), the analysts and the announcers are working their predictions for those stories. They gather the data, they crunch the numbers, they spin scenarios from sunflower seed husks and leather oil. And I watch, and I listen, and I agree and disagree and none of us really knows anything and we all know that and it doesn't stop us. The pleasure is in the conjecture; the pleasure is in the wanting to know. Even if it ends in heartbreak. We want to know how it's going to end.

Last October, Gary Smith wrote a piece for SI called "We're In Baseball Heaven." As an English instructor and a writer of fiction and a member of the editorial staff for a damn fine literary journal, I should probably not admit that this article was the thing I loved most of all of the things I read last year. I won't recap the whole thing; I'll just say it's well worth the time to read the whole thing, particularly if you (like me) love the Phillies. If not, you're probably still able to imagine a time when it felt like everything was coming together for your team, how light each step became. Even as you knew it was silly because you still had to go to work, your job still sucked, you still had to pay rent. Nothing changes, but everything changes.

Smith's piece captured everything Phillies fans were hoping for about the 2011 season: that perfect storm of pitching, the near-invincible feeling that accompanied looking at the record. But it didn't pan out, of course. It was just four days after that article went up, October 7, that the dream season ended. And that stung. I won't lie: I sulked. And then I had to watch the rest of the season feeling that sense of despair, the we should have been there, using that first person collective as though I had anything to do with it. But I was still watching because those were the last games of the season, the last breath of summer before the long, baseball-less winter. Any baseball is better than no baseball. And so I watched every last minute of the season, even when it felt like sandpapering the insides of my elbows.

But why the burning need to know? There's a thirty to one chance that your season's going to end in heartbreak. I know those aren't weighted odds (if you like the Yankees, historically, your odds are better than most other fans'), and yes, at the start of every season, some of us have a better all-over shot at the World Series, but there are no guarantees. Our October proved that.

So, why? This is why. In Smith's piece, he asked a number of Philadelphians to talk about the 2011 team. Bryan Dilworth hit it:

 "And it all just keeps getting better and better," he gushes. "When the Roy Oswalt thing goes bad, the Vance Worley thing appears in its place. Everyone here loooooves Worley. He's fearless, and we won—what?—14 straight games the kid started? That's crazy. The dread we used to walk around with, it's gone for 75 percent of this city. And now Hunter Pence. He's perfect for this team and for this town. He just wants everything so badly. He's like watching a baby giraffe run. This has to be heaven. An angel just appeared here—Hunter Pence." 

This is that paragraph of childlike joy. It's in how Worley and Pence play. It's in how these players--not just these two, but the players we love for so many reasons. The way Gary Carter played: not perfectly, but passionately. Wanting everything so badly: desire. We share that much.

I get tired, sometimes, of overblown sports metaphors, even as I'm desperately guilty of it, too. (As a writer, I spend most of the time being tired of myself. Goes with the territory.) But baseball is, at the end of the day, a game, I keep reminding myself. Just a game. If I see one more comparison of sports to war, I may scream. Because sport isn't war. Ask people who've been in wars. They'll clear it up for anyone who was confused. But there is a magnetism in sports, in following a team, and I may go my entire life without fully understanding it in a way that I can properly articulate (though, of course, I'll keep trying--that's what we do).

In thinking about this, I turn again, as I often do, to Annie Dillard. She's not talking (much) about baseball in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but she says this:

"The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." 

She's speaking most particularly to observing the natural world clearly, closely, sharply. But it holds true for me, here, perched on the start of a new baseball season: good things are going to happen. And I don't just mean victories (though I'm lying if I think I'm going to be happy with the Phillies not making the playoffs); I mean every one of those triumphs of spirit that takes place on the field. And those things certainly don't confine themselves to professional athletics--everywhere we turn, there are quiet marvels taking place. I encourage you to look.

But spring training, the emergent baseball season--this is just one place to see those things, and I plan to be there.