Laurie J. Marks

A couple of nights ago, during a torrential rainfall due to the remnants of Hurricane Lee, I was awakened by the sound of water falling inside the house, and got up to check the position of the bucket under the big leak in the spare bedroom.  We’ve had nine more inches of rain than usual this year: 12 inches in July, 6 inches in August, and in September (so far) 5.5 inches.  While it rained, we waited for a hearing with the Historic Commission, and at last our roofing project was approved, but we still had to get a permit, our contractor had another project, and the roof work won’t begin until sometime next week.  We’ve been trying to get this project off the ground as long as I’ve been working on the current book!  Of course next week everything is happening: A medical trip to Boston, two ukulele club meetings, the first meeting of an art class I’m taking, and (I hope) the building of our new dormer.  At least Deb’s two cataract surgeries are now in the past.

Our neighbors, Iris and Dave, are traveling in Europe, and are happy (pleased, even) to allow me to write in their living room while our house is under construction.  Meanwhile, trapped indoors by rain, heat, and mosquitoes, I finished the first draft of my book.  The word count is 61,000, just barely a novel rather than a novella.  On first drafts I don’t waste energy trying to write well and instead just write to efficiently reach the end, therefore my first drafts tend to be pretty short.  The second draft will be substantially longer, as I’ll use the plot like a laundry line on which to hang the fancy stuff.  In fact, I’ll load the manuscript down with so many words that the third draft will be all about deleting and compressing text.  That’s how my process goes.

The Slough of Despond

Writing is emotionally fraught, especially when that difficulty lacks joy, as tends to be the case during a first draft.  First drafting involves a lot of wandering in the desert wilderness, not only struggling to find my way from beginning to end, but also struggling to convince myself that the effort is worthwhile. I’m a terrible writer, and this is a terrible book!  It is so trite, so predictable, so awful, dreary, and poorly written, blah, blah, blah.  I am a weird, lonely kid sitting at the edge of the dusty playground, daydreaming during recess while the other kids play kickball and hopscotch or climb on the playset.  Then I become a weird, lonely adult trying desperately to make meaning in the midst of historical catastrophes and the winding down of my clock.  Why and how did fantasy-writing become the thing to hold my life together?  I sit in my black leather chair staring into the cold fireplace.  What a weird thing to have done with my life.  And yet I keep doing it.  Discipline.  And sometimes an elusive joy.

When I stop writing, though, as I have done this week, I feel bereft, aimless, ordinary.  I pull myself together and do the many tasks I’ve neglected while I was writing five hours a day.  Housework, bleah.  Weeding, yay.  Medical appointments, ick.  I missed my granddaughter’s first birthday!  Hasty gift-buying!  Stock up on art supplies while they’re on sale.  Plan the new bathroom-to-be, which, fortunately, is mainly Deb’s project.  (Our plumbing lives in the basement, which is a good place for it.  But now the pipes must travel upstairs somehow.  And our electrical is a mess—for eight years we have been powering the entire second floor with an extension cord plugged into the only grounded outlet.  I don’t think the inspector will approve of that.  I love my old house, but I really wish its previous owners, rather than obscure its beauty with dull wall paper and ugly flooring/carpeting, had modernized its systems.  The lazy bums!)

And The Surprise

Towards the end of the draft, in the second-to-last chapter, I realized I had a surprise ending on my hands, by which I mean not the surprise ending I had planned, but an additional ending that took me by surprise.  I had planned this book far more meticulously than usual for me, and still got bogged down in the middle.  And then the story took the bit in its teeth and went plunging wildly off the path.  I love that!  Also, my protagonist came to life in the second half of the draft, and became an interesting, stubborn survivor who does a lot with very, very little.  This book began as my labor, but it became her story. 

Now that I know the landscape, the back-story, the story, and the character, I am ready to really start writing.  These five months of note-taking, word-generating, research, and feeling sorry for myself were just the preliminaries.  The fun part is about to begin.