This is the last dispatch you’ll see from me for a while, because it’s time I bunkered down to write. It feels as if I’ve written more to date about the writing process than I have for the actual book, even though I’m almost 25,000 words in. So what if I haven’t finished two chapters yet? (And so much for writing more efficiently.)
More frustrating is that I’m still seeking a groove. Self-help books and collegial advice aside, I’m struggling with the typical self-doubt and procrastination on top of the fact that my work routine keeps veering all over the road. Just to give two examples: whereas I started out on this project with a typed outline and a daily start time of 8 a.m., I’m currently working off index cards John McPhee-style and I find myself only beginning to write around 3 p.m. (I keep going until I’m too tired to think clearly anymore). Both seem to work… for now.
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I keep waiting to hit a point where the writing process will feel like an assembly line — the smooth production of polished prose — and I’m beginning to wonder if I ever will. By now I’m far enough up the mountain in terms of word count that a major fall would kill me (or at least my timetable) even though I’m seemingly no closer to the peak.
These days, I wear the same ragged pair of jeans and comfy cardigan and runs errands looking as if I just fell out of bed. Some mornings I run into a friend who looks the same way, Jeff Howe, except the look in his eyes is even more frantic, because he’s just about finished with his book, Crowdsourcing. Jeff’s been six months ahead of me the entire way, and he warned me at the outset “guard your headspace” against all distractions. I complained to him the other day that I was scared about the middle frames of the process, and he just sighed.
| One of the toughest and most confusing chapters will now pay for itself. |
“The middle was the hardest time, and I’m facing the second-hardest time now, which is getting ready to go into edits,” he said. “I had busted my ass, but it sill felt as abstract as it did in the beginning, like I was filling a bottomless hole. The middle part is maybe when my internal deadlines were most useful for me. I made checklists of everything I needed to do each day, and some days I wouldn’t write anything at all, because I was reporting that day.” And it was the reporting that carried him through, because “I would find myself on roads I hadn’t planned to travel, but it often turned out that those were the most fortuitous routes. And that really saved me, because it no longer felt like I was working on a book or a chapter, but was working on sections of a narrative.”
That’s one lesson I’ve thoroughly learned. While in Bangkok this summer, I was saved from a hopelessly tangled narrative by an introduction to someone working in a field that touches directly upon the themes of the book. I can’t say what or who, only that I’ve successfully pitched Fast Company a long feature on the subject, meaning that one of the toughest and most confusing chapters will now pay for itself and have a SWAT team of editors work it over before I pass it along to my own. What I like even more is that it now feels like a discrete thing, a task that’s manageable and within my powers to master and polish to a high gloss.
On past occasions when I’d bumped into Jeff, we’d talked about what it meant to be magazine writers working on books. We each had an ear and an understanding for how a feature should sound and read — the overall sense of compression and the telegraphing of intent early on, high up in the nut graf. I still haven’t acclimated to the long narrative lines, and it took him forever, too. Finally, after some advice from his editor, he’d figured out where to plant signposts in the narrative to point the way forward without letting the line go slack. That’s something I still have to learn.
Jeff had one more piece of advice: keep the difference between “strategy” and “tactics” clear in my head. Have a strategic vision for where you’re going with the book, but the metaphorical war is, in fact, won in the trenches — the daily writing to make word count and hit self-imposed deadlines. “My days are more or less spent working for tactical victory, not strategic victory,” he said, and by that he really meant the daily grind.
So this column is going on hiatus until sometime in the spring, once I have some major news (and hopefully some major insights) to report. In in the meantime I’ll be in my office, writing.
1. Don’t be afraid to keep changing your writing tactics if what you’re doing isn’t working.
After pooh-poohing the McPhee index card method one month, I was using it the next because I need an organizational method that was more fluid than Microsoft Word, yet I didn’t want to take the time to learn project management software. And it seems to work, so I’m sticking with it. (For now, at least.)
2. Dump all distractions (like this column).
Another piece of advice Jeff Howe gave me in the early going: “Guard your headspace.” He meant I should protect myself against anyone or anything wanting a piece of my time or attention. Stephen Pressfield makes the same point in the War of Art: They may be noble, and they may be necessary, but any distraction is a form of Resistance, and need to be dealt with somehow.
3. Come to terms with the fact that you’re not writing a story.
The pace you’re used to as a magazine writer is unsustainable over a book. A runner who’s trained all of his or her whole life to run 1600m can’t make the jump to marathon distances without re-learning how to run the race. I’m still trying to build up my stamina.
Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.
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