I Can See The Finish Line From Here

A note from 14,000 words closer to the end of "A Town Called Nowhere"

GPT-3 is Pretty Good

So the good news is that you’ll get the end of “Nowhere” before the end of the year. I’m doing a pseudo NaNoRiMo challenge, which is to get the next 50,000 words in the bag this month. And I’m well on track to do so. After that I’ll start recording audio and dropping chapters. Let’s call it December 1st. And, I’d like to have the whole thing released before the end of the year. (Happy Christmas, Merry New Year)

Between you, me and the rest of this email list, this one has been tough. I mean, not having-a-loved-one-be-sick tough, but there’s a great deal of psychological difficulty that comes with writing a novel. Or any other large project. And I thought I’d write about that because it’s useful to know that maybe a lot of what goes on your head while you are doing serious work should be ignored.

The Doubt of Writing in Public

First, there’s the doubt of writing in public. Which compounds everything else I’m going to write about in this essay. What you’ve gotten is something like a first draft. A very polished first draft, but still. To quell the anxiety I keep telling myself this draft is provisional. All can be changed or edited or rearranged.

I’ve written about the process a little here.

The Self-Loathing of ‘Who’s Going to Read/Listen to this Anyway?’

Which is the bitch of the question. Discovery is hard. And it seems like it got harder during COVID. The marketplace is flooded. Maybe nobody should write novels. Or maybe everyone should write romance novels. And what kind of screwed up western/fantasy crossover are you trying to pull here. It’s ridiculous. Nobody will read it.

All of these may be valid points, but in the middle, they need to be killed with fire. Your comments, emails, and encouragements help a lot. But if you attempt a large, artistic project like this there is one rule to be honored above all others: THOU SHALT FINISH.

Finish the thing even when you think it’s utter shit. Finish the thing despite floods and broken hearts. Finish the thing even if they break your hands to try to get you to stop. Finish the thing and it will make you mighty. Because then you will have done a thing and no one else will be able to take that away from you.

The Pain of Shifting Gears

During the break, I wrote a 120-page screenplay adaptation of The Soak. It’s pretty good and I learned a tremendous amount. It had been long enough that I got to go back through my novel with fresh eyes. Fresh screenwriter eyes. And I got to see all the places where I thought I was being clever, but really would have done better by making it simpler.

The process also lets me see what made that book good. There’s a deep internal story that really works. It’s about competence and aging and knowing when to give up something that’s tearing you apart. It’s a suspenseful, tough-guy book (funny in places) but that internal story gives it a real beauty. So even as I was critical of the flaws I found, I was proud of what I have done. Especially because, I FINISHETHED IT!

For my job, I write scripts and produce them. And I’ve done a lot of that in the last three years. I’ve become fluent with the format in a deep way. Because when I write something in a script, I then have the responsibility of bringing it to life. It teaches you what’s going to work and what’s is going to be a huge pain-in-the-ass to shoot.

I’ve come to truly enjoy screenwriting. And shifting gears back to a novel was really hard.

The Takeaway

You (and I) are built to be able handle pain, self-loathing and doubt. There is a whole school of thought (e.g. trigger warnings) that suggests that you should shelter people from trauma and strain. I think that is bullshit. It’s a recipe for a small life and brittle people. As a father of two, I literally have a skin (and bone and flesh and blood) in this game.

My philosophy is that my job is not to make sure my kids don’t get hurt, but to see that they don’t get maimed. My job is to make them resilient and capable because I’m not always going to be around to protect them. Which really makes me think about how to present them with appropriate levels of difficulty. And most of all, to give them the gift of necessity, rather than the shackles of endless comfort.

That’s hard. It’s way harder than writing. Because all of modern life conspires to make us comfortable. Easy calories, cheap distraction, central air — all of it.

But without difficulty, without struggle and strain and risk, neither you, nor I, nor anybody else will get to know what’s really inside us.

So don’t be afraid to struggle to bring something new into the world. It’s worth it.