W. Somerset Maugham once wrote, “There are three
secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.” Right.
Thanks for nothing, Somerset.
Sometimes I really, really want to know what those
fricking three secrets are. I want
it to be easy. I want to live my adolescent vision of writerdom. Wild parties full of interesting
people, travel around the world, days in the sun and maybe surf or climbing
mountains, and somewhere in there a quick coffee while I pound out five or ten
pages. Of course, being older, I might skip the all-night parties etc… but the
quick pounding out of wonderfully astute and insightful pages using powerful
and arresting language that perfectly expresses what I’m trying to say—yeah,
that sounds pretty good. If I just knew those three secrets, I think, wouldn’t
life be great.
But here’s my reality. I’ve written many novels and
every time I sit down to start a new novel I feel a wave a panic. What do I do
now? How do I get going? Why is all that white starring back at me? I start to
sweat. I sigh. I grumble. I have a kind of amnesia. Not like Gregory Peck in MIRAGE, not the “who am I and what have I done?”
kind of amnesia,
but the
“how did I ever write a novel?” kind. How could I manage to bang out so
many pages, keep characters straight, make it all go together—mostly anyway?
What have I forgotten?
Time to walk the dog. This is not code for some
memorization technique or therapy. No, I mean when I feel this way I always
think it’s time to walk the dog, watch a TV program, pick up a familiar
book, check my email, facebook,
twitter (thank you social media) or do anything to put off facing the blank
page that is as blank as my mind. Anything not to face the fact that I have
lost whatever it was that made it possible for me to write a novel the last
time I wrote a novel.
I always feel this way when I start a new
manuscript. Every time.
Maybe if I were an outliner type of writer the
panic would be less. Maybe. Though the outliner types that I know seem to suffer from the same
problem. They just suffer when they’re trying to get to their outline
If I knew the three secrets though. If only.
In spite of this initial panic, I do, eventually,
get started. I write the only way I know how. One word after another. Sometimes
the words fall out of me and sometimes I have to pull them out. Usually they
make sentences as awkward as a middle school dance. But eventually one
paragraph is made and then another and another. I tell myself that I’m writing
a first draft and I need to let it be ugly and let myself think that I can make
it more beautiful in revision. I urge myself on. Slowly, a story starts to
emerge and once that happens the panic fades and I’m writing. I’m just telling
a story, struggling with tone and character and setting and plot and all the
things I struggle with as I try to become the story, try to be there in what’s
happening moment to moment.
It’s this struggle that makes writing so exciting
to me. It’s the struggle that makes it one of the great passions and wonders of
my life.
I taught a workshop last week and a participant
stayed after to talk to me. He was a businessman who had an MBA but had started
writing fiction. He didn’t even know why exactly, but he’d written and written
and now he’d finished a novel, and he said it made him feel something he’d
never felt before. He couldn’t talk to his business colleagues about it. He’d
had a hard time expressing what he felt to anyone.
He said, “It gives me a sense of fulfillment. More
than getting my MBA, more than business. It’s hard to explain. It makes me feel
alive.”
I offered him my sympathies. “You sound as if you
might be a writer,” I said.
And I offered him congratulations, too. Unlucky
lucky guy.
Maybe it’s not unfortunate after all that I don’t
know what those three secrets are. If it was easy, if there weren’t the moments of doubt and
desperate struggle then there wouldn’t be the moments of elation and
discovery. I’m an unlucky lucky
guy, too.