The magic at the end of the road
And how long it takes to get there
Today in dreams coming true: APOCALYPSE was Briefly Noted in the New Yorker! Today’s a great day to get your copy and learn how “numerous egalitarian political movements were born of catastrophe.” We can do it, too!
It’s been about a year since I started the final push on APOCALYPSE. At the time, I couldn’t wait for it to be over, and now, I miss it so much. Once vestibular therapy got my subconscious back online, I knew exactly what I had to write each day, and I did. Gradually, and then suddenly, I finally understood the book I had spent years working on. I finally knew why I had organized things the way I had. I finally knew what the book was trying to say, and how to say it.
It wasn’t ideal that the Big Magic happened so late in the process, although I knew there were medical reasons for that. I was tremendously lucky it happened at all. Next time, I thought, I’ll be able to find it earlier. Next time, I won’t be so desperate. Next time, maybe writing the whole book will feel this good.
I haven’t started a next book, and maybe it will feel that good when I do. But, fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve started to believe there’s something special about that last push on a project, when everything else falls away and the desperation takes over. My suspicions were confirmed by my friend Julia Rosen recently, who wrote about a similarly exhilarating experience when finishing her forthcoming, assuredly brilliant, book on grass:
I truly went underground at this point—at least, mentally. The book became the real world. The real world became a niggling distraction. My main goal during daylight hours became not to forget my kids in the car or commit some other terrible act of negligence. I did not trust myself to go through the motions of life as I normally would.
But amazingly, whatever competence I lost in my day-to-day life I seemed gain 10-fold in my writing process. One day—or rather, one night—I completely restructured a 15,000-word chapter. The next day, I did it again. It was like I had acquired a superpower: I saw exactly where each sentence should go and moved sections around with unfamiliar confidence. Again, it struck me that my intuition had taken over; it perceived the hidden architecture of each chapter. And though it sounds cliché, I could feel the rightness of it in my bones.
Maybe some people reach those heights during their inspiration-fueled first drafts, and editing feels like being dragged back down to earth. Unfortunately for me, I have to write and rewrite several full drafts before I can even catch a glimpse of the magic. My subconscious needs all that mulch before something can bloom out of it. It needs all that desperation, which gets photosynthesized into energy and originality. An outline simply could never.
As I happily plow through 800-word news stories and fitfully consider what the next longer thing might look like, I’m realizing I probably can’t get back to the book-finishing place I loved before, you know, I’m actually finishing a book again. There will always be drafts best thrown in the trash, however much I wish I could avoid it. But there will also be, eventually, the draft where everything clicks. There will never be a shortcut. There is only the road so long it seems like you must be lost. And then suddenly, when you’ve given up all hope, you’re found.
