How could they possibly understand?

A few things came together recently to inspire this post.  I’ll weave them together in the best tapestry I can.  I don’t recall every source.  If one I don’t cite seems familiar, let me know.

The first item is the vaguest, but I think it came from Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller.  Whatever it was, the writer was talking about how people don’t understand the plight of being a writer.  Even your closest friends and loved ones — especially your closest friends and loved ones — see you struggling hour after hour, day in and day out, alone with your computer and barely typing.  They want to offer you relief, to help you somehow overcome the frustrating struggle.  How could they possibly know that it’s this struggle that we writers live for?  It’s not about victory, it’s about the fight, gaining ground on a vision that can never be perfectly translated to paper.  We’re marathon runners of words, triathletes of typing.  It’s the struggle against ourselves that is beautiful, rewarding.  If it came easy, we wouldn’t do it.

This came up the other day with my wife.  She spends a lot of time in the basement working on her photography (portrait, stock, and event), especially doing editing on her computer.  I can understand what she does to a point.  I can see the changes she makes.  Some are too subtle for me to notice, others are obvious across the room.  She is a professional in that she advertises and accepts clients, but she is not full time.  She is quite talented and I am proud of all she has accomplished so far.

But.

I proposed that we each set aside some time during the week to focus on our secondary careers while the other takes care of our daughter.  She nodded and said something about she makes money doing what she does.

Ouch.  She has a point, I’m not raking in the dough with stories.  That’s not what it’s about, at least not everything it’s about.  Right now her photography money is supporting her photography habit and nothing more.  She’ll move past that eventually as long as she keeps working hard at it.  So will I.

She apologized for the comment and said she understood why I needed private time to write.  I told her she didn’t understand, but that was okay.  Now I was a little harsh there and still owe her an apology of my own, but it was true.  In fact my need for time is so obscure, I couldn’t find a way to explain to her why she wouldn’t get it.

Today I was sitting on my reading chair (read: toilet) and stumbled across as good an explanation as I’ve found as to why my seclusion time is necessary in large chunks.  I found it in the out-of-print book Those Who Can (Robin Wilson, ed.) in Samuel Delany’s essay, “Thickening the Plot”.  I won’t infringe on Delany’s copyright, but I want to share his explanation of how writers really work.  I’ll try to recreate the idea using an excerpt from my own story, “Chasers” (originally printed in the anthology Triangulation 2004).  The italics are what I’m typing; the rest is in my head.  This is a dramatization.  The real experience is much less pleasant.

• I want to start with my character, Sebastian, flying his ship away from the base.  Sebastian accelerated away from the base. No, too bland.  I need some sensory words.  What does he feel?  Sebastian felt the acceleration… How does he feel it?  Where?  Sebastian felt the acceleration in his stomach… too specific…in his gut…not quite.  I need something more visceral, more descriptive.  How did it feel?  A push?  A pull?  I know, a squeeze.  Sebastian felt his gut squeeze… No, that doesn’t work.  Sebastian’s gut squeezed against his back… Not quite right.  Lower, more internal.  Sebastian’s stomach squeezed into his pelvis as he accelerated. Close.  There’s stomach again.  Why did I discard it before?  Too specific.  Sebastian’s organs squeezed into his pelvis as he accelerated. Good but feels unfinished.  How fast was he going?  Good place to put in some world-specific terminology.  I wanted speeds expressed in decimals of the speed of light.  How fast was he going? Check your research, dummy.  The ship he’s chasing will be going like .2 times the speed of light, so maybe he’s going .1  …as he accelerated to .1. Looks weird.  …as he accelerated to point-one. Better, but he’s not stopping at point-one.  …as he accelerated past point-one. That will work.  Let’s get in his head now.  He’s chasing a ship to refuel it.  He hasn’t caught one before, so is he optimistic or pessimistic?  Optimistic plays better.  He knew he would succeed this time. No, too optimistic.  He had a good feeling this time. Not bad, the good feeling plays against the squeezing organs.  Damn I’m good.  Need to say something about his goal.  He was going to catch this ship. A little blunt and sounds like he’s in a police chase.  Can I put more world-specific lingo in?  Maybe he wouldn’t mention the ship, but just say he’ll catch “it”.  Or better, maybe “catch” could be the noun.  He was going to make this catch. That works conceptually, but the sentences are getting monotonous.  Can “catch” be the subject?  This catch was going to be his. Ick, passive voice.  Was it better the other way?  Not really.  There’s something neat about describing a catch passively, isn’t there?  Eh, maybe I’ll come back.

That’s how writing works, forward and backward and rewriting as you go.  Not always, sometimes it rolls off the fingers like butter, but timewise, this seems to be how I work.  My original opening paragraph was surely not as smooth as this, but the process was the same.  If my wife were to come check on me after this process, my screen would say:

Sebastian’s organs squeezed into his pelvis as he accelerated past point-one.  He had a good feeling this time.  This catch was going to be his.

What have I been doing all this time?  She can’t get it.  She can have an idea.  She can equate it to the moving around of lights she did for a half hour on prom night while she made me stand there as her test dummy, but only writers seem to get it.

I love my wife and I know she wants me to succeed as a writer.  I need to keep this in mind when she calls me from my keyboard to change a diaper or take the dogs out or even do something that does not involve urine.  It’s hard to explain that breaking away from a train of thought derails the process and makes me start over, possibly rewriting several lines, even paragraphs, in order to align the story to where I am now.

What’s my point?  (Do I ever have one?)  I guess I’m trying to reassure my visitors that I get it — we all get it — even though a lot of people don’t, won’t, and can’t.  Writing is hard, it’s lonely, it’s frustrating.  Maybe I’m crazy, but I love it anyway.