After 80 chapters, 436 pages, and 200,000 words of a novel that took on a life of its own and took over mine, I'm so ready to write something new. I've had a few different projects all lined up for me to dive into, but an entirely new idea caught my fancy over the past couple of weeks and so that is the one I've chosen to pursue. I see it as a small book, 100 pages, maybe more, maybe less, the story itself will decide. It's sort of a parable about the journey through life told using the metaphor of a climb. It will be called The Climb. I'm only a few pages in, but far enough to be well engaged and excited about it. Now I need only surrender myself to it and let it take me where it will for as long a time as it requires.
Completing the novel has given me my legs, as it were. After so epic an undertaking, anything of shorter scope seems a walk in the park. I learned a great deal about writing throughout that 3-year process, but perhaps the most important lesson was in coming to understand the absolute necessity of giving any writing enterprise its own daily sacred space. And by space, I mean time. Every single day I fed the novel its 3-hour ration of time. It hungrily gobbled up every precious minute and sometimes rewarded me with pages filled with words. Other times, only a single paragraph, or a single sentence. And occasionally, a single word. But at a certain point (and I'm not really certain when that point occurred), the story took on its own life and began rolling forward like a snowball, enlarging itself of its own accord. The words practically wrote themselves. The characters I'd created took on a quality like the machines in the Terminator movies--they became self-aware. Or maybe my own awareness of them had grown so complete, my own knowledge of who they were and what they thought and what they would be likely to do had so ripened as to require of me only that I sit with pen in hand for three hours and allow the strange magic of creation to occur. That, I now understand, is all I need do with any project I undertake. Feed it the time, and it will reward me with the words.
I met the author Michael Chabon at a reading one night and asked him if he had any advice for the aspiring novelist. "Stay in the chair," he said. I was sort of hoping for something a little more practical, a little more specific and detailed, and walked away disappointed. I now know that his advice was just as practical and specific and detailed as it needed to be. It's just that simple. Stay in the chair. Feed it the time. With nobody else around--no TV, no Internet, no people, no potential distractions whatsoever. Just you and your thoughts and your pen. Or your computer, if you must, but ideally without internet access. Some would disagree, and argue that the internet is essential for research related to the writing. I would argue no. During a first draft, while engaged in the act of pure creation--writing fiction, mind you--making things up--mining the imagination--no research tools are necessary. Do the research later. Leave blanks to be filled in. Feed your project the time, be rewarded with the words, then watch your story snowball into something bigger than yourself. Stay in the chair.
That is what I will do with The Climb. In so doing, I know I will produce a finished story. Don't know when, don't know exactly what it will look like in the end, don't know how long it will be, how many words, how many pages, how many chapters--but I know it will be a complete story. And that will be good enough for me.
Signing off from the heartland,
D.E. Sievers
No comments:
Post a Comment