Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

It Never Stops

It doesn’t stop.

Contrary to popular belief, fond hope, and fairy tale, the world does not in fact stop whenever you reach a major milestone in your life and/or writing. No matter how momentous the occasion, no matter how important it is to you, it is not an ending. There is no happily ever after, the credits do not roll, and most importantly, you are not excused from continuing on. 

Which ain’t a bad thing, nosirreebob. But it’s not what we’re necessarily led to expect by the romantic myth of the writer.

Case in point: Me. This month, I had the unmitigated pleasure of seeing my first original novel, Firefly Rain, hit the shelves. Physically, it’s a gorgeous book, one that I was more than happy to pogo around my office showing off because it looked so damn cool. In the company of my lovely wife, I did all the things you’d expect a giddy new author to do – throw a party, wander from bookstore to bookstore doing surreptitious faceouts, holding copies of the book prominently and loudly proclaiming “Gosh, what an amazing book!”*. You get the idea.

And when we’d had a day or two of fun doing that, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof, I went right back to trying to administer the coup de grace to the next project I was working on, one that took me slightly over two years from inception to draft completion. Why had it taken so long? Lots of reasons, really. Part of it was the difficulty of the material and my closeness to it. Part of it was the demands of the day job, which did in fact conspire to chew up many of my evenings and weekends with carnivorous deadlines and abrupt travel catastrophes. Much of it was a series of fits and false starts as I tried to find the right voice and the right tone.

But a little bit of it was shaking the feeling – completely unfounded – that until I got “closure” on the first book, I wouldn’t be ready to write the next one. This is a dangerous and fallacious thought to carry around in your noggin for many reasons, not the least of which is that writing is not a serial process. It’s parallel. The time between when you finish a book and when it hits the shelf can extensive, so if you wait until one comes out to finish (or, God help you, start) on the next one, you’re just vastly increasing the time that will elapse between your books.

Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math. I finished the first draft of Firefly Rain back when John Kerry still had a lead in the polls. A polished draft was done by April of 2005. If, at that point, I had been able to compartmentalize and say “That one’s done, on to the next”, and if the next one had taken exactly as long as it did in real life, it still would have been done last spring. Instead, I finally wrapped it up this week, meaning that close to a year’s worth of time has been spent, more than a year’s worth of momentum has been frittered away.

Or, to put it another way, I’m already a year behind on the next one.

Fortunately, I’ve learned. The next next one, such as it is, is already in progress. I finished the manuscript Monday, went to bed early on Tuesday, and started in on the next round Wednesday.

Is the manuscript perfect and polished and done? No. At this point, it’s chainsaw sculpture – the shape is there, but there’s plenty of work to be done with sandpaper and polish. But I’m not waiting, not waiting for the folks who are looking it over get back to me, not waiting until I’ve made it perfect and sparkly with the literary equivalent of a cherry on top before digging in on the next generation of projects. Instead, I’m compartmentalizing, and I’m moving forward on the next project (and laying the groundwork for the one after that) while this one gets tended to, and then when it’s ready for me to go back in with the dremel instead of the chainsaw, I’ll do that instead.

Because, after all, it never stops, and now I know it.

 

 

 

 

 

*Not as such. Honest.

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