Another one down

Just over a week ago, for the fifth year in a row, I ran the Soaring Wings Half-Marathon.  It raises money for a good cause, an institution that takes in troubled kids and tries to give them structure; it also is quite a challenging course and the only race of its distance in my hometown. I can't not do it.  And I'm happy to report that for the fifth year in a row, I met my goal: to finish in under two hours.  I even ran faster this year than last!  (Okay, so it was only 35 seconds faster, but 35 seconds is 35 seconds!)  I'm also happy to report that I managed to finish in the top 25% or so, better than usual for me.  This is not to suggest I am a fast runner.  No one's ever accused me of that.  Fact is, I don't have a natural talent for speed.  What I have, instead, is a talent for Keeping Going.  Maybe talent is the wrong word to use here.  Let's say a disposition--or simple thickheadedness.   Which is why the longer the race, the better I tend to do relative to other participants.  The longer the race, the more attrition and exhaustion sets in.  Inevitably there are runners who don't train well enough for the distance, or who set out in too fast a pace, or whose bodies just aren't up for it that day.  You see them walking along the side of the course, hands on hips, head bowed, their faces washed in pain and frustration.  Then there are those who simply have the mid-to-late race realization that a) This hurts, and b) I am doing this to myself voluntarily, and thus c) Why don't I just stop? Oh, I can sympathize, believe me.  I don't think there's any normal mortal who's ever run a marathon or half-marathon (well, especially a marathon) who hasn't had those thoughts.  But so far at least, I've never listened to them.  If I start the thing, I'm going to finish it.  You just keep going.

I'm set to teach a course next semester called Novel Writing Workshop.  The semester's theme and the semester's process will be: Keep Going.  I won't be expecting masterpieces from my students, just finished drafts.  That is, drafts of novels that meet the word count requirement I set for them.  They won't have time for existential crises related to writing because they will have to get a certain number of words down each week.  And the next week.  And the next.  I'm convinced, after several years of teaching, including teaching some truly gifted people, that what keeps students from achieving their dreams of becoming novelists isn't a lack of talent or a lack of good ideas or any sudden short circuiting of their imaginations, or even the business of life; what stops them is an inability to just keep going.  Keep going despite the fact that you have other schoolwork to do or your job is calling, despite the fact that you're not sure anymore where your damn book is headed, despite the fact that you don't even like your characters anymore, despite the fact that you suspect this just might be the dumbest novel ever, despite the fact that your favorite movie is on tv or your laundry needs folding or your best friend just suggested dinner out or maybe a weekend romp to Fayetteville.  Despite the fact that far from feeling inspired you'd rather be doing anything else than sitting in front of a computer hacking at your amateurish story.  Yes, well.  Welcome to the writing life.  My advice to my students next semester?  Keep going.  You can't know what you have until it's actually done.  Then you can curse at it all you want.  Until then, under threat of a F grade, don't you dare stop.   (Here's the thing, though: It may actually be a lot better than you think.)

Learning to write even when you don't feel like it, learning to see every writing session as just another one down, another day's work done, may be the hardest but most necessarly lesson for any student writer.  I don't know about you, but I've never heard a writer on the radio say, "I only write when I'm inspired," or, worse, "I can't write if I'm not inspired."  I've never heard one of the writers who visit my campus say that.  Never.  What I hear writers say is that they try to make writing a ritual, something as normal to the process of their day as brewing their morning coffee or brushing their teeth.  When I was an undergraduate, one teacher insisted that not only should we write everyday but that we should write at the same hour everyday.  Over time, her theory went, your body will get used to being creative at that given hour.  It will become easier and easier to slip back into your story, even if just before sitting down at your desk your mind is AWOL, three thousand miles away, or simply stressing over the electric bill.  This makes perfectly good sense to me now; and given that most people--like most animals--are more habitualistic than they realize or care to admit, Making Writing a Habit is the single most useful way to Keep Going.

A last thought: You can't get too taken up in your good days either, those times when you put down a great scene or a great paragraph or a great chapter.  Okay, so pat yourself on the back, give yourself whatever compliments you need, but finally that day's work--or that year's work--is just another day down.  When the next day comes, you have to be ready to work then too.  Keep Going, remember?  I recall something another teacher of mine said.  This was years later, in graduate school.  He said that it's really hard to be too proud of a book you've just published, because by the time the book comes out and you start on a book tour, reading excerpts to admiring audiences, six months to a year has passed since the thing was finished.  Since then you've started your next book, and what's on your mind isn't how great is the book you've just published but all the problems you're having with your current one.  He described this as a kind of useful humility.   Yes, it is that, but it's also a revelation of a working writer's credo: Every project you successfully complete is just another one down.  And then it's on to the next.

After my better than expected showing in the Soaring Wings Half, I gave myself the next day off, but on Monday morning I was out there on Prince Street, shuffling--very sorely--through my usual daily trek.  Saturday's race was down; but there was always next year's to prepare for.   I had to get going.

Taking the long view

    Yeah, that's me, a couple of years ago, after I ran the St. Jude Memphis marathon.   Since then, I've completed the Mid-South Championship marathon once and the Little Rock marathon twice, bringing my grand total of marathons completed to eight.  The marathon isn't actually my favorite race distance--that would be the half-marathon (which, interestingly, was cited as the favorite race distance of runners en masse in a recently published Runners World magazine study)--but the marathon has so many metaphorical connections to so many life ambitions that on both an existential and a literary level it becomes the one unavoidable contest.  I've already blogged about the nearly seamless comparison between novel writing and marathon running, so I won't do so again today.  Anyone interested in reading further about such matters should hustle out right now to buy, borrow, or steal Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.   What struck me the other morning in the middle of my daily constitutional six mile trek (this one a double loop around the lovely Cobb Island, Maryland, where I happen to be vacationing) was that distance running doesn't just make a superb metaphor for the act of  novel writing but for the sum of one's writing life, whatever kind of writing that means.  Both distance runners and creative writers are required by their disciplines to take the "long view."  By this I don't mean length in the page numbers of our individual projects, but length in terms of our perception of our creative lives.  Writers are often informed that they will need a thick skin to survive all the rejection they will receive--and this is true; writers are often told, in fact I tell my students this frequently, that persistence is almost as important as talent--and this is true.  (The great William Matthews put it very succinctly to a class that I once happily found myself enrolled in.  "There's a lot of talent in the gene pool," Matthews told us.  "Talent isn't the issue.  The ones who keep publishing are the ones who keep getting the work done.")  But even persistence is not quite what I'm writing about today.  What I mean is that to have a successful writing life, or any kind of writing life, one must conceive of it in terms of decades not months.  Because while a month, or maybe a year, or maybe several years, will lead to an apparent nothing, through decades of continued work, effort, and activity one eventually makes for oneself a livable and satisfying creative life.  For each person this will mean something different.  It could be the pleasure of several successful public readings; it could mean seeing one's plays performed; it could mean publishing a novel; it could mean winning a major prize; it could mean working as a teacher of creative writing; it could mean the publications of stories or essays in periodicals you respect; it could mean contributing regularly to a newspaper you love to read; or it could simply mean producing work that is treasured by the people one knows and loves best.  For some people it could mean all of these things.

But one will never know what kind of writing life one can really attain unless one adopts, from the very beginning, the long view.  In my years of teaching I've seen so many students exhibit dire hopes and high plans for themselves as writers, only to find out a few years--or only a few months--later that they've given those hopes up just because they couldn't get a brilliantly satisfying and creative job right out of college.  Or get that one story of theirs published.  I think it must be true for all of the fine arts--for filmmakers and dancers and actors and sculptors and painters--but it strikes me as especially true for writers that they must live out their creative lives with as much as patience as possible.  Not to be macabre, but to give up too early and quit too absolutely is akin to taking one's own life.  At a conference I attended at the end of June (see my recent post), one of my students and I were talking about the tragic phenomenon of suicide.  We agreed that maybe the saddest aspect of this horribly sad act is all the things that the victim will miss out on, things that he could never have imagined for himself when trapped in that well of isolation and despair, but real--or potentially real--all the same.  I feel the same way when I hear about talented writers who got diverted by law school or by parenthood or by buying a fast food restaurant.  Of course, everyone must do what they feel is finally right and necessary for them--and by no means does going to law school or becoming a parent or owning a pizza joint mean that one can't or shouldn't write again--but my reaction when I hear news like this is to think, "They'll never know what they're missing."  I've been writing creatively literally for decades and for a variety of reasons (which I'll have to blog about some other time) 2012 is shaping up to be among the most satisfying years of my writing life--and it's only halfway done!  It's not just me either.  A colleague of mine, in his mid-fifties, after countless and deeply frustrating years of rejection, will soon be publishing his first collection of short stories.   I've never seen him so excited about an accomplishment or so determined to make a project succeed.  So should he have quit at fifty?  Of course not.  Think of what he would have missed.  Why didn't he quit?  It was impossible for him to.  Because this man lives  and breathes the long view.  Writing is his life's mission, one from which he refuses to be diverted.   At the same conference mentioned above, I heard a South African writer read a wonderful short story.  The woman is fifty-one and the story she read was the first one she ever published.  This publication happened only about five years ago.  For decades, she thought of herself as someone who wanted to and should and eventually would write. She held in her head the knowledge (let's call it the long view) that she wouldn't leave the planet without turning her talents to literature.  Finally she did, quite successfully to judge by the numbers of her publications and by the prestigious grants she's already received.  But grants, awards, and publications isn't finally what I'm writing about or the reason for the long view.  What I mean is that by keeping and supporting and indulging that view, and working from inside it, one cannot help but to make a life for oneself in writing--I didn't say a living, but a life--a life that maybe isn't the one the twenty-two year old dreamed of, but is one which the thirty-six year old or the forty-three year old or the sixty-seven year old can't imagine living without.

Conquering time

Last weekend, for the sixth time in seven years, I ran the St. Jude Memphis Marathon. The day was cold, but the race went well--for me and thousands of other crazy people who pay money to put their bodies through 26.2 miles. (An even larger number put themselves through 13.1 miles.) Out there on the road for 4+ hours, you have a lot of time to think, and you try not to think too much about how sore you're getting, although it's hard to think about much else once you get to mile 20. (Well, that and "Where is the next #%*!&* mile marker? Shouldn't it be here by now?") Another thing you try not to think about is how much longer you'll be out on the road. For this is the strange, or maybe not so strange, thing about running long distances: If, in the middle of the race, after already running way farther than most sane people ever will, you allow yourself to think "My God, I'm going to be out here for 2 1/2 more hours," you'll lose heart. You might even stop. So you simply can't put it that way. It's probably not wise either to say "Well, 15 more miles to go." The best thing to do is say "Okay, that's mile marker 11. 12 in a little bit." Or: "That's mile marker 22. 23 in a little bit." You get the idea. By not letting yourself confront exactly how much more is ahead of you, you don't stop--and you eventually get there. This is true about my training runs as well. I never ever like to tell myself that I'm heading out into the darkness of a November Saturday morning to run for 4 straight hours. It's a lot more comfortable to think that I'm going to run 20 miles. Or, even better, that I'm just going for a training run.

But here's the thing. It's not just trickery. By not thinking about it, by living inside it, you keep time at bay. You melt it. You bend it. Dare I say, you defeat it. By the time you finish the marathon, it never really does feel like you've been on the road for 4 and a half hours. Yes, the race started at 8:00 and it might be 12:30 at the finish, but it simply hasn't felt that long. Because you've been so busy inside your mind, tending to the business of holding soreness and all those bad thoughts away, substituting any and all thoughts of another kind. Yet there you are at 12:30 with a shiny medal newly hung around your neck and grinning with relief. (See me above.)

And--I'm sure you've seen this coming--how true this is about working on a novel as well. Heather Sellers, a writer and writer-about-writing whom I admire, recalls in her book Chapter After Chapter hearing from so many people who feel like they have to get their books done now. Because time is running out. Because life is running out. Because they have to finish so they can get it to an agent. Or to a publisher. Or to a competition. Or because they are just sick of working on it. But, Sellers suggests, the problem is that many of these people are finishing before they're finished. They are like marathoners who quit at mile 20 because they can't face another hour on the road. Instead of speeding up, Sellers advises, slow down. Be patient. Take all the time you need to get it right. Because you have all the time in the world.

Sellers' advice is so comforting because it's so true. When I started my Van Gogh project I did not anticipate that it would take me 4+ years to complete, although I didn't anticipate a short cruise either. I knew what kind of time and effort novels demand. Mostly, I didn't think about time at all. That was my way of dealing with it. I stayed focused on the work at hand, which on any given day might mean reading more about Paul Gauguin or getting that crucial childhood scene down in my notebook or typing a handwritten draft of a scene into a Word file, or--as now--nailing down some last necessary and crucial revisions. I kept my head down and my shoulder to the wheel; one day I looked up to realize 4 years had gone by. But they really didn't feel that long. Those years feel like mere weeks in retrospect. I know I'm not unique in this regard. This is just the working novelist's experience of time. And, best of all, at the end you've got a finished book to show for it, which is an even greater satisfaction than a big fat marathon medal.