Winston Churchill said it best when he wrote - “Writing
a book is an adventure: to begin with it is a toy and amusement; then it
becomes a master, and than it becomes a tyrant; and the last phase is just
as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude - you kill the monster
and fling him to the public.”
Writing your first novel is a daunting task. It is a dance; a balancing
act between your inner-editor and that part of you that, for some inexplicable
reason, wants so badly to put your story down on paper.
I struggled with myself for most of my twenties, including a two year
stint in the Peace Corps, where I started and quit twenty different projects.
Though I wrote almost every day in my journal and in letters to friends,
I could never really get past the inner-editor that kept trashing my stories,
in order to write the great American novel that I had anticipated when
I’d first arrived in Africa.
I would sit there in the heat of the Namibian desert, banging away on
the keys of an old typewriter, romanticizing that the Hemingwayesque setting
would somehow provide enough fodder for my imagination and that the book
would simply write itself. I’d always make it to about the fifth
page before I’d hit a wall and would end up sitting there staring
at the blank pages with a despondent and vacuous look in my eyes.
Afraid that I was going to end up a starving writer, I went to graduate
school where there was little time to do anything else, but digest and
regurgitate esoteric political theories on why dictators preferred briefs
over boxers and how this contributed to their bellicose regimes. I was
then sidetracked to the second San Francisco gold rush, searching for
the next killer app and enough financial freedom to give me the time to
write. After the company that I had started went bust I did finally have
the time that I needed to write, though not exactly in the way that I’d
imagined. I thought that I would be writing my first book on a tropical
island with a pina colada in one hand and a pen in the other. Instead
I was sitting with my laptop in the corner of a dusty library shushing
high school students.
I’ve always said that I hate writing, but I love having written.
I thought that writers were supposed to be inspired by the wild lives
that they led or the fabulous friends that they had, but instead the tedium
and the boredom of the process had always frustrated me. But faced with
unemployment and unsure of what I was doing with my life I started to
write again.
Writing my first novel gave me the opportunity to figure out my process
and what I learned was that, rather than waiting around for inspiration
to show up, you just have to slog through the boredom, frustration and
tedium to get to your story. What I was surprised to learn was just how
much of being able to write well was just showing up every day, writing
badly and learning to accept it.
I’ve learned that what works for me is just sitting down at the
keyboard and writing as much as I can for as long as I can. Doing this
keeps my inner-editor at bay. What I usually come out with is a series
of unintelligible sentences, dropped modifiers, and grammar errors that
would make a 3rd grader wince. But when I start sifting through the wreckage
of overwrought verbiage and discordant tenses I find a few gems that I
read over and over again with great satisfaction.
The beauty of writing is that it is a very forgiving medium to work in.
The writer, unlike the sculptor, painter, or woodworker can discard, reassemble
and rework caricatures.
Writing my first novel has also been a lot about overcoming my personal
insecurities. Since writing has been the only thing in school that I truly
excelled at I was always looking for external validation from it. I was
terrified that if people didn’t immediately find my prose pithy and
delightful that I might suffer a debilitating brain aneurysm and lose
my ability to write altogether.
So much of writing the first book was getting over myself and my ego
letting go and realizing that people would both love and hate my work.
It’s more than two years and 68,000 words later, and my book has
finally come to fruition. Now in a last act of faith I fling it to the
public and I am filled with both trepidation and exhilaration as I watch
my baby take its first steps in the world.
The initial reader reviews have been exceedingly kind using words like,
inspiring, hilarious and brilliant in its description. For this I breathe
a sigh of relief, but I know that other less praising words are likely
to be used as well and I’ve learned to be okay with that.
So get that novel out of you even if is terrible. At least it will give
you the opportunity to slay that monster within.
