I’ve been working on my book for about eight months. I started it on a Sunday, when I woke up at seven a.m. with the beginning of a book in my head and then got up and wrote for ten hours straight. I was writing about my dad, who passed away last fall, and about my relationship with him.
Just the previous week I’d been picking up the pieces of another book I’d started, a book about my years in the Peace Corps that I had put down while Dad was dying. I thought that after the winter had passed and I was caught up on my life, I would finish that book, but instead, here I was on a Sunday with words about Dad pouring out of me in a torrent.
I must have written ten thousand words that day. The message was clear: this year I was going to be writing about Dad, not Peace Corps.
Eight months later I have finished my first “real” draft, a full-length draft the size (100,000 words, 350 pages) of a real book. It’s far from done—it consists of patches of eloquence interspersed among patches of blah, mediocrity that any reader would recognize as amateur. But that’s what editing is for.
When I first started to write, I told people I was working on my Block of Wood. I remembered Michelangelo’s saying he didn’t create his marble carvings but rather freed them from the stone, that all he had to do was chip away the pieces and reveal them. I reasoned that, if I was going to be chipping away the pieces and freeing my book from the rest of the words, then first I would need those words to be there for me to chip away. I needed to create the marble hunk from which to free the art—except for some reason I kept thinking of wood instead of marble, so I decided I was creating a Block of Wood.
I have since been told that renowned memoirist Anne Lamott refers to this first writing stage as the Sh*tty First Draft, which I think is an even more apt expression for what I was doing. In the very first draft, you can’t be bothered with quality, or you’ll never get anything onto the page (screen). You have to just get the story out and worry about quality later.
So I got to the end of my Block of Wood, more or less, and eagerly started back over at the beginning for my second draft. At this point I realized I had not so much created a Block of Wood as a Skeleton. I had not written a complete draft.
I had lazily skipped over parts that were difficult to write, figuring that if I dawdled over the tough parts I would lose my momentum. Only now, with the second go-round, was I truly creating a Block of Wood, as evidenced by the fact that I was on track to end up with about 200,000 words, way, wayyyyy longer than a writer’s first book can possibly be and get published.
It turned out that all the parts I had skipped had one thing in common: they were the most emotionally painful parts of my life. One still-unwritten chapter involved the death of a close friend. Other absent sections were about Dad’s darkest times, his deepest spirals into depression and alcoholism, his two greatest demons.
And I still had to write the final chapters of the book, the last few months of Dad’s life, the months when he was in hospice. I thought I had skipped those chapters out of impatience, but they would turn out to be damn hard to write, nauseatingly heavy to relive.
As I began tackling these harder parts, I had my first real bouts of writer’s block. It came to me in the form of fogginess, needing to do something besides writing, something like going for a walk or reading or watching “Star Trek.”
I had thought writer’s block meant simply staring at the computer screen and drawing a blank. But for me, it was more like finding myself at the computer in a dreamlike state, having trouble even grasping why I was there, my thoughts drifting lackadaisically to food and friends and tasks to do around the house. My mind simply could not pin itself to the computer. My thoughts were like low morning clouds that rise and dissipate rather than staying on the ground.
After a couple months of hemming and hawing, I had ground my way through Draft 2, the Real Block of Wood, and got ready to start editing. (I still hadn’t completed the hospice chapters.) Draft 3 was the draft I was going to show my family, my first editors, so now for the first time I was really aiming for quality.
I performed the fun trick of dumping nearly completed chapters into a new Word document that I had formatted like a book, with the proper number of words on each page and the margins aligned. I even put in a title page and made the chapter headings look real. It’s amazing, the thrill a writer gets from seeing her words formatted like a real book. But it’s dangerous, because formatting alone does not in fact change the quality of the writing.
It was at this point, the actual writing of Draft 3, that I began to feel like I was Wrestling Underwater with a Giant, Amorphous Bloblike Creature. That was my visual for Draft 3.
I had thought I’d be chipping away at my Block of Wood, and indeed I was chipping away, lopping off whole swaths of writing and cleaning up the story, which was satisfying. But most of the time, the further I progressed, the more I sensed the Giant Amorphous Bloblike Creature and felt overwhelmed.
The problem is, it’s impossible to capture a whole person, family, or relationship in one puny book. If I were to truly try and capture all of Dad, my book would be two thousand pages long, much longer than anyone would want to read (unless I was Tolstoy) and impossible to publish for the same reason.
And not only is it impossible to capture a whole person or relationship in a book, but the person—Dad—and my relationship with him was incredibly complicated. That was why I needed to write about him. Things between us were so complicated that after he died it required this entire year of focusing on him to sort out my feelings and memories.
Dad was a great person, a great man, brilliant and passionate and sensitive to a fault, capable and musical and philosophical and kind-hearted, and he loved my sister and me more than life itself, unconditionally. But he was also depressed and angry and unhealthy and alcoholic, and somehow, even though I always knew I was at the center of his universe, in a way I also felt constantly abandoned by him.
I want so badly to bring Dad to life in this book. I want to do him justice and make my readers fall in love with him and cry for him, to capture his struggles and my anger while preserving the sense of the wonderful man that he was. But it turns out that I have to pick and choose the memories I write about, to make sure that the story keeps moving forward and to keep things concise. There isn’t enough room for it all. I can only scratch the surface, hoping that the few memories I choose will be representative of the truth and will provide enough texture to capture the spirit of what really happened.
I feel like I’m transcribing a book into a screenplay, trying to do justice to its depth and complexity in just a couple hours’ worth of time. Except that I’m trying to consolidate one man’s whole colorful and complicated life into just a few hundred pages.
Maybe my family and I will just have to accept that this book isn’t Dad. That even though I’ve spent the year trying to bring him back to life, he is still gone, except in our memories, and those memories are richer than anything I could possibly capture in a book. That all the books that are written about people, real and fictional, are still only the surface of reality, like home videos we watch over and over while realizing so many more things happened when the camera was off. That the real Dad is a composite of all our memories combined, all the things I’ve written plus everything else, and that when a person dies something essential is lost forever no matter how well-documented their life may be. That when I die the same thing will happen to me.
In July I finished wrestling—for the moment—with my Giant, Amorphous Bloblike Creature and gave what I’d written to my family. Except I still had those pesky hospice chapters to write, so while they were editing the first three-fourths of the book, I was finally tackling those.
I thought I could rattle them off in a month. I wasn’t prepared for the way they’d send me into the deepest, most distant, foggiest fog of all. I groped my way through. I wrestled underwater. A month passed. Two months passed.
Two months have now passed and I am finally finished. Really finished. I have written the whole book, my first “real,” complete draft. I’m as finished as I could possibly be with this draft that scratches the surface of my experience of my father.
When I get the edits back from my family I’ll begin Draft 4. I’m excited about it. I have ideas. And I’m going to a writer’s weekend here in Madison in a month that will help me Find my Voice, that elusive Me that jumps out of my journals but dissipates when I try to pin her down in the pages of a book.
Last night I dreamed that I was going winter camping. I had my campsite all set up and waiting for me, with thick, dry boots to keep my feet warm and lots of wood for a fire. For some reason Dad was dropping me off at the campsite, and he drove me around Portland in his big blue van, with the faint scent of nicotine lingering from his cigarettes and the faint hardness of metal and cold from the lack of insulation. But rather than being downtrodden and strained, like he so often was, he was cheerful and upbeat, excited to be helping me (which he always was, excited, when I asked him to help me), happy that I was having an adventure, looking forward to picking me up when I was done. He seemed healthy and content, and after he dropped me off we waved good-bye and he drove off, whistling under his breath like he always did.
I awoke with a deep aching in my chest and began to cry.
