Indeed where have I been?
There’s an essay of T. S. Eliot’s in which he praises the disciplines of writing, claiming that if one is forced to write within a certain framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas.
I’ve been working revising the novel. The only comfort I have found is a recent post at The Paris Review about Erica Heller’s book about her father, the author of Catch 22, Joseph Heller. It took him ten years to write that book, his first novel.
Writing this book is probably the equivalent to a very difficult pregnancy that causes me to interrupt my life in the interests of the one living inside me. I’m trying to nurture it to maturity. But it’s hard. I’ve never done this before, and like Heller, I am very slow, very dense, very methodical. This revision process has taken far longer than it took for me to write the first draft.
So now the book is in the hands of my editor. And I’m waiting. Waiting. Waiting….
Then I read Erica who writes in the Paris Review blog:
When Catch was finally taking off, about a year after publication, my parents, who had now moved us to a much larger, far grander apartment, would often jump into a cab late at night and ride around to the city’s leading bookstores in order to see the jaunty riot of red, white, and blue and the crooked little man the covers of �the book,� piled up in towers and pyramids, stacked in so many store windows. Was anything ever again as much fun, I wonder, for either of them?
I’m sure that was a blast after ten years of searching for the right words, sentences, and paragraphs…. I cannot wait, even if I will be reduced to looking at a computer screen instead of a store window….
One of the reasons I stopped blogging is that I began to wonder about using my energy up writing this rather than spending time with the characters in my book. I’m pouring my heart into this. Be patient. Thanks…..
