First Drafts
The love-hate rollercoaster of the humble WIP
Friends, as of today I’m 47,000 words into a new project I began in early June. As most of you know, I’ve been doing #1000WordsOfSummer, Jami Attenberg’s popular generative #writingcommunity activity, and I have not taken a day off because I seem to be a tad compulsive.
I’ve pounded my laptop so badly (RIP trackpad), that I can feel its hot rage burning my thighs because I use it as a literal laptop. I’ve hauled the recalcitrant Dell to a family reunion in Tahoe, followed by an extended camping trip that logged some 2,000 miles.
I’m happy to be home at long last, but yesterday, in order to complete my daily quota, I worked on the patio while our house was undergoing the equivalent of wisdom teeth removal. The power out for the entire day and a hardworking team pounding a new roof in place, my goal was to complete the wordcount before the ninety-degree afternoon (and before my laptop battery quit).
Friends, I nearly quit.
I’m in that middle place where everything my MC does irritates me, or feels contrived, or takes me down a path that leads nowhere. And this is with an outline (that I’ve, to be honest, mostly abandoned). At one point I scrolled through the nearly 200 pages I’ve written, and had a moment of what my teacher, Tom Spanbauer, would call profound failure of spirit.
I’ve worked with enough writers on their book-length projects to know that this stage of writing is fairly universal. That moment where you question the process. Where you loathe your voice on the page. Where you feel like a fraud. Writer’s block is a shorthand term for it, but really, that connotes more of a mental impasse. I think what’s more at work here is lodged in emotion and existential dread, which then leads to a disconnect with the work and terminates in the inability to give a shit. Failure of spirit, indeed.
What to do, then?
For me, when I start down that road, I do one or both of these things:
Reread passages from my favorite books (which acts like a reminder of what I myself yearn to do).
Pick up my margin-noted copy of From Where You Dream, by Robert Olen Butler
Yesterday, it was the latter that called loudest. There’s a chapter called “Yearning” that really speaks to me. Here’s a sample passage: