E. P. Beaumont

A quiet day, which is my usual observance of this holiday. We had dinner with my mentor, a simple meal of baked fish and potatoes and salad, with cherry pie for dessert. No over-eating, no football, and no shopping. We stood on the front balcony in the golden light and admired the unseasonably warm weather as the robin’s-egg-blue sky turned pink at the horizon and the empty street filled with blue shadow.

Sitting quiet with friends always brings up this deep sense of gratitude, where I count the blessings, and rapidly lose count: good health, so far; a job that isn’t sucking my soul; a marvelous, almost miraculous confluence of all the directions my reading and study has taken over the last thirty years. I was on the voyage out for decades, and now the ship is coming home, laden with treasure. I can feel the force of that in the confidence I feel now with writing.

A big piece of that confidence is the willingness to let the work breathe: not to push at full force all the time, but to work slowly and steadily. My goal this year was to turn into a real writer and a real editor, and so I have. The key to real longevity as a writer is to keep at it and to write as often and as steadily as one can manage. National Novel Writing Month is a wonderful, arbitrary challenge, and I enjoy the camaraderie of my fellow sportswomen and -men, but that’s the key: it’s a sport. It has arbitrary rules, and it is training for a certain variety of real life.

What it’s taught me: a manic joy in just banging out the prose, and not worrying about it. The writing mind (the hand in motion) often comes up with things darker and more enchanted than anything we could conjure by thinking about it.

Everything is a prompt. I might sketch some architecture for my plot, but the story will write itself, within or without, with or against that structure. I might amass huge amounts of preliminary material, but I still don’t think of myself as a planner. It’s only a matter of focusing the obsession. This year, it’s becoming clear that the scale of the novel is quite a bit larger than 30 days or however-many words. I don’t think I can pull off the sort of marathon that will finish it, so I have changed the deadline to 15 December rather than 30 November.

The ultimate secret: to take things as they come.

I woke up late today, after writing too late last night, and then had my entire day eaten in double-checking a story that proved to be a lie. Which struck me funny, in an odd sidelong way, because I’d been up late the night before lying my head off.

All novelists are liars. Of course. So how is a novel different from a garden-variety prevarication?

It’s truthful. “Once upon a time” is a mask; once under its shelter, we can speak the truth that we can’t in full sunlight. In the fictional town of N–, beloved of Russian novelists, we can tell the dirty secrets of our own home town.

It’s consistent. Nine times out of ten, I catch a lie by means of internal contradiction, which is to say, a failure of craft on the part of the liar.

It has its own agenda. Liars lie to get something, or get back at someone. Their lies are weapons seized randomly, in the dark, and slashed about to catch hapless shins or skulls. A novelist might have a list of targets–all of us do (ask me about “Anne-Marie Writes a Memo,” dedicated to one of my least favorite ex-workmates, may she fry in hell)–but a novel has its own shape, and the good novelist is ready to drop one assassination target off the list to substitute another.

(Yes, and I have a love of violent metaphors. That comes of dealing with lying liars who lie.)

… shifts location, depending upon whom you ask.

Once upon a time, Your Humble Author had a day job that ate her life, to the point where garlic and crosses availed naught, and the beast would not back down when she said, “You are a day job.”

In spite of the time invested (shoveled into, sucked down by) the day job, it did not reward her efforts: she suspected and then knew that she was being underpaid (by $20,000 a year at least) compared to the Virtual Mistress and the Hangers-On (see “court of Louis XIV” or “anybody else’s day job”), her work was published under someone else’s name… you get the picture.

She left.

Smartest thing she ever did. She had money in the bank, so she took a Self-Funded Sabbatical Year, during which she wrote nearly 400,000 words. That’s the five or six unpublished and/or unpublishable novels that are every writer’s dues to the craft.

Now she’s working another day job, but came in this time with an already established identity as a Working Writer. This makes a big difference, because as we all know (thank you, Ernie Hemingway), The Real Writer is the One Who Really Writes. There are commitments, there are deadlines, obligations at the Real Job to facilitate escape from the Day Job.

Nonetheless, there is repetitive stress and sleep deprivation.

There comes a time when enough is enough, even for the Craft. NaNoWriMo is teaching me that the line is very fuzzy, and that I need to keep an ear cocked for the insidious voice that says, “Yeah, whatever, 5000 words written today. You might be able to call yourself a writer if you did at least that much that every day.”

I do make a point of writing every day. That’s made the difference between 51,000 words in 30 days in 2008 (during which I actually drafted fiction on 17 of those 30 days) and 51,000 words as of day 18 in 2011. (Well, that, and doing the bulk of the character development and plot sketching in October. )

But when some evil little voice claims that enough is not enough, then I look for that chalk line on the floor, and check where my feet are planted.