Going Strong While Getting By

— Onward —

I’m closing in on the completion of my new manuscript. I mean it this time.

Those who know me know I’ve been saying this regularly for the last year, as my personal “deadlines” keep retreating by weeks, months, seasons. The fiction-writing process is so inherently anti-efficient, so non-streamlined, based so much on necessary detours, excavations, mysterious distractions (“What’s this secondary character’s back-story? His upbringing? Romantic disappointments? Obsessions and hang-ups? What does he like to eat for supper?”) that a self-imposed deadline is, more often than not, just a helpful illusion. Almost there, almost there … but wait, what’s the rush? Why not push the finish line back a bit and take some time to flesh out this sub-plot.

There are, of course, other reasons for a rubbery deadline. Daily life tempts, absorbs, distracts — sometimes disrupts. For instance, you happen to spend three months battling a sinus infection, as I did this winter, or you happen to have back problems, or you can’t shake those migraines, or you’ve got loved ones in town and would rather rack up on quality time than word count, or your household appliances stage a revolt and begin leaking, smoking, screeching, or kicking the bucket one by one. As distractions go I have not been undersupplied this past year. I’ve enjoyed the blessed kind (visitors), and cursed the perplexing (appliances).

And yet returning to my work, as I somehow manage to do for hours upon hours each week (thanks to late nights and sacrificial weekends), I’m conscious of a steady, if glacial, progress. Pages accumulate. Plot tightens. Lines grow leaner, tauter. Characters walk and breathe. It’s sort of mysterious, almost inexplicable. After many a frantic day spent fretting about receding personal deadlines and all the work I am not managing to do, I come back to the desk to find an ever thickening stack of pages, an ever stronger book.

Going Strong While Getting By is how I’ve come to think of it. It’s a time-honored tradition among novelists, if not among artists in general. Somehow, somehow, patiently abiding interruptions while remaining intent on the continuing imaginative process, you make headway.

It made me smile today to come across this snippet in The Journal of Jules Renard, penned in 1889:

I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, they make me talented. Peace and well-being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice. I prefer to be plagued. I am stating it. I’ll be properly annoyed when I am taken at my word.

Renard was rather more declarative on the subject than I care to be, but his words strike a chord.

Last month the bank account was overdrawn. The kitchen window-pane has been broken for nine months (yes, nine; thank God for storm windows). The car steering makes a noise. One headlight is out. There are bees in the wall of my writing room. My toddler has a runny nose and has cut the length of his naps in half. The lawn is shin-high. At the flip of a switch the other night, three overhead lights made a zapping sound and went black (not a fuse issue –  something in the wiring, as I learned by shocking myself at the fuse box during a bumbling troubleshoot). And, oh yes, I’m a day late writing this post.

But I’m not complaining. I’m getting by, I’m also going strong. Here’s to making the best of  it, and seeing that it brings out the best in me.

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Daunting Task? Learn to Whip It!

In the Absence of “Yes”