I don’t have one, is what I now think.

I write on computer. I write in longhand. I write in the morning. I
write in the afternoon. I write every day. I miss a week. I plot and
plan. I stumble about in the dark. I follow advice. I ignore advice. I
write in “flow.” I quit for lunch. I concentrate. I procrastinate. I
follow rituals. I flaunt them. I go into my writing grotto and hide out.
Or I venture forth into anonymous writing spaces — coffee shops,
libraries, trains, the beach.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It really makes you start
believing in this muse stuff.

She’s been visiting lately, thank God, though you never know when she’ll
take a powder. I am 71 pages into (working title) “To Walk Humbly,” the
sequel to my novel To Love Mercy, and I’m cooking.

I was feeling decidedly diffident (look it up) about this novel at
first. I’d never written a sequel so I felt compelled to put tons of
background into the first chapter. But when I read that stuff, it
sucked. It’s still sitting there, but it’s targeted for death.

Then I wrote a chapter that brought the tears to my eyes. Now I’ve
written a second such chapter and I’m feeling pretty plickin’ good about
the project. When you stare at a blank screen for two hours, you feel
like taking the gas pipe. But when you write something you feel good
about, the elation is indescribable.

I figured it would take me six months or so to write this novel but here
it is closing in on six months and I’ve only written 71 pages. Is this
good or bad? Discuss:

• It’s bad and you’re a procrastinating slacker. OK, I plead guilty.
When you don’t know what you’re going to write, procrastination is the
easiest thing in the world to do. I can sharpen pencils down to the
erasers and never get bored. But when La Musa comes to call, things
change. I find myself eager to write. I want to tell the story. I want
to find out what happens next.

• It’s bad but excusable. I didn’t write a word the first three months.
Unlike To Love Mercy, where I just tapped into my early childhood, this
novel is set in my adolescence and I don’t have the bone-in memory for
this period that I had for childhood. I spent the first three months
doing research to ground myself. I went to the Library of Congress and
read tons of microfilm of the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and Defender.
Now that I’m writing, I view most of that research as a waste of time,
in that I’m not likely to “use” much of it; but at the time I was doing
it, I felt it was absolutely necessary. So I guess it was.

• It’s bad, but hey. Most days that’s where I am right now. I am
realizing that, in a sense, story tells itself. At the start, anything
and everything is possible. But the more you write, the clearer and more
alive the characters become, and the more inexorable the story becomes.
As this happens, you write faster. So maybe it’s OK that it took 2 1/2
months to squeeze out these first 71 pages; maybe the rest will “write
itself” in just a few months more. (I can dream, can’t I?)

It took approximately three years to write the draft of To Love Mercy.
That’s always embarrassed me. True, I was working a day job, but still.
Some people — lots of people — write 50,000 words in a month and have
day jobs. There’s this wonderful contest called NaNoWriMo, short for
National Novel Writing Month, that takes place every November. It costs
nothing to enter and you don’t win any prizes except a 50,000-word novel
draft on Nov. 30. Thousands of people participate and hundreds finish. I
signed up last year for the first time but didn’t participate. Maria
Thompson, my nephew’s wife, entered and knocked out 50,000+ words of a
romance novel and held down a day job and raised a teen-ager. Visit
www.nanowrimo.com.

I wrote To Love Mercy figuratively (and literally, see below) in the
dark. I had the belief that plotting amounts to painting by number, and
doing so would rob me of my spontaneity. I now believe this was a
misconception that was the direct reason TLM took three years, not six
months, to write. This time I’m doing it differently. While not in the
strict sense plotting, I have a yellow pad full of plot and story points
written in longhand. This narrative bounces from topic to topic and is
fragmentary, but every time I’m not sure what happens next I re-read it
for inspiration. When what I’m looking for isn’t there, I get out the
fountain pen my son Sam gave me for Father’s Day when he was about 12 –
also known as Dumbo’s Magic Feather — and write more story points.

All this said, I now dimly realize a few principles and tricks that help
me become more creative and consistent. Having established my bona fides
as an unreliable source, I don’t expect you to pay any attention
whatsoever to the advice that follows:

1. Put the writing first. Many sages say to write every day. Others say
to write X number of words per day. I can’t do either thing, but for me
resolving to put the writing ahead of all else seems to have the same
effect.

2. Just start writing. If you’re stuck, write blah blah blah if you
must. Write what you ate for breakfast or what you plan to eat. Write
what you dreamed last night. Write about your wife, your children, your
boss, your mama, but just write something until whatever you sat down to
write about starts to flow. This is pump-priming and, believe it or not,
it works.

3. Do whatever you have to do. I’ve heard of writers doing truly
outlandish things. I like to write in the dark, for example, but Kent
Haruf, author of a plangent (look it up) novel called Plainsong, says he
locks himself in a dark closet and pulls a knit cap down over his face.

Finally, get a prescription for Ritalin. Ritalin helps, I think. Then
again, that’s what Dumbo thought about his feather.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Apologies for the blog-o-lag of the past week. Life got busy, then
we went to the beach for four days. The good news is, we had a great
time. Best of all, I wrote some lambent (look it up) prose at the beach.
Thanks to daughter Shawn for getting the great beach place yet again,
and for counting her Old Mom and Dad among the friends she invites.

P.P.S. I’ll be in Chicago next November for sure. Plans are shaping up.
Watch this space.