The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer
Annie Wilkes: God came to me last night and told me your purpose for being here. I am going to help you write a new book.
Paul Sheldon: You think I can just whip one out?
Annie Wilkes: Oh, but I don't think Paul, I know… I'm your number one fan.
~ from the movie "Misery"
The deranged Annie Wilkes ends up breaking Paul Sheldon's ankles with a sledge hammer to keep him from escaping and force him to rewrite his latest novel with an ending to her liking. Rewrites are as central to good writing as is completing the initial draft. But it can drive one batty. I am currently in the midst of rewriting my latest novel, Havana Queen, working with a top notch editor and her team. They are brilliant. Their red pen slicing and dicing of my manuscript is making Havana Queen a work I can be really proud of. But, at times, I feel like Annie Wilkes just hobbled me with a four-pound fence post driver.
In my post, Inspired Insomniac: Voices in the Dark, I describe the solitary laboring in silence of a writer, how this writer routinely stays up till 3:00 am pecking away at the keyboard. Characters' voices take over my brain as I sit alone in the dark. If you are an extrovert in need of constant social stimulation, forget about becoming a writer. It'll drive you nuts. But, if like me and most serious writers, you're okay spending whole days and weeks shuttered behind closed doors, stooped over a backlit screen, spilling your emotional guts into stories you fantasize will become New York Times bestsellers, you can give it a try. Not all will admit it, but your average fiction writer is socially awkward and delusional, more at home in his or her world of fantasies than in the workaday world most of us must inhabit.
In the hilarious, quirky movie, Wonder Boys, the Michael Douglas character, Grady Tripp, is a college professor and has-been novelist whose latest work and personal life are in a rut. Uninspired, the middle aged writer just keeps adding more pointless chapters to a pointless plot. At one point, a female student gives him some much-needed honest feedback: "Even though your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's... it's at times... it's... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices. At all. And I was just wondering if it might not be different if... if when you wrote you weren't always... under the influence." Later in the story, the typewritten paper manuscript, his only copy, gets blown to the four points of the compass by a devil's wind in a parking lot. Just as well. It forces him to make a fresh start as an artist and as a person. Sometimes it feels the same during a major rewrite. One's labor of love is blown away in all directions, forcing one to virtually start over.
Anyway, I've put the rest of my life on hold. The mail piles up. Shaving is sporadic. Communication with friends and fans goes dead. Loved ones express guarded concern as to whether I'm okay. This blog goes fallow. It's all right. Don't worry about me. I'm crashing on my book, soon to be a New York Times bestseller...
More essays on writing:
Writing the National Security Thriller, Part I: Tips for the Lay Author
Writing the National Security Thriller: Tips for the Lay Author, Part II: People, Places & Things
Writing the National Security Thriller, Part III: Spy Tradecraft
Greta Garbo & Me
End of Days for the Castro Brothers