The Days Between: Finishing One Manuscript, Starting Another
For the past year or two, I’ve been working with a map, though one I made myself. I outlined the forests and paths of the manuscript I just finished, and erased old lines and drew new ones. Still, I had something to work from, and a dream to get it right. Now I have to think of blank paper not as a dare, but an invitation, and I tell myself: when I’m ready. My writer-self doesn’t like to be pushed. She performs better with loopholes and sweet talk than threats.
The blank page will call if I don’t panic. I keep the lined but otherwise empty paper by my elbow, but the porch isn’t church. It’s okay if I fiddle with the straw in my ice tea, flip through a magazine, stare into the green, even check my e-mail, though I’m better off now sticking with paper and my barely-decipherable handwriting than a laptop. I can fold over the corners of paper. I can stick my pen through paper. Watch it curl in the heat. Its everyday look evokes unscheduled summer days. But if the laptop with its built-in diversions calls, I’m not going to raise a fuss. If I take time off for poetry, I may come back with a gift for my work instead of outrage at some scandal, but let’s not go crazy separating bad from good habits, setting too many rules.
I’m trying to hold out just one admonition for the characters and place starting to form. I’m telling myself that this book won’t be drawn from history. I love stacks of books, but want a vacation from the nonfiction section, partly to catch up on reading poetry and novels, immersing rather than skimming surfaces, which is part of my research method: waiting to be caught by a concrete noun. A friend recently lured me to walk down the street of Old Deerfield, scanning the historic village map for a century that pleased us, but I’m off the clock, here as company for Deb, who is a weaver as well as a writer, and is open to something that might bring those selves together. We smelled the roses in my photo, and then the sawdust inside a recreation of an old joiner’s shop.
Finishing my manuscript was fun, even if there were no fireworks. More and more I let myself listen to the whispers of a few new ideas. Foolish, full of holes, overdone, not my style, or are they? I’m trying not to assess at this point. Maybe some history will sneak in after all, for there is an old house, and the mom looks like she might be a paleontologist, and what’s life without looking back? I was thinking no magic as I’ve tried and failed at it before. But could I try harder? I don’t feel obliged, but admire books in which magic weaves through realism. We will see. What great words to have as a job description. I feel my luck, I feel my trepidation.
Pushing out the judge-in-me isn’t just about having a better time. It’s vital to creation. To weigh ideas at this point would be like cutting down all the trees in a forest because none had painted signs showing a way out. I don’t know which dead old branch or falling leaf I’ll need. Maybe there’s not a theme in the brush, but a way toward one. I keep looking and walking, getting over stubbed toes, and grateful for the occasional blue bird.
It’s a thrill, or do I mean terror, to begin. At least there’s a lot of hope. I make folders with titles that keep changing, put in and toss out flotsam, while looking more closely at other bits. And writing a page is writing a page, whether it’s first, last, or in the middle. So it’s best to celebrate wherever I am in the process, at least with a smile, a tip of ice tea at the cat, when I’m, say, pleased with an image. Or a bit of dialogue, or the rhythm of a sentence. Or even that I spelled rhythm right the first time, which has taken a lot of years.
