Welcome back to my series on how to avoid becoming a novelist, a feat at which I’ve had some middling success.
I am painting my house. I am doing it with a hand brush, not a roller or a sprayer. I am doing it stroke by stroke, layering dark blue over the original honey-mustard color. I am doing it without listening to a podcast, or music. I am doing it alone (for now). Today I stood on the scaffolding platform with a brush and a tray of dark blue promise. The name of the shade is Heirloom China. It was the perfect day for this job, the first weekend of August, about 70 degrees with a breeze.
Painting is good work for writing, because writing requires both large swathes of time in which to write, and large swathes of time in which to let your mind wander. I find characters and ideas come most easily to me when I’m walking my dog or doing manual labor, doing one task alone and undistracted.
This is not easy, for any number of reasons. Most of them have to do with money and loneliness. I promised in my last installment I would tell you about my failures, how despite knowing better I have written a few novels. Here’s what it took.
First novel (began 2010, finished 2012): Mystery novel set in Trinidad, CA. I sent it in installments to my grandmother, whom I was terrified of disappointing. I finished it the summer I quit my first grownup job. Gram said she had read worse novels, but also better novels, and that there was too much profanity in it. Thanks Gram.
Second novel (began 2012, finished 2016): Horror/mystery/thriller set in Eureka, CA. Wrote it for my my mom, who loved horror. It was a real start-and-stop process, but I finally finished after working straight through several Saturday nights in a row. The horror aspect of it never really gelled, and it’s still basically in pieces in my hard drive like an old car that’s been stripped for parts. My mom seemed to like it okay though.
Third novel (began 2019, finished 2021): My first non-genre novel, set in a fictional and unnamed East Coast town. It was the novel I quit my job to finish, in early 2020. Was not counting on an absolute shit tornado of both personal and geopolitical events to coalesce around the same time I made this move. I finished the edits while sitting vigil at my mom’s hospital bed shortly before her death from lung cancer. Cursed object, I don’t think I can go back to it.
You don’t need to be smart or funny or creative to write a novel. You need time and focus and the ability to say no. For me, the minimum amount of time I would like to spend writing every day is about two hours, and that’s not counting the lead up of dog walking or house painting I need to get myself ‘in the zone.’ Which makes money the issue, because um I need it to pay for this house I’m painting. And I’m expected to work to earn it, and novels are not real money makers until they are, and that takes a long long while, if not forever. (Column for a different day.) So I have to make choices.
I love so many things, and the capacity to love so many things is both a privilege and a burden. Because I can’t be a novelist and pay the mortgage and also be a bird-watcher, a cave-diver, a journalist, a mother, an anthropologist, a person who folds and puts away their clothes away as soon as they’re out of the dryer. To be clear – other people can. It’s not impossible. Agatha Christie was an amateur archaeologist, mother and found time to date and marry a man 13 years her junior. But I’m pretty sure she had family money. I digress. In order to find any time to write, I have to say no. I have to say no to social and family engagements, decent meals, volunteering and innumerable house projects.
I have to say no. But I usually say yes, hence why I’ve only written three novels. But as wiser people than me have said, “What’s the value of a yes if you never say no?”
Which brings me to loneliness. I, like many people in the modern age, have found that technology has made me simultaneously lonelier and also less tolerant of the feeling of being alone. I spend a lot of time by myself, and much of the time I am either listening to podcasts or on some sort of screen. I know I do not give myself enough silence or time to think, important components of a writer’s life. Ironically, having time to be bored and let one’s mind wander is imperative to retaining the deep focus you need for a project like writing a novel.
So it’s kind of a f’d up situation I’ve created for myself. (I’m self-editing in case Gram is also spending her afterlife judging me. *sits up straighter, combs hair with fingers*) I know I need time and silence and focus to write, so I have sort of created a life where I get that in small bursts, but when I get time and silence my skin starts crawling and so I’m immediately on my phone or leaving the house to go do something else or deciding it’s time to move the furniture again.
It’s a muscle. It takes practice and persistence to get stronger. I had two chances to let go of things this weekend, two projects that make up the innumerable perpetually open tabs in the browser of my brain because no one could possibly do them better than me. I gave one away to someone I know will do a good job. I watched the other one get done imperfectly. It didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel awful, kind of like exercise when you’re out of practice.
I am painting my house. This afternoon I could hear the sound of workers restoring an old Victorian down the street. The wind carried scattered bits of conversation in Spanish, the pound of hammers, the occasional buzz of a saw and burr of a generator. I let myself feel the dreaminess of being outdoors, aloft, above my blackberry-choked pond, a line of trees whispering in the breeze. I wondered if the workers could see the slow transition of my wall from yellow to blue, if they had opinions about my color or technique. I thought about the strange camaraderie of us all working on scaffolding, in backyards just a few fences apart, doing our separate projects out in the open air. I thought about that poem by Robert Frost, “Men work together, whether they work together or apart.” I am painting my house by hand because Homer, the octogenarian who owns and maintains the rental house next door, recommended it. It will last longer, he promised. It’s going to take a long time. It might even take years. I am finding each imperfection in the siding, the knotholes and crumbles and flakes that need filling and sealing and sanding. And it feels good the way writing feels good when you can get down to it, when you can be alone with the job, when the sheer scale of the thing you’re trying to accomplish feels impossible but also joyous because someone who knows has not only told you that it’s possible, but that what you’re doing is important, that it’s slow work to create something good, something that will last.
