Erik sent me a short email, after I shared with him the first few chapters of my work in progress. I won't quote what he said but it helped me enormously, more than I can say, to have encouragement from a profoundly good author I've admired for many years.
As far as I know, I'm a terrible writer, that's my whole experience of it. I make tons of mistakes, have to export from OpenOffice to pdf every few minutes and read it over and over and over, fixing stupid stuff like spelling errors and getting character names mixed up, fix lines with clunky grammar and those I edited on the fly and mangled. I pause, think through individual words, fact check, change tense, and tell myself repeatedly "Don't gild the lily!" -- erasing whole phrases and ideas that sounded good a few minutes ago. Every line matters, every modifier. And worse: each moment, every split second of life. I have to stay true to my people, good, bad, ugly, complicated, terse.
So far, I have avoided naming the truth. I'm the slowest and least able writer on earth. It takes me 8 hours to write a page or two, interrupted by walks outside to glean and sift what the next scene might and ought to be, a complication, a key line of dialogue, a dilemma solved badly, because people make mistakes and feel foolish, rebel or roll the dice and pay for it in tears and shame. I know about such things because what I write is always a gamble.
If it succeeds, as Erik says I do, the price is mighty fucking high, because I'm naked, transparent. The only stories I can tell are life on life's terms, full of risk and loneliness and a sort of brutal will to live, price no object. I'm soft. I let my people win, because that's part of the greater truth. I let them laugh, growl and hit back with the force of Hades if threatened. Friendship and true love take years to root and grow, no cheery guarantees. A single breach can kill everything.
It took a long time to start this novel, couldn't face writing the first word -- for weeks!
It's the most difficult thing I've ever attempted. My target is 100K or more, two stories told from two points of view, identical events related twice, although what he sees and what she sees are often separate experiences. That's how men and women survive, separately, privately, showing each other an edited best behavior. Or we try to. But real danger changes everything. Orders are shouted, guns drawn.
I'd give anything to have a different life, but that's not going to happen, so I write as I must, incapable of better work. Long winter months in a frozen barn with terrible food doesn't matter if I can pull it off, a hundred thousand words that surprise and thrill and achieve something that no one else has done before, a mountain to climb bare-handed and alone. Erik's email gave me hope, that it might be worth it, every hour, every day, price no object, so long as I live long enough to finish it. After that, I'll take whatever punishment I must.
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