Lauren Kessler is an author, narrative journalist and director of the literary non-fiction graduate program at the University of Oregon who blogs at Thin House.
I was down at UPS yesterday arranging to have the final edited version of my manuscript sent back to my editor in New York.
“Another book?” the woman behind the counter asked, all smiles. She’s been following my work for a while now. “You must be so excited!”
Actually, not.
I’m more like…deflated. Depressed, even.
When I’m excited is when I’m writing, when I’m immersed in a subject, hip-deep in the world of the book, energy focused, all cylinders firing. The excitement begins to mount somewhere around chapter four. By then I’ve found a way into the book. I’m warmed up. I am seeing the possibilities, and the narrative is starting to make itself visible. Around chapter four I am keenly aware of the difficulties I face, of the challenges I will encounter and have to master if the book is to be successful. But, unlike in the throes of chapter one, two and often three, I am not in a state of semi-paralysis, fearful that I am not, nor will I ever be, up to the task at hand. By chapter four I have a toe-hold. I am by then – biochemically speaking -- scared enough to have a good adrenaline rush going but not so scared as to be awash in cortisol. I am alive, alert and ready for action.
More than that: I am thrilled to be so thoroughly absorbed. My life takes on a shape. There is order to my days. Order to my reading, my thinking, my conversation, even my dreaming. The book is like a planet, and I am its moon. I love the tug of that gravitational pull. I don’t ever want to be released.
And then, one day, I am. One day I find myself at the UPS counter with a stack of manuscript pages. When I place the work in a big envelope and sign my name to the shipping slip, I am closing a door I am never ready to close, no matter how many times I’ve been through this process. When I place the work in a big envelope and send it cross-country, I am ending an intense relationship, the relationship I have had with the characters in the book (even when one of the characters is me), with the world these characters inhabit, the world I have tried hard to understand. And I am ending the lovely, insistent, book-driven rhythm of my days: the morning run when I clear my head, when mirabile dictu, ideas and connections sometimes come unbidden; the long hours of thinking and writing and staring out the window and making pots of tea and circling the room and forcing that tough and wonderful discipline of seat of the pants to seat of the chair. I love the way writing demands tunnel vision, the way it obliterates the twenty-first-century multi-tasker in me. On a good day, I forget time.
Flannery O’Connor once wrote that writing a novel was a “terrible experience during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” I choose to interpret this not as a scene from a Coen brothers’ movie (or, for that matter, a Flannery O’Connor short story) but rather as a statement about the intensity of the experience, the way it transcends and makes irrelevant the mundanities of life. Yes, I know she meant it otherwise. I have read the tortured, anguished (sometimes just plain whiney) words of writers who view the act of writing as a uniquely unpleasant form of mental, emotional and/or psychological torture. What can I say? That ain’t me, babe.
“You must be so excited!” the UPS lady said to me. I smiled back and nodded pleasantly. But what I was thinking was: How will I structure my days now? Where is the rhythm to my life? What I was thinking was: I can’t wait to rush home and start looking through the telescope for a new planet to circle.
LAUREN KESSLER’s (www.laurenkessler.com) new book, My Teenage Werewolf: A Mother, A Daughter, A Journey Through the Thicket of Adolescence, will be published by Viking next summer. She is the editor and founder of Etude.
