The squashed bug

I’m not going to mince words. It’s taking me a hella long time to finish this manuscript. And by ‘finish’ I mean get it to a stage where other humans can logically read it. Occasionally I distract myself with the knowledge that I’m not alone in this. Like many aspiring writers, I’ve become a fan of other writers’ stories of pain and failure.

The diary that John Steinbeck kept while attempting to finish The Grapes of Wrath is a favourite. You can vividly feel the physical agony he felt every day, all day, as he was writing. Not psychic or spiritual agony – physical. In the midst of it he wrote “Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.” This mirrors Ann Lamott’s famous ‘bird by bird’ advice, which was so true that she got a whole book out of it.

Bird by Bird was also the source of the concept of the ‘shitty first draft,’ which brings me to the most memorable piece of commentary I’ve read on writing. It’s an essay called “The Getaway Car” and you can find it in Ann Patchett’s essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. After reading most of Ann Patchett’s personal writing, including this book and Truth and Beauty and everything she’s written about her late dog Rose, I feel as though I know everything about Ann Patchett that she wants complete strangers to know about her. It’s a lot, but also almost nothing.

For me, “The Getaway Car” is the best of a lot of good stuff, and it’s been revelatory for me as a writer. In it, she describes the disconnect between idea and execution: “The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write – and many of the people who do write – get lost.” She describes her unwritten work, everything she has in her head about her as-yet-unwritten novel, as “a thing of indescribable beauty.”

I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

When she can’t stall anymore, with this perfect piece of writing in her head, she pulls it from the air and sets it on the page, and discovers that what she’s left with has died somewhere along the journey.

Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing – all the color, the light and movement – is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.

When this happened to me – the shock of reading back what I thought was good, what was not good, what didn’t resemble at all the image in my head – I discovered that I had reached that point that defeats so many aspiring writers. Past the breezy first draft that I'd assembled bird by bird, and confronting the fact that what I'd written was so much less than what I'd imagined. This is when I keep this simple thought in my head, from an old interview with Gillian Flynn: “There are a million talented writers out there who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard. Don’t do that. Keep writing.”