Word After Word

The day after I sent the book off, I settled at my writing desk to work on an essay. I feel like my writing life is a little airport. We got the big jet off. All the employees were involved; we weren’t sure we could do it, and there are concerns: it could easily crash. But the next morning, right back at it.

(That night of the day of the mailing, my sweet sweet friends Elle and Vincent, bought me dinner. “This must be celebrated,” they said. That was so good of them to do. I hadn’t been thinking celebration at all. I’d been only thinking: so much more to be done. So many shoddy patch jobs. So much duct tape! What a disaster. At the airport, we weren’t thinking this giant near-miss was a good thing, but more of an albatross, a horror, a kind of mental illness.

Friends don’t see that though. They’re great. They just see, from afar, a glorious jet in the sky, headed for

So, book mailed and celebrated, the next morning, I got up and went out to the tarmac and headed straight over to the little Cessna which is laying out in parts. I always knew once the big plane got launched that I would turn my attention to this little guy, an essay, an essay on humor in fiction.

I sat down. And looked at the parts. It looked like a wreck. But I have been doing this for twenty-four years, seriously, and I know a thing that looks like a wreck is most often not damaged, not wrong, just parts. Waiting to be assembled. How?

Step one: hang with the parts, get to know them. Pick each one up and let it kind of talk to you.

The advice I give my students and clients: have your next project on deck. Don’t think. Be as much like an assembly line as you can be. Practice the motion of forward motion. Slowly.