Building A Perfect Little Wrtiting Machine that Works
So, I sent my book off and I am lost, wandering, desolate, reading Lorca poems.
I know we haven’t broken up. I know the ms is simply on a business trip, a Grand Tour – but will it come back all changed? Will we still be us? Will I have changed?
These have been difficult writing days. Then, I realized this: I need to reconfigure my writing life. I need a good plan, a shape, an elegant structure within which I can work. I need something to push against. Boundaries. I can’t be loose like this, in the world, I’m on sabbatical for crying out loud, I’m completely unsupervised.
Backing up a moment. This new phase started out really well. I thought I had a great plan: the day I wrote the last sentence of my book (which I really like quite a lot) I simply saved, closed the file, and opened a new file and gave my next book a working title, and wrote the first sentence (I like it pretty good, too). Good good good! I felt like Thackeray. Like a carpenter. I felt employed and steady and seamless. End one book. Keep writing, start the next one. I didn’t even get up and stretch between the two sentences. I just went from one to the other. It was like dating more than one person at a time: wild and healthy and is this going to work? Let’s see!
To drive the dating metaphor into the ground: no instant chemistry. I wrote the first sentence and then made a table of contents (desperate attempt for shape structure boundaries, a plan). I wrote pages of notes. I reflected. I quit reading Lorca. I tried to think. What kind of book will it be? Who will read it? What’s it for? After that wonderful propitious instant start, a radical falling off (and a cheering tango lesson!)—I fell into the horrible torso-less malaise I referred to earlier, the lost desolate wandering reading angsty awful days.
Then, a wonderful stroke of luck. You know how when you aren’t looking for something, something specific will spring into your hands? I came across my old notes from Visiting Writers Series events, specifically the genius writers and teachers Rick Moody and Marianne Boruch.
I read how Moody writes 1500 words—good words, polished words, a day. Instantly I knew: new program! Perfect for me! A perfect way to organize the working life—not by a table of contents, not by hours, but 1500 good words.
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Fifteen hundred words a day—it didn’t sound like that much but it turns about to be hard, and the perfect level of hard. I need something hard to do each day, don’t you? I need something to push against. I need a shape, a goal, a task, a list, a sense of forward motion. I need to know where I am, and how far it is, exactly, until I can stop. (This is why I love running and training for races and Holm’s temperature game.)
I am awed that these writing mentor angels, Moody and Boruch, showed up just when I needed them.
Fifteen hundred good words a day. It takes Moody four hours. It takes me exactly six hours.
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