Well, the book is coming along, but as I just posted on Facebook, even here in writing sequester at lovely, solitary Lake Cumberland, one can be distracted by squirrels in the sunflower feeder and bald eagles flying by the window. Let alone sitting for some zen time contemplating the extensive rock face just across the water from my perch in the Kentucky hills.
The first week here I couldn’t get the television to work like at all. I listened to music instead, and had a little more quiet couch time, I think. After Shannon came by and showed me the right buttons to push it’s been NASA TV at lunchtime and Rachel at 9 with the occasional search for something good to watch. Last night I turned it off and went back to music.
I was going to make this pretty quick today, but let me address the issue of writing a book as I know it. I think about this stuff a lot, but don’t write about it much. Bear with me.
Writing a book is hard on many levels IMHO:
1. One must be sure to have enough of the right material to tell an historical ballad true. My protagonist was a prolific writer, accomplished artist, and popular lecturer, besides having a very interesting love life. First, it’s tough to get one’s head around the whole story all at once, and second, there’s so much stuff to read — most of it unpublished and archived in an ivy league university library far away — you hope you got all the good stuff. One can have doubts about these things, but I think I’m okay. Still lots to read, anyway you cut it.
2. Sitting for hours concentrating on plan/outline, specific subject matter, word choice & sentence construction, noting sources, revising as you go, and hoping like heck you haven’t left anything out takes a toll on one’s brain. This, I think, is what most folks think about when they say writing is hard.
3. And then there’s the issue of life’s free-will choices. I believe I could have done work other than teaching junior high and high school kids for thirty years and feel more beat up than I do. Shoot, I got to teach thirty years and walk. Thirty years. Retired at 52. When I have friends all around who say they’ll never be able to retire due to their job and personal savings limitations, it’s hard not to feel guilty. Humbled, for sure.
So I rather enjoy doing lots of stuff in my life. I find cutting out most of the fun stuff to write a book that is really hard to do, presents a book production problem. You might be able to guess such is the reason I’ve been at this project for over ten years.
4. Still, when I get going with the words on paper part of the writing process — aiming for 500 words/day minimum [per the advice of a wise university friend] — the ease of syntax feels pretty good. I most often fear the muse will leave me at any time, though. So a couple weeks ago when I got started late morning and didn’t quit until failing light after 5 for two days in a row, I felt a warm satisfaction.
I now doubt what I wrote then is really so good. Taking chapter two apart and rebuilding it is next on my docket and I’d rather not go there, for some reason. It just feels like hard work. I understand, indeed, the necessity of revising and editing. See #6 below.
5. Work on The Dressy Adventuress project continues in one way or another, however. Besides re-crafting the ‘Transcendental activist’ chapter, I have begun detailed planning for the next ‘movement’ which brings in the Emily Dickinson connection. I am eager to get there, where I feel much love and energy. I hope to be there by Monday, but don’t hold me to it. I also have the need to cull out specific details of summer life on Hog Island from the already collected diaries of Mabel Loomis Todd. This newer generation synopsis will be on my desk as I construct paragraphs. And then there is the composite list of all of David Todd’s global solar expeditions. I should have this stuff at my fingertips when I write content.
6. The sage university professor told me, too, to expect ten rewrites of my book. I don’t doubt that’s true, and that feels okay. But rewrites can only follow ‘writes’ — or drafts.
Having lots of time all by myself to find a way into that writing is a real blessing that I thought might help production. It is working, but at a weathervane pace that points and takes me to places I don’t always know are connected.
Have I ever told you how lousy my self discipline is? I’ll save you the details…
Today’s elder idea:
for Bruce
Yesterday on the phone
when you told the story of helping
your unknowing mother
relearn how to wipe herself
the feeling in my heart was warmth
for you and her sharing such a personal
moment that breeched the parent /
child continuum. You came of age.
In the coming to that place you
did not welcome — where stature and
family position reversed from caregiver
to tended — I felt for you
a welcoming hand into the realm of the elder
where I, too, see a diminished mother
fighting tooth and nail the coming darkness —
one who will not go gently into that good night.
I watch her struggle. You watched your mother do the same.
Neither woman selected this path.
Both would rather be baking on a hot summer day or
sorting laundry, wondering how one family could create so many dirty clothes.
Maybe they might even rather re-experience
the discomfort of the eighth and ninth months
of carrying us, struggling with weight gain
and wanting, then, the ordeal to be over.
Maybe not so much now.
Both Nancy and Gertrude have become passengers swept
onto a nonreturnable journey that has served them well —
that has gifted them with time on this Earth
in the presence of parents and friends and family
and the kids, like you and me, who now live into
our years as elders, singing & telling stories of what
they taught us and what we now know as true.
Tom Schaefer
Lake Cumberland
4 February 2014
image: In Mrs. Todd’s front yard on Hog Island. (summer 2013)
Note: This blog entry was also posted @ 'The Back Porch' / http://tomschaefer.blogspot.com/2014/02/writing-process.html
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