Highs & Lows of the Writing Life (Progress Report for September 16, 2019)

It’s Monday morning. I haven’t written a word since last Wednesday. Total words today: 0. Manuscript total: 116,190. (UPDATE: 1,079 for the day, 117,269 for the manuscript.)

Sigh.

But it’s like this:

“I haven’t even written so much as a *sentence* in weeks,” LT says to me, distraught. “Everyone always wants something from me — my kids want something from me, R wants something from me, my students want something from me, *you* want something from me… and there’s no time left for myself.”

“It won’t always be like this,” I say, trying to soothe.

“I just feel like it’s all too late,” she says. “I’m forty. I’m running out of time. It’s never going to happen.”

The despair is evident in her voice. And although we are on the phone, I can see her body sag as if she was directly in front of me.

So I pull up a webpage, the same one I’d found earlier when she’d gotten this upset. I begin to read pieces of it to her:

“George Eliot didn’t publish her debut novel until forty,” I say. “Then six more novels after that.”

I pause. But LT doesn’t say anything, so I keep reading.

“Mark Twain first published at forty-one. Marcel Proust — forty-three. Oh — Henry Miller was forty-four…” I scan down the page, looking for names that might catch her interest. “How about this one — Bram Stoker put out Dracula at fifty. Watership Down, Richard Adams was fifty-two.”

“If you’re trying to make me feel better…” LT starts.

Uh-oh, I think. But the end of the sentence is a good one —

“…it’s working.”

So I finish with a few more, just for good measure.

“Alex Haley — you know, Roots? That was probably his most important work, and he didn’t put it out until fifty-five. Oooh — you’ll really like this one. Laura Ingalls Wilder. The first Little House on the Prairie book didn’t come out until she was sixty-five. She kept writing until seventy-six.”

“Yeah, but she was probably writing all along before that,” says LT.

“So are you. The point is, she didn’t pull everything together and get her first book out until her mid-sixties. And Picasso painted until he died at ninety-one.” I wait, but this time LT doesn’t have any objections. “You’re not out of time, love. And the way things are now isn’t how they will be in one year, or five years, or ten years. Your main job is to keep yourself healthy enough to have a nice long life, okay?”

I haven’t written lately, but not because I’ve been lazy, or have had writer’s block.

I haven’t written lately because too many parts of my life want too many things from me, and because I make choices sometimes — like spending time with two different friends who happened to be in town this past weekend — that are required for some semblance of work-life balance. And because the people I love will always take precedence over the written word. How could they not?

So I start this week afresh, determination renewed, trying to keep in my own mind the same speech of encouragement I gave to LT. I try to remember that I am on the downhill side of this novel, because 85,000 words to go is at least less than 115,000 words to go, which is where I was only a month or two ago.

To all of you writers and aspiring writers: Remember that there is always a very good chance that your best work still lies ahead of you, and remember that writing is always a marathon and never a sprint. It seems to me that sometimes emotional fortitude is more important to finishing a novel than technical skill.