turtle-speak

When I was a teenager I was enthusiastic about chess. I'd always been fascinated by the game, and felt frustrated at age 6 or 7 when my father refused to teach it to me.

"You should learn checkers first," he said.

I was initiated into the game at age 8, I think, by my classmate Bill. I'm not sure whether he knew the game properly himself, but he got me started.

In 1972, when I was 13, the world was on fire over the apocalyptic (so the press would have had us think) world-championship match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik. Incredible though it may seem, each game in the 24-game series was front-page news worldwide. Now my father taught me how to read chess notation, and we would examine the games together--some of my favorite memories.

Over the next few years I attended a few tournaments and collected several books on chess. One of these books contained a chapter discussing the introduction and use of the clock in chess tournaments. In case you don't know, a chess clock is a twin set of clocks that measure the amount of time each player has spent deliberating over moves. In tournament and club play they are required, and they are often used in casual games by serious players as well. Nowadays these clocks are digital, but in my day the clocks were regular dial-clocks, actuated by buttons protruding from the top of the case. You'd make a move, punch your button, and this would stop your clock while simultaneously restarting your opponent's.

The time limit, called the "time control", is established in advance, and can be whatever the event organizers decree (or casual players agree on). I remember the time control for the Fischer-Spassky match: each player had 2.5 hours for the first 40 moves of a game, then 1 hour for each 16 moves thereafter. This is a relatively long and open-ended time control. By contrast, "rapid transit" chess is played with just 5 minutes for each player to finish the whole game.

And what happens if you exceed your time limit? Simple: you lose. If you're about to deliver checkmate, and your flag drops, you lose.

As my book pointed out, the clock was a lifesaver for chess. Without clocks, chess games would be reduced to a "turtle-paced inanity".

That phrase stuck in my mind. Recently it rose to the surface again, but not regarding chess, which I haven't played for years, but in regard to--you guessed it--my opus in progress. Trying to nap after lunch, or lying awake in the dark of night, the words haunt me: "turtle-paced inanity".

True, this is hare-speak. The turtle's pace suits the turtle. For the Preacher in Ecclesiastes it's a matter of painful irony that the race is not always to the swift, but Aesop provided a reason for that apparent anomaly in his fable of the tortoise and the hare. Hares are cocky and goof off.

But maybe that's just turtle-speak. No doubt turtles (or tortoises) have copies of Aesop tucked in their shells: consoling words for when the hares are sopping up the glory.

Turtle-paced inanity. The phrase has a rhythm that invites chanting. I'd better resist that--if I can.

the long stages of completion

My effort at this long and difficult project has fallen naturally into stages. I refer not to stages of completion, but stages of kinds of effort, or stages of emotional attitude--something like that.

There was a years-long gestation period before I regarded this book as begun. During that time I was searching for the story I wanted to write. I didn't know where or when the story would be located, or who its characters would be. But I was excited by certain ideas, certain trains of thought, and I knew that I wanted to write about those things.

I regard the actual beginning or birth of the project as having happened in 2002 while I was temporarily a monk at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton. If I look through my papers I may be able to come up with the exact date. It was probably about April. I discovered what I felt was the beginning of my story: the historical scene of the cremation of the decapitated corpse of Pompey the Great on a deserted beach in Egypt.

How excited I was. I would spend Saturday mornings--our open day at the Abbey--in the library, writing notes for my story. In fact, I couldn't resist starting to write the story itself, even though I knew that it was vastly premature to do so. I just had to do it--I was that excited by it.

When I returned home from the Abbey that August, ahead of schedule due to a ruptured Achilles tendon, I spent my days sitting in my foot-cast in the living-room, writing in my notes-binder and poring through research-books. Having begun with a handwritten process at the Abbey, where I had no computer, I continued in the same vein, and did not think about starting to type my notes on the PC. In part it this was also due to the fact that going up and down stairs was a bit inconvenient.

I wrote hundreds of pages of longhand notes before I started typing notes directly onto the computer. Those sunny days in the living-room were mainly wonderful, my mind restlessly pushing forward, solving problem after problem: historical contradictions, story problems.

The fiery passion of the beginning gradually died back to something more like glowing charcoals. With my outline still not really complete I decided to start writing my story, I think in 2004, because I was afraid of delaying any further. Working with history--actual historical events, not merely the backdrop of a period--forces constraints on the story and presents and severe story problems. My aim is to hug as closely to historical accuracy as possible, to take zero liberties. The resulting story is the trail of the struggle between fact and imagination.

I'm still going. I've settled into my pace for the long haul. As with running, my pace is a plodding one. I look out the kitchen window at the path on the boulevard and see young runners running smartly along it at a clip that, to me, looks like a sprint. I sigh and think, "That's not me."

I'm still waiting for the stage to arrive when I've locked on my story--when I know exactly what it is, and what it means. I'm still not there, and this I find frustrating at such a late date. My background reading is not slowing up; it might even be increasing. I have a load of new books set to arrive as my researches continue to carry me in still more directions.

It's like a boundary commission. I'm walking through wilderness with the aim of outlining a new territory. Someone's got to cover every meter of the border of the territory, no matter how large it is and no matter what kind of wild uncharted country it passes through. The space must be marked out.

I'm still engaged with that. My country is still coming to birth.

the Muse and I

All right. If this blog is supposed to be about the process of writing this work, then what can I say about where I'm at right now?

I'm going through the process that has evolved, seemingly of itself, in the long course of working on this project. I'm in the midst of trying to work out the chapter that, for now, I'm numbering 32. (My chapter numbers--and the number of chapters--will change in the next draft; this is one of the few things I'm sure of.) The notes document now runs to 32 pages as well.

The first and best metaphor that springs to mind is that of digging. I ask myself questions and try to come up with answers. Whether the questions are really useful or germane--never mind the answers--is not clear. They are just what come to mind in my effort to discover where I'm going.

I have a rough idea of where I'm supposed to go--that's laid out in my outline, the blueprint I developed in the earlier, happier days of 2002-03. But sometimes that outline is vague (such a huge job), and often it's hard to engineer the events that will bring about the steps required in the outline. Then again, sometimes the outline itself needs to be changed: I come up with actual new ideas for how to turn my story. In a way, that's the most exciting part of this first-draft process, even as it creates anxiety that my whole story might shift out of its current form and turn into something else--something that will take yet more years of my life to write.

Ah, anxiety, my old friend. Many fears attend working on a project like this (all right, on this project--there are no others "like" this). The greatest fear is of not finishing it, which might happen for any of a number of reasons, the most pleasant of which would be my own death. Other reasons would be physical or mental incapacity of one kind or another, including the "incapacity" of losing inspiration.

And now it dawns on me that this is the real reason that epic writers of the past have invoked the Muse at the beginning of their works. Not for quality of inspiration, even though that is how they couch their terms: "Help me, O Muse, find adequate words..." But for quantity: "Help me, O Muse, find the creative stamina to reach the end of this work..." I can't speak for other epic writers, but that's what this one needs. And for this I really do pray. And I believe that the Muse so far is helping me. Through the umbilicus that attaches us she sends the inspiration that nourishes me through these long seasons of effort.

For this I thank her. Oh yes indeed. Thank you, O Muse. Please don't let me down. I will keep at it and offer the result, good bad or indifferent, to you. It is yours before it is anyone else's.

story peaks

Yesterday I reached a (minor) milestone in the progress of the book by finally hammering out the sequence of story-events that I've been working on. These story-events constitute a mini-climax within the work as a whole--what is known as an "act turning-point" in storytelling jargon.

By writing in "acts" you show that you understand storytelling; by reading or watching a story composed in acts the audience feels confident in the powers of the writer, and also that the work is one thing--a unified whole.

For, interestingly and perhaps counterintuitively, it is exactly the decomposition of a thing into relatively autonomous parts that makes it a whole--a distinct thing. The human body, for example, is not just a mass of cells, and still less a stew of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It is made up entirely of subunits which are relatively whole in their own right: organs. The heart, for example, is integral with the rest of the body but is also a distinct organ with its own clear functions and inner rules of operation. In the term coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine, it is a holon: a part that is also a whole.

In a complex hierarchical system, in order for a higher-level whole to operate smoothly, all (or anyway most) of its component subwholes have to be running smoothly: doing their jobs without taxing the higher-level holons above them. When this is not happening, for whatever reason, there is a failure of efficiency and of health (a word that comes from the same source as whole), and the organism is diseased. If your pancreas is not running smoothly, you have some form of diabetes. If your thyroid is not running properly, you have some kind of metabolic disorder.

In a story, the acts are the highest-level "organs" making up the story as a whole: the equivalent of its brain, heart, and liver. And like these vital organs, acts too are complex things made up of subwholes of their own. In a movie script the next-lower subwhole is called a sequence, and a similar level exists for prose writing--often roughly at the level of the chapter in a novel. The next-lower subwhole below the sequence is the scene. Each scene too is composed of distinct subunits, which Robert McKee calls beats. These, according to him, are the elementary units of a story: the individual intentional actions that cause a story to move forward.

So, having now plotted out my act-climax in some detail (and having resolved many story and character issues to do so), I feel like someone who has scaled a mountain-peak. But it's just one peak in a range--and not the highest one. That still lies ahead of me. And the difficulty I've had in scaling this one gives me pause about tackling the big one.

But I'm committed now.

up on blocks

Kimmie took yesterday off to ice gingerbread cookies. A welcome respite from the morning alarm, and a bit of a change of pace. The blog-post got squeezed out.

I continue to work on my story. By that I mean, work on the story itself--the succession of "what happens".

This is anxiety-inducing. Why? Because while I tinker, fiddle, and imagine with a bunch of conversational notes to myself, and shift around entries in a list of bullet-points, the book itself, the prose, sits idle, like a car up on blocks. In this case the whole drivetrain has been pulled, and the mechanics going over it seem to be taking their time.

Some part of me is no different from the old-time Hollywood mogul Jack Warner, reputed to have walked past the writers' offices on the studio lot to make sure he heard the clack of typewriters. Lacking any idea of how scripts are actually written, he was merely expressing his ignorance, powerlessness, and superstition. I know a lot more about creative writing than Jack Warner did, but even I recognize that a text that remains frozen at the same word-count week after week is making no visible display of progress.

Hence the anxiety. Nothing beats the feeling of sailing ahead with prose that you know is good, that you know is telling your story, and doing so in close to the best possible way. At least, I assume that nothing beats that feeling. Not having actually experienced it, I'm kind of guessing.

the writer tries (again) to encourage himself

I slept better last night, thank you. And woke to a morning of frost. I had agreed to drive Kimmie down to the SeaBus terminal so she could attend a work seminar over at Metrotown, so we joined the cars creeping down the frosty streets in the twilight of early dawn.

Yesterday I felt too restless and distracted to get down properly to work, so I spent most of the day procuring a Dell laptop for my aunt and trying to set it up. Got to keep a watchful eye on the writer's universal tendency to seek alternative activities. "I'll just take care of this..." Yeah, right.

One contributing factor of distractibility was my feeling of disgust and boredom with my project, at least with the stage I seem to be stuck at. I'm disgusted with the fact that I can be stuck for so long at one point; I'm in a leg-hold trap and have not had the courage to chew my leg off rather than just let myself starve here. The story situation I'm working with, its features and motivations, all seem bland and colorless to me. Who cares? I think. Who cares?

You need to find what excites you. When you find that, then you jump on it--or at least start steering toward it. When that no longer excites you, you need to move on. Something else will excite you now. For we're each of us repositories of all the emotions, all the passions, and each one of these will have things that trigger it. In terms of behavioral science, these things are called releasers. The energies within us are set and primed; they just need the release of a particular stimulus. It's up to us to find the stimulus.

Ah well. I must remember Thomas Mann's observation that the quality of the finished work is independent of the mood of the writer while creating it. He found that the quality of the material he wrote while dissatisfied and depressed was almost indistinguishable from what he wrote while enthusiastic and optimistic. The finished work bears only the faintest traces of the state of mind of the writer while it was being composed.

The moral: keep at it, regardless of mood. Just as a good parent puts the welfare of the child first, so a good artist puts the "welfare" of the project first. Don't starve it, don't hate it; above all, don't abandon it.

Somehow I've got to make my way through the next scene, no matter how boring and mechanical it seems to me.

cliff

I would like to report progress in my great work--I really would. But the very concept of progress has become hazy even to me, the one supposedly "progressing" with it.

I have arrived again at what feels like a characteristic spot for me: stuck on a cliff-face. Metaphorically, that is--although in my personal mythology, the guiding image is from a real event. When I was attempting my lifewriting project about seven years ago, one of my efforts was to write a number of vignettes of my earliest memories. These form an archipelago that has no sequential order in my mind; they remain self-contained yet interconnected, not unlike the Greek myths.

Here is the vignette that I labeled, simply, "Cliff":

Let's climb up here. Yeah. Okay. It's the cliff behind the Schmidts' house. It doesn't seem like a cliff because trees grow around it and up it and on top of it, but the dirt runs out and you have to go up the speckled rock. Greg Schmidt is first. he's twenty-four days older than I am. He's five. I'm next. Doug Schmidt is last. He's four.

Greg is fast, he finds places to grab and places to put his feet. I try some of his places and some of my own when his look too hard. At some point I stop. All the places look too hard here. I look down. Doug climbs slowly below, bristly blond head against a yellow sweater. I can't see the last place I put my foot. I look up again. There's a crack in the rock running up at an angle. The top of the cliff is rounded. Greg is just standing up to turn and look down.

A wave of fear passes through me. It is intense fear that I have never felt before.

"C'mon!" says Greg. "It's easy!"

There's a squeal of excitement in his voice. He makes a big come-up gesture with his arm, lifting one gum-boot from the rock with the energy of his movement.

I cling to the rock. I look up. I look down. The fear becomes strongest as I realize that I must either go up, go down, or fall. There is no other choice. There is no one who can help me. I must do something. I must do it by myself.

"C'mon!" says Greg. "Grab over there!"

I must choose.

"C'mon!"

But Greg is already turning to explore the trees at the top, losing interest in us.

I don't know the word panic, but I know I mustn't or I will fall. The top is closer, but I don't know how to get there. The bottom is farther but I'll have to get past Doug. I'd be chickening out. I could still fall.

I decide to go up. I reach for the crack where Greg went and cling to the rock as I make my way. I hate being forced to do this. I hate being stuck so I have no choice. I hate being terrified. But I have to. I put my feet in places and grab places with my hands. The slope gets less and I walk leaning forward over the curve at the top. I make it.

I look down and see Doug slowly climbing his way up. He doesn't seem scared. I feel some triumph but mainly relief and maybe anger that I had to be scared so badly to get up here. But I made it.

Want to know what it's like to be most of the way through writing The Mission? See above.

musings on a dark, rainy fall morning

Back to the task. Kimmie returns to work today. The mornings are dark a long time now after 5:30, when our alarm goes off. I hear the distant jingling of our front-door chimes buffeted in the predawn autumn wind.

My project, my story, is morphing out from under me. As I learn more, throw open more doors to the vaults of the deep past, my world enlarges and changes the journey of my heroes. Not fundamentally--I'm in far too deep to make a radical story-change now. But it's more like discovering things that were already here: connections, meanings, possibilities. I feel I have the opportunity to replace certain arbitrary elements, which I'm never very happy about, with elements that reflect the growing meaning of my story. In this way a controlling idea very gradually emerges, like a shipwreck being floated gingerly from the bottom of the ocean.

My reading about the cults of the Roman Empire--the exotic religions brought into it by its foreign traders and captives--is throwing tremendous new light on the way I see that world. I sometimes wonder (and worry) about the fact that I'm coming across this information so late in my journey, but in general I trust the timing of the arrival of information. This trust seems to be borne out time and again by the coincidental arrival of complementary information from different sources. I read about the Egyptian religion of Isis, which became widespread in the Roman world, in a book devoted to her cult, only to open a chapter of Toynbee's A Study of History to find him discussing Isis and Osiris (he conjectures that this brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-son duo represents a transformation of the more ancient cult of Ishtar and Tammuz in Sumer). These simultaneous linkages between widely different sources happen a lot for me, and tend to confirm the path I'm on, and the way I'm traveling it. It's like just-in-time delivery of manufacturing parts, except the parts here are ideas or pieces of knowledge.

If my "building blocks" are arriving just in time, that must mean I'm assembling things at the right pace--painfully slow though that seems to me. (I find it embarrassing to be asked about the progress of my work, since its progress is almost imperceptible, even to me. Pluto seems to orbit the Sun faster.)

Even in Chalmers Johnson's latest book, Nemesis, about the disintegration of the American republic, I have a very good short summary of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which also dovetails with my other research, even though I'm reading it to learn more about current events and not for my project. The parallels between Rome and the U.S. are striking, and give me a feeling of relevance in what I'm doing.

Supposedly Harry Truman said that the only news is the history you don't know. I'm sure that's true. History is made generally by the ignorant and purblind, those who believe they're acting in an original way but who are in fact merely duplicating the actions of others taken long before, most often with disastrous results. It's a truism to say that history repeats itself, and it never actually does, quite. But the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to see a pattern where the less intelligent see only chaos.

Mind you, that's also the hallmark of paranoia.

One of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I think it was Live and Let Die, had as an epigraph this little saying:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

According to Toynbee, since the beginning of civilization societies have evolved according to one overarching pattern: growth; stagnation into a "time of troubles"; the rise of a pacifying "universal state"; and a final rupture and disintegration due to the combined agitation of a disenfranchised "internal proletariat" and a hostile and opportunistic "external proletariat" of barbarians beyond the civilization's frontier. Although I have not yet finished reading his Study of History, Toynbee so far reckons that our own civilization (which he calls Western Christendom) entered its "time of troubles" in the 16th century with the bitter and fratricidal European Wars of Religion. Since the 20th century was even more disastrous and bloodthirsty, it seems safe to say we're not out of the time of troubles yet. Indeed, they have to get so bad, in Toynbee's view, that people are generally relieved to acquiesce in living under the aegis of a universal state, like Rome under the Empire.

We don't seem to be there yet, which means that things are set to get continually worse. The U.S. administrations since World War 2 have set their sights on becoming the next universal state. But their chances of success are, in my opinion, poor. I expect this century to be worse than the 20th century in terms of human suffering, and that much of it will be linked to catastrophic environmental change. If Toynbee's historical cycle is still functioning after we go through that wringer, it's anyone's guess who might be strong and coherent enough to provide a peaceful universal state for the survivors to recuperate in.

Whew, this morning's even darker than I thought.

patience

What does a writer who's writing about his writing write about when he's not writing?

Last week I saw, in a book my mother had bought about writing, a snippet from Lawrence Durrell, which I paraphrase as, "All blocks are at bottom a form of egotism".

For I do feel rather blocked. But at the same time I recall Robert McKee's sterling advice, that the cure for writer's block is research. According to him, writer's block is simply lack of knowledge of your subject.

I suppose that writer's block is actually a symptom, and not a disorder in its own right. It could therefore have different causes, as a fever can have different causes. Durrell's egotistical block sounds like a symptom of the writer who has donned the hat of the editor or critic, and sits perched at the desk, waiting for the creator to come up with something so he can edit/criticize it. The creator, like a gopher in a hole surrounded by vigilant dogs, knows better than to poke his nose out in that environment.

I do suffer from that type of block, but it has not been debilitating. It has not prevented me from creating--although I do think it has limited the quality of what I have written, and I have taken various steps in my life to try to improve the situation. I have tried to both throw the hounds off the scent, and also toughen up that little gopher so it can sock it to the hounds if it does find them on-site when it emerges. I've used things like writing drills, in which inhibition is smashed by forcing oneself to write nonstop for a short period, like 15 minutes. But I think this obstacle is also overcome somewhat by taking on projects that are so challenging in other respects, such as in size and complexity, that one's attention is forced to those aspects, leaving one's actual manner of expression, one's use of words, to fend for itself.

But in general I think McKee's assessment is more to the point, and more debilitating if left untreated. For the slavering hounds called Editor and Critic can be thrown off the scent by one trick or another, but if you don't know what you're talking about or what you're trying to say in the first place, you really are stuck. Then it's true that only research can save you. You have to refuel the empty tank of your head.

This is what I've been trying to do. Yes, I've been researching my world and my topic almost nonstop for five years. Yes, I read from at least one and usually two or even three relevant books on it each day, and type notes into Word files. But I need to get my hands on the right books, the right topic areas. And it takes me time to get through them. I'm steady rather than fast.

Then there's the task of synthesis. If I read more than one authority on a subject, and they disagree, which version do I go with? What do I think happened? This is decision-making in the face of uncertainty, which is inherently stressful and hard. Each decision defines the world of my story a little more, gives it its character and its meaning. For each decision is made by particular criteria, whether conscious or unconscious. If I have a choice, then I should choose that which furthers the aims of my story, which is largely still an intuitive choice.

The other danger with research, also cautioned against by McKee, is that of spending all one's time in research and never getting down to writing. This is the sign of the nervous student or amateur. In McKee's view writing should proceed as a series of steps of writing and research. You write as much as you can, until you get blocked from lack of knowledge, then you turn to research. As soon as you know enough to proceed, you do so. You learn what you need to know in the course of writing, so that by the time you finish your final draft, you know the world of your story completely--and not before that time, if you've been writing efficiently.

I've been embroiled in the world of the cults of the Roman Empire, and seeing ways to incorporate this material in my work. It's very relevant, since my work is a spiritual story at bottom. I'm still stuck at the same chapter, but I find myself making notes in other chapters for how to rewrite them in draft 2. I am learning enough to find that my current draft, draft 1, is already becoming obsolete.

And yet I must finish it. Because going back to start a new draft before you've finished the current one is suicide, I think. Don't rewrite something that isn't written yet.

Patience. That's what I really need. I think that's what I'm really trying to learn.

the seeds of today

I'm in one of my work slowdowns. I suppose I'm like one lost in the woods: the advice is to stop and figure out where you are and where you're going, rather than striking out in some direction, hoping it's the right one.

Action does feel better than inaction: it seems like you're achieving something, rather than just sitting there thinking (or worrying). And yet, in order to arrive anywhere, you need to know where you're going. It's better to get that sorted out and proceed calmly.

I continue to learn about the ancient world. The research books I'm currently reading are Isis in the Ancient World by R. E. Witt, and The Cults of the Roman Empire by Robert Turcan. Kimmie and I have also taken to watching the HBO series Rome, which is set right in my period. Very impressive. (A fun challenge: try to count all the producer credits at the head of each episode. I haven't counted, but I'm going to guess it's about 14.) Each book (or show) takes me on a tour through another piece of the ancient world, and enlarges my "experience" of it. I feel that my task is to get beyond the facts to the feel of that world--the underlying feelings and motives of its people.

I've read that good writing makes the strange seem familiar, and the familiar seem strange (I thought this was Samuel Johnson, but I can't find the source). Well, writing historical fiction presents special problems of strangeness and familiarity. The strangeness is obvious, so the challenge, I think, is to find the familiarity. Other forms of--what shall I call it?--"displaced fiction", such as fantasy and science fiction, present their own challenges with regard to strangeness and familiarity.

In the case of fantasy, it's a purely invented world, which maybe poses special problems in making it seem familiar enough. (My guess is that fantasy characterizations might therefore tend to be somewhat restricted--when the world is too strange, the characters need to be somewhat standard-issue.) With science fiction, it's a matter (often) of extrapolation from the current world: perceiving the seeds of a possible future in our present, and growing these into a jungle of consequences.

Historical fiction presents a different case again. The idea is essentially to present a world that factually was, and thus give the story the authority of factuality. It's "factual", but nonetheless makes imaginative demands of the reader, just as fantasy and science fiction do. Like science fiction, it is linked causally to the present, but instead of growing the seeds of present facts into big consequences, it shows the present as the jungle of consequences which has grown from the seeds of the past. In some sense it answers the question, "how did we get here?"

It's a tall order. Can I answer it even for my own life? How did I get here?

Of course, it might not matter. If you're lost in the woods, then how you got there is less important than how you'll get out. And yet I think it's important to know the history of a situation--including one's own. Knowing the history tells you what causal factors have been at work, and may still be at work. As with the science of ballistics, to know where you've come from is to know where you're going. Or at least, where you will be going unless you make deliberate changes.

So I float over the foggy landscape of the deep past, searching for the seeds of today. I like to think that I'm not actually lost in the woods, I've simply stopped to gather seeds.

write-o-phobia

Write-o-phobia. There's probably a proper Greek name for the disorder, but this makes it nice and clear: fear of writing.

How does it happen? How do I get derailed from the march of progress, and then find that I can't get back at it? I'm not sure. You get out of the flow of writing each day, and then it seems awkward, even presumptuous, to try to get back into it. It's sort of like trying to reboard a moving train or a revolving merry-go-round: you stand poised, wanting to get on, letting the opportunities zip by, but worried about goofing up and getting flung away. You want to find the right rhythm and just hop aboard.

So I remain in the swamp of chapter 30, going through my research material, collating ever more of it, and asking questions. I've been here for over a month, and start to worry whether I'll ever get out. Aren't I just being too fussy? Just sit down and write, damn it!

Ah, but that's not my way. The pump has to be primed. There's no use in writing anything until you know what you're talking about. When a writer fully does his or her homework, the writing is rich and informative. We've all read material that's mainly fluff and flab, composed of wordy generalities and familiar images. I can't stand that, and I don't want to be the author of it.

I have found that there is no substitute for simply going through my research material, looking for promising facts. These facts--events of the time of my story, or cultural practices--can trigger ideas. They can feel potentially relevant. If so, I toy with them: I try to relate them to my story. How can this fact affect my story? It's sort of like trying jigsaw-puzzle pieces. "I think that's a piece of sky..."

But it's not so well defined as a jigsaw puzzle. There's no way of knowing whether I'm moving in a fruitful or relevant direction, except by the gut feeling I have. When will the "story" feeling click in? When will I get that feeling of excitement, of wind filling my sails? My Notes document now runs to 45 pages--how much is enough?

I'm the creator. I'm supposed to be the God of this project. How did it become the boss of me?

the gestating virgin

Yesterday I finally had time to take up cudgels again for writing my book. It was one of my least-favorite kinds of writing sessions: one in which I struggle to recollect the threads of what I'm working on. Eventually I realized that, after my break of several days, I just could not remember what my thoughts and intentions were with respect to my current chapter (30). Nothing for it but to go back and read the (highlighted portions of) my Word notes.

The notes document for chapter 30 now runs to 35 pages. When chapter notes get long like this, I become anxious. Admittedly, the first 13 pages of notes are mostly extracts from research texts. That still means over 20 pages of actual cogitation-and-creation notes.

Mind you, the overall quality of these notes is high (take my word for it). In my effort to understand what drives my characters, I must dig. And dig, and dig.

"Oh, pshaw!" you might say. "A character's motivation is just whatever you make it. Decide on one, and go! Don't talk in that quaint way about 'discovering' the motives of a character, as though he were a real person. You've said yourself that characters aren't real people."

Yes, true. I've been skeptical of this kind of talk from writers, which is finally a form of pathetic fallacy, I think. I remember reading a nonfiction work by the novelist John Fowles, in which he described working on The French Lieutenant's Woman. He said that when he was writing a scene for his character Charles, he had the strong feeling that Charles wanted to diverge from his path and go down to knock on the cottage door of the heroine. Fowles declared that it was a real, definite feeling of intent coming from the character--that was how he experienced it.

Yeah, right, I thought.

I was already a writer myself by then, and not had any such experience--at least, nothing so definite. Of course, I never had a very clear idea of what the hell I was doing in any case. But my suspicions about this Frankensteinian moment of the composite character suddenly rising from the laboratory bench are backed up by Robert McKee in his Story:

Research from memory, imagination, and fact is often followed by a phenomenon that authors love to describe in mystical terms: Characters suddenly spring to life and of their own free will make choices and take actions that create Turning Points that twist, build, and turn again until the writer can hardly type fast enough to keep up with the outpourings.

This "virgin birth" is a charming self-deception writers love to indulge in, but the sudden impression that the story is writing itself simply marks the moment when a writer's knowledge of the subject has reached the saturation point. The writer becomes the god of his little universe and is amazed by what seems to be spontaneous creation, but is in fact the reward for hard work.

To discover what drives a character, you need to know his world, for that is what he is responding to. It's an ecological task: to understand how the animal functions within its environment, for the two go together. The cheetah is an animal of the African savanna; it can't function in the Arctic or in the Arabian desert. It is what it is, and behaves as it behaves, because of the environment in which it exists.

Finding this level of authority for a remote historical period is, of course, difficult. But I find, as I keep at it, that insights do come. Gradually, gradually, my main characters start emerging from the fog of potentiality into the clear outline of specificness. As I learn--or decide--something definite about my world, my characters acquire something toward which they can have an attitude, and thus define themselves.

In fairness to myself, I've made a lot of progress in the last month in understanding more about my world. While the historian and the archaeologist have to refrain from making positive statements beyond what the evidence permits, and so leave their picture of the world frustratingly vague, the storyteller must commit. Nothing can be a maybe; the finished picture will be the result of countless definite choices.

My finished world will be in high-definition, and so will my characters. And look how long it took us to get high-definition TV.

my people

Forward progress on The Mission has slowed lately. On the one hand I have copywriting to do--and therewith the earning of (some of) my keep. On the other I have problems with my story, and with the world of my story, that I'm still working out. These things combined have brought the course of my stream, which has never been a torrent, to the stillness of a lake. Now I'm just poling the raft along, searching for the outlet so I can resume my journey to the sea.

Last night on CBC's Sunday Night was a segment on monasticism among young women in Canada and around the world. I watched with much interest, since I was myself, briefly, an ordained Buddhist monk at Gampo Abbey on Cape Breton. The segment specifically focused on the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary in Michigan, whose convent was founded 10 years ago. According to the report, the average age of a Canadian nun is 74, but this convent is filled with young women who have turned to a life of poverty and chastity in order to commune with God.

Kimmie and I were both impressed with the convent and with the girls. As I recall, the convent houses about 90 nuns, of which nine are from Canada. All the ones that appeared on the show were young, and it was clear that the convent was not a dumping-ground for unmarriageable Catholic daughters, but a destination of choice for thinking and spiritually aware girls who had many other options open to them.

I found myself identifying with these girls as they talked about wanting to do something meaningful with their lives, and enter into the question of why they were born and why they are here. Some of them had given up athletic and political ambitions, and all of course are giving up aspirations of having a family of their own--as well as personal possessions.

I recognized the "feel" and the attitude among the nuns, for I venture to say that the monastic experience is probably not too different between the different spiritual traditions. When the girls get up to pray to God, it's not so different from the morning gathering of the Buddhist monks and nuns to chant and meditate before breakfast. Each person there has made a definite, conscious decision to orient his or her life around a spiritual discipline, and has implemented that decision fully. It's an extraordinarily powerful basis for a community. While Buddhists don't refer to their ultimate reality as God, they share with the Catholics an intent to live in accord with ultimate reality, and their discipline and their behavior are probably not very different. They lead spare, unadorned, mutually supporting lives.

The girls interviewed were in no way sanctimonious or zealous. Their speech had a soft, heartfelt, and candid quality that I recognized from my own monastic experience. These are not people who "can't cut it" in secular life, but rather people who have perceived the emptiness and unfulfillingness of many worldly goals, and who have decided to do something about it. The Buddhist monastics I knew included bond traders, zoo-keepers, scientists, athletes, and nurses.

While I don't think that monastic life is for everyone, I had a strong feeling while watching the segment that the world needs people who have had monastic discipline--as many of them as it can get. We need selfless people who take a long, deep view of things and speak from the heart. We need spiritual people as much now as we ever have, and maybe more.

Yes, as I watched these young novices and nuns I had the feeling that I was again among "my people".

why writing is hard

To my own surprise (since I didn't see it coming), yesterday was a good writing day. After rising rather late (6:00) and tired, I keyed notes from A Study of History, vol.1, wrote what I thought was a pretty meaty blog post, and moved on to a rare day of insights and ideas into my chapter and my story generally. My typing could barely keep up with my thoughts--and I type fast.

What happens is that after a lot of research into a topic, a mist clears and I am able to see the wide picture. In writing terms, I'm able to sum things up to my own satisfaction. It is the intellectual equivalent of reaching a mountain peak--or at least a mountain pass--and the exhilaration, as well as the fatigue, is comparable.

It's strange, because the result of much research, much travel through jungles of complexity, is to arrive at simplicity. I think of the old slogan: you don't really know something until you can teach it. Teaching requires that knowledge be explicit and active: you know and understand the concepts clearly, and can bring them to mind at will.

For most of us, relatively little knowledge exists in this form. Recently when I was explaining some political thing to Kimmie (she'd asked--don't worry!), I mentioned the word republic, and Kimmie asked what exactly a republic is. I fumbled.

"Well, it's a country that has a constitution...it's, uh, usually democratic...."

I didn't know exactly what a republic was. (Do you?) I'd read Plato's Republic, and have read a couple of texts on political science in the past year. I know that I've read what a republic is, but I couldn't bring it to mind on demand when asked. My knowledge was not explicit and not active.

If writing is any one thing, it is just this: making things explicit. This doesn't mean that writing is all superficial and on-the-nose (although too much of it is). It means that all writing involves turning implicit, inchoate, and undifferentiated ideas and experiences and feelings into precise concepts, and arranging these in a meaningful order. This, in my opinion, is what constitutes the labor of writing--why it is hard work. It's not hard like coal-mining, but it's hard in the sense of requiring a continuous, demanding effort of attention--like learning your lines in a play, or studying for an exam. It doesn't happen automatically; you can't coast. If you're laying bricks--or mining coal--you can get into a rhythm and your mind can go elsewhere for a time while the work is still being done. Not so with writing. If your mind is not there, no writing is occurring. Every inattentive moment is downtime.

The difficulty that even experts have in explaining what they do or what they know shows how difficult it is to make knowledge explicit and active. You can probably be the world's best brain surgeon without being able to explain exactly what it is you do.

Yesterday I felt that I reached a milestone in my understanding of what I'm writing about--my knowledge became explicit and active. I also found more exact views and tasks for three of my characters, a rich haul for any dramatic writer. I moved a step closer to being able to teach the world of my story to an audience.


republic 1 a : (1) a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usu. a president b : (1) a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law

long train runnin'

The sun has gone, replaced by overcast and a cool wind stirring the greenery out the office window. I hear Kimmie's chimes jingling from the back deck. It reminds me of certain days of late summer and fall, traveling in Europe as a young man.

The writing train left the station again yesterday. I started drafting chapter 29. The train image seems apt: for it is a heavy thing, rolling slowly forward on a planned track, stopping at definite stations for varying lengths of time. At each station preparations have to be made before the train can roll out again to the next station. Sometimes--maybe all the time--the train runs late. But somewhere up ahead, there is an end of the line: the trip will be over.

Chapter 29 is starting to sound like a lot, even to me. Soon (that is, "soon"--a relative term), I will be in the 30s, and definitely in the later part of my journey. Not unlike my own life.

I'm trusting that the result will be worth the effort. I think back to when Warren and I used to get together monthly or so for beers. I remember one night talking about a book project that I was excited about (not this one). I'm still rather excited about it, or the evolving version of it in my head. It's set not in the past, but in the future. But, after talking about it for awhile, I voiced a concern that nagged at me: "But will it have social value?"

I asked Warren whether he understood what I meant, and he said yes he did. "Social value" is the term I reached for to suggest a distinction between created works, similar to the distinction between empty calories and nourishing food. I like things that are engaging, exciting, funny, and entertaining--but I don't really want to spend my life creating works that are merely those things. There must be substance as well: nourishment. Because life is short and time is precious, it's important to do what matters, so that if I have the luxury of a deathbed to lie on, I can reflect calmly that I have put my effort into the right things--or anyway, have tried my best to do so.

So this train-trip is well along. How I'll feel about it at the end, who knows. But I can say this already: it's been a hell of a trip.

the task: concentration

After the relief of finishing chapter 28, back to square 1 with chapter 29. By "square 1" I mean the gathering-together of materials and thoughts, working toward creating the critical mass that will trigger the writing of the actual chapter.

In a simple-minded, clerical way I go through some of the reference works for which I've created Word documents, and copy and paste sections into my Notes document for the current chapter. As I have thoughts or ideas based on what I read, I type these in the free section at the bottom of the document, where I begin each day by typing the current date before pushing ahead with my notes. Then I go through the previous day's notes and highlight any "keeper" ideas.

At the beginning of this process I feel a certain helplessness, baffled at the task of finding stuff for my characters to do. There is anxiety involved: no guarantees that I'll find anything, or that it will be interesting. What will it be like for the eventual reader, who gets to flow through the story uninterruptedly, rather than the author's laborious trek through a wilderness, where I can barely remember what happened three chapters ago, written sometime in my ever-receding past?

In a certain sense, all work is concentration. By that I mean not mental concentration, but the more physical act of sorting things and bringing together the most valuable--concentrating them. Just like Kimmie preparing her lunch this morning up in the kitchen: while I poured our second cup of coffee, she stood at the counter, patiently cutting the less-desirable parts of lettuce leaves away, and dropping the still-fresh parts into the plastic box that would hold her eventual salad. She took some aging lettuce leaves and, by applying work, created a nice salad for herself.

Where is this thought-train taking me. I think about placer mining: panning for gold. That is the classic effort of physical concentration. The gold is out there, but its value cannot be realized unless it is concentrated into once place. So the miner patiently washes sand, finding the glinting flecks mixed in with the endless silica.

Also: the more valuable a commodity, the rarer it is, meaning the more dross or sand you have to go through to find the nuggets. It's possible that the great effort I'm going through of sifting through all this research material is a sign that the "nuggets" I seek have extra-special value.

Lately Kimmie and I have been watching the 1984 British miniseries The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. Excellent. The adaptation was done by Ken Taylor, and he did a fantastic job with a more than usually difficult task, because Scott's tetralogy, inspired, I'm sure, by Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, is written in a nonlinear way that makes it hard to perceive the exact sequence of events. Taylor had to find that sequence, and then dramatize it. On the plus side, the underlying story and characters were wonderfully drawn in the original work, making the task very worthwhile.

As I watch the show, the scenes, the speech and actions of the characters, flow with a naturalness and logic that I don't naturally question as a viewer; I simply enjoy them. But as a writer I ask myself how and why the choices were made, first by Paul Scott, and then by Ken Taylor, to realize the drama before me. Why this scene? Why these characters? Scott will have wrestled with these questions, and the very quality of the final product tells me that it was hard going. Now I get to enjoy the company of these finely drawn characters, taking them for granted as I take for granted real people as naturally complex individuals, because that's what people are. But the "people" created by an artist are not naturally complex--they have to be made that way through art, by someone who knows what he's doing. And even if he knows what he's doing, it's hard.

As I think of it, the Raj Quartet is a modern epic: it features multiple heroes or protagonists embroiled in a large political problem: the struggle of India to shrug off the yoke of British rule.

Hmm. Maybe it's time to poke my nose into the Raj Quartet again. Time to read some more fiction?

finishing gracelessly

Well, yesterday I finished drafting chapter 28 in a final push, while power-washers ran their gasoline compressor right outside my office window and while a fire inspector troubled me to get him into our common garage to check for fire extinguishers and exit signs (and borrow my stepladder). I wore earplugs and pushed on between the interruptions.

In a way, interruptions are helpful. Why? Because they lower my expectations of myself--not unlike when I'm sick. When circumstances are unfavorable for writing, anything I get done is gravy. The pressure (self-imposed) is off, and I can just write freely--well, sort of. There is a feeling of assertiveness and pride in working through the distractions, a feeling of achievement--"they're trying to stop me; well, I won't let them."

In that frame of mind I wrote the final 5 pages, finishing on page 38. Two or three chapters ago, when I sent a newly drafted chapter to Warren in Chicago, he commented that it terminated rather abruptly. Yes, no doubt it did; and no doubt chapter 28 does as well. It's like those Olympic long-distance races, like the marathon. A runner, having given it his all, moves across the finish line and then just collapses. He doesn't walk off the run, as you're supposed to, cooling down and letting the body adjust to having the load removed from it. No, there's nothing left. The body's "cooling down" energy was spent somewhere back there on the track. The race ends not in a graceful walk, but in a graceless, exhausted collapse.

As I'm typing the last paragraphs, the last sentences, I think, "Can I get out of here yet?" No, still need to say x and y... But at some point I think, "Yes, I can get out of here, there's nothing that must be said any further." Then it's a matter of hitting CTRL+S to save it and opening up my spreadsheet to log it as done.

I am outta here!

write fast

Yesterday the great train of this mighty work lurched ahead again. Fearfully I opened up chapter 28 for the nth time and scrolled to the bottom, the end of the trail, the point in the story, the scene, where I'd left off. It was a long exchange of dialogue that has much import for my character. I couldn't figure out how to bring it to a close, what the real finishing point might be. So I executed a decision I had already made in the past couple of days: cut it off. Just end the exchange, the scene, and get out of there any which way you can and on to the next thing. Don't let this millstone drag you to the bottom!

It worked. I simply terminated the exchange and moved on to the next thing, and got four pages written that way. I'm still not at the end of the chapter, but I can sense it coming--the end is near! Sure, there are plenty more chapters still to come, like the ancient Greek tribe called the Myrmidons, or "Ant-men", who sprang out of the earth in numbers and kept coming--an enemy's worst nightmare.

I tried also to carry forward with another decision I'd made in the past few weeks: Write fast. It sounds like a joke for this ponderous glacier of a project, a thing so massive it causes the crust of the underlying Earth to sink into the mantle below. But wherever possible, if I know more or less what I'm trying to write, I want to just spit it out. Just say it. Grab words that spring to mind and use them; trust. I'm well able to do this; the biggest obstacle is the nagging feeling that it's somehow "cheating".

But it's not cheating--it's writing! The whole aim of mastering anything is to turn labor into ease. The training is laborious and effortful; the performance itself, if one is thoroughly trained, is a piece of cake. All mastery is essentially automation. When learning to do anything, the basic skills at first are laborious and deliberate. In time they become automatic, and the next-higher order of skills become the focus of the labor. On guitar one starts by learning how to make strings sound without accidentally muting them or making them buzz on frets, and learning how to finger chords. Thirty years later, for things I know how to play, I can spare attention for nuances of phrasing and such; the lower levels of skill have been automated.

Writing is not different. I get the feeling that laborious writing is the mark of one who still feels like a student. Yes, masters still train, still practice. A writer should keep reading critically, should keep looking up words and writing down the definition, should try out techniques in journals and so on. But at performance time the master should be able to switch on and draw on that training to let it flow.

It's a nice idea, anyway. Full steam ahead!

write when ready

Yesterday the train lurched slowly from the station one more time: I started writing chapter 28.

There comes a point where I feel ready, or anyway, ready enough. It happens when I develop enough knowledge of what the chapter is to contain, what it's about, and when I feel a certain excitement or enthusiasm about it. This, at its own small scale, I understand to be the "intoxication" that Nietzsche said must precede the creation of any work of art. The word enthusiasm itself, which I just used, from the Greek enthous, "possessed, inspired", originally meant to be possessed or inspired by a god. No doubt this is also the same as what the poet seeks in turning to his muse, as John Milton did right in the text itself of Paradise Lost.

Many times in the past, impatient to get going, I have launched into writing before the material was ready. It never works out. I start out with the thought, "I'll fix it up in the next draft", but this is hopeless. What happens is that I wind up struggling with the wrong problems at the wrong stage of the process, and therefore in the wrong way and with the wrong results. I don't know enough to be able to write well, and so struggle with the material, feeling blocked. Indeed, as I've said before, I think "writer's block" is just simply insufficient knowledge of one's subject. It's not that the writing is blocked, it's that there's nothing to write.

So I'm learning to be patient. I get worried and depressed when I'm not turning out prose for my work, yet experience has taught me that there's no use writing scenes whose purpose and content I don't yet understand, at least provisionally. I take that worry and direct it at my research--"research" including the thinking-through of the world of my story, including its fictional, made-up aspects. To do this I must make decision after decision, which is hard. But once a decision is made, I feel a sense of solidification and definiteness, as though I had just added more concrete to the foundation of my story.

That definiteness, specificness, seems to be the essence of good writing. The whole process of a work of writing, including "creative" writing, seems to be one of taking a vague but inspiring feeling and gradually shaping it into a definite, intricate, detailed form. A weak piece of writing shows signs of lingering vagueness. The writer contents himself with "he put on a hat", instead of visualizing the scene definitely enough, and knowing his character well enough, to write "he put on his tweed motoring cap". Notice the difference?

The vagueness of course can run right through a project, all the way up to its thematic level--its heart. These will be the weakest works of all--those in which the writer is unsure of what he or she is trying to say at all. When you're not sure of what you're trying to say, you don't know what belongs in your story or what belongs out.

You can't start out sure of what you're trying to say. You might think you know, but if you don't discover anything new in the writing, you are merely a lecturer. This is why nothing can be any good after only one draft. I think only the most rudimentary and uncreative stories can be written that way.

No doubt there are lots of exceptions to these rules. It may well be that a great work can be written without the writer knowing consciously exactly what it means, what its deepest message is--it will be unconscious knowledge. But I believe that the ideal process for writing a creative work is one in which you work your way through a first draft as best you can, then read it over and discover what you're really writing about, that is, become conscious of it, and then go on to write the subsequent drafts in that conscious knowledge. Now you can throw out scenes that don't belong, and do this with a sure hand. And you can beef up scenes that are not strong enough, because you know why they're necessary.

Yes, I'm trying to convince myself that it's okay to tinker so much with my material before writing each chapter. But it is okay, dammit. It is.

draft 1 inches forward

This morning I pushed through and finished drafting chapter 25. I sent a copy of it by e-mail to Warren in Chicago as proof that the cosmic heart-paddles have indeed reanimated this creative corpse.

Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have said, "The first draft of anything is shit." As far as I can tell, he seems to be right. That's not to say that the first draft of everything is equally bad; far from it. I think that the first draft, like any other stage, reflects the amount of work that's gone into it. But it also reflects the amount of work left to be done, and, depending on how much of that there is, this is the measure of its "badness".

I think what's disappointing about the first draft is what I might call the quality per hours invested. Draft 1 is disheartening because it represents the largest quantum of effort in any project, and therefore causes one's hopes to soar. The result, I find, is, at least after the first exhilaration of finishing, always disappointing. One hopes that after all that work something more polished, more sensible, more readable, would have emerged. Nope.

For draft 1, the best strategy--if you can do it--is to switch off the quality indicator of your mental dashboard altogether and pay attention only to the quantity indicator. Even this is relatively disappointing compared to the much faster progress--page throughput--one can achieve in the second and subsequent drafts, but there is the miracle of creation: the fact that you started with nothing, and now have something. Even if we can't follow God and say that it's good, at least we can say that now it is.

I've decided to start printing hard copies of each first-draft chapter again. I left off doing this back around chapter 13, when I stopped reading them out loud to Kimmie when I'd done them. Now, partly out of concern after reading The Revenge of Gaia and James Lovelock's warning of how all our electronic documents will vanish with the collapse of industrial civilization (which he foresees this century if we do not act swiftly and vigorously to ameliorate climate change), I want to have a hard copy. Toward this end I bought a couple of plastic hanging-file boxes at Wal-Mart last week, and am setting them up to receive all my extant chapters.

Today Kimmie and I are planning to be virtuous and power-walk (in the cold rain). That means I need to get into my research reading early, and that means I need to get going. Which books, you ask? These days it's been An Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament by Oesterley and Robinson; Principles of Psychology vol. 1 by William James; A History of Greece to 322 BC by N.G.L. Hammond; then, if I've got time and energy, The Earth System by Kump, Kasting, and Crane.

Off I go.