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And The Dark Of Night I told someone today I'd fire up an old file server and see if I didn't have the first chapter of the book I wrote some twenty years ago on the hard disk. I wrote it in the late 1970's using a Smith Corona electric portable typewriter and a bottle of whiteout and I never bothered to type it into a computer except for that first chapter. I'm curious to read the first page, just the first 250 words, to see how they sound. I rewrote those few paragraphs, well, I said 200 times, but I suspect that's an understatement, trying to get the sound and the rhythm and the meaning right. You don't want to know how many times I rewrote the first sentence. I don't want to know how many times I rewrote the first sentence. You can't read something you wrote and rewrote that many times and read it with any chance of objectivity or even comprehension, but I bet I could now. The rest of the book went into the trash. It was a good writing exercise, but useless even as a door stop. I think it represented three or four years of writing every day for at least four hours. I had enough money to live on, but just barely. I was lucky. Writing for me, the learning of the craft, was about developing a personal style and I set out in good military order to write four hours a day until I had one, preferably something that would be admired by readers and publishers and young ladies of a literary bent. What a wuss. I was walking into walls, bouncing down the hallways like a zombie. Interesting, getting that far inside your head, but I was doing it out of dumb grim determination rather than any desire to fight the good fight and bring forth a book that needed to see light. In the end, I found myself writing much as I had written when I started. I found that book, but boy howdy, it was comfortable just where it was, thank you, close the door behind you and don't come back. Jack. That's a lesson I still learn and relearn. I get myself into situations where I'm batting my head against the wall for no good reason other than it seemed like a good idea when I started. Little things, big things that if I took a moment to think, I'd kick them over and go to a movie. Dumb. Still, with time, some things go well. This journal, for example, has all necessary elements to make it into another trial. Right now I'm enjoying the writing. This journal thing is new, I'm seeing things that interest me, I'm occasionally writing something I halfway like, but how easy for it to become just another death march into the desert, "gotta write, gotta write". I've been big on death marches. Ease up. By the way, firing up that file server. I may do it tomorrow, I may do it this weekend or I may just be lying. To you and to myself. But I would like to see the first page of that first chapter. Something about the rain and the storm and the dark of night. |
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