I’ve not blogged much lately because I’ve been working on the new book. I turned in a rough/rough draft a month ago and got some good feedback from my editors. Now I’m revising that draft into an actual rough draft, and after that we will polish it into a publishable piece.
Somebody asked me while we were on the bike trip whether writing a book is harder than riding a bike across America. The truth is they are both pretty hard, but I think writing a book is more difficult. Physical work is also challenging, but with physical work you can just make your body do it. It’s not like that with mental work. If it’s not there, it’s not there, and you just end up writing a bunch of words you will throw away the next day. Also, riding across the country was a team effort. For some reason, when there are fifteen other people getting up at the crack of dawn to start out on the road, you don’t even question it. You just get on the bike and start pedaling. But when you wake up and have to face a book alone, you have to exercise a great deal more discipline. If you are somebody who can do what they don’t feel like doing for hours every day, you have part of what it takes to be a good writer.
Mental work is a nest for second guesses and insecurities. You are always wondering weather the work is good. I’m amazed at how hard it is to capture a distinctive voice from day to day and even hour to hour. In the morning, my voice is more didactic and in the evening it’s playful. And you can’t fake either. So the trick, somehow, is to write in the morning and then revise at night to capture a consistent voice. Otherwise the reader has a jerky experience going through the book. It’s odd to have to work around moods. It’s like working around the weather. When the inspiration hits, you run to the fields and plow as fast as you can, and when it’s gone, you still do the work, but fewer of the crops you planted that day ever break the ground.
Still, there is no better feeling than wrapping up a few good paragraphs. And I mean that. There’s no better feeling. I’m a junky for the experience. It doesn’t happen every day, and you have to go looking for it. It’s out there in the forest and you walk around turning over leaves and rocks not even certain what you are looking for, just whatever it was Lewis found at the back of the wardrobe. Maybe it’s a door, but you never see the face of it. You can’t tell at the moment you pass through the door, you can only tell when you come back to the world that you had just been somewhere else. You realize you were pleasantly alone in your head and the weather came in, and it was only you and the story. You were a cabin in the woods with a light on, even if you were in a coffee shop or your living room. The only things you knew were the story and the dog. And even the dog got quiet at your feet. I’ve never understood why Lucy gets quiet, but she does, every time. Lets hope it happens again today. I have to take Lucy for a walk. She’s crawling into my lap even now.
