Half-Time in the Writing Game--Or Is It Just a Clever Excuse?

[I wrote this back in August, when I really was stalled out on my novel. Now I’m in a totally different place, but thought these words might be of interest or encouragement to the many writers—and procrastinators—out there.]

For three months earlier this year, I wrote furiously on my novel, The Sleep Diaries; then, as has happened so many times before, I reached half-time or the seventh-inning stretch. In other words, I stalled out.

Deidre says that the first half of a novel is much more difficult than the second half, and I know what she means about the first part, but I haven’t written many second halves.

The fact is—and I’m hardly alone in this—I’m at least as talented at not writing as I am at writing. Or, to quote a great line from a song by the Jayhawks, “I’m perfecting the finest art of wasting hours.”

Yet as I’ve watched Deidre work relentlessly on Parallel Seduction, the third book in her series, I’ve felt convicted in my procrastination.

She debuted Parallel Attraction in April, and Parallel Heat came out in October (also her deadline for delivery of the third manuscript), and did all this on top of her other responsibilities as a mommy, business owner, and so forth. The tight schedule, and the fact that she actually has a publishing contract, certainly explains a great deal of her dedication, but she wrote with the same sense of purpose five years ago, when she was just doing it for pleasure.

In that same period, I’ve begun three novels, each of which would be great if I’d just finish them. The first, There’s This Girl, is a thinly veiled chronicle of my own experiences in college. Much further removed from personal experience is Sol Invictus, in which an Indiana Jones–like figure battles the demonic incarnation of a Roman deity.

If that sounds farfetched, then consider the premise of The Sleep Diaries: a man in his early forties, with an extremely dynamic wife and two beautiful little girls, lives in a giant house and tries to write a novel even as he confronts his own demons. Imagine that! (Anybody who knows me will get the joke here. But seriously, all fiction is autobiography.)

The story is essentially written, or at least heavily outlined; now I just have to sharpen it, and that requires typing up the handwritten pages so that I can begin editing. One of the big discoveries for me in writing this book is the fact that, for my first draft at least, writing by hand in a bound journal works much better than typing my thoughts directly into a computer. There are several reasons for this.

At the most obvious level, writing by hand affords an organic, intimate connection with the text that’s difficult if not impossible to achieve with modern technology. There’s also the sense that when you compose by hand, you’re working within more or less the same physical parameters as Tolstoy or Proust—though it should be noted that the writing instruments available to them were far less user-friendly than my beloved (yet disposable) fine-point Pilot™ Precise V7 Rolling Ball® pen.

And because this novel is loosely built around the idea of a journal, it seemed all the more appropriate to compose it as though it were. It’s almost as though I’m acting out the role of the protagonist, which brings out some freaky thoughts about the relationship of author to narrator.

Finally, writing by hand has somehow made it easier to jump around: whenever one part wasn’t working, I would simply begin work on another part. Eventually, though, I realized I could go on scribbling indefinitely—my handwriting is unreadable to anyone, sometimes even me—and needed to switch to the computer to get it organized.

So maybe it really is just half-time. Or maybe I’m afraid to finish because I told myself at the outset that I didn’t care if I ever wrote another novel, so I would pack everything into this one. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had this erroneous belief that a novel is supposed to take years and years, and this one just flowed out of me in a few months. Or maybe I’m just lazy.

These are some things this writer thinks about—especially when he's not exactly writing.