It makes me tired just thinking about it.
Today, I was reading a bit of memoir by Robert Towne about writing his famous movie "Chinatown."
He said it drove him nuts. He retreated to Catalina Island to write most of it. The isolation helped him focus on it and wrestle with it every day.
I was glad to hear it was a beast to write. Made me feel better.
I realized that part of my problem is that I want it to be easy. I don't want to wrestle the 800-lb gorilla.
I want it to be easy like a short story, like "Casualty of War," which won the Random House short fiction award in 1999. That story took me about 20 minutes to write and I was smart enough not to change hardly any of it.
(Here is a link:)
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/contest/0999/sstory1.html
But novel writing is different. Takes me nine or ten months working all day every day to get a first draft and eight or ten years to do the rewrites. Of course I do much line-by-line revising. I should probably follow Borges's advice:
“Perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.” – Jorge Luis Borges
Of course being a compulsive rewriter and endless futzer, that is hard for me to do.
Anyway, the important thing for me now is to realize that I cannot expect it to be easy. It is going to be hard. As someone once said, "If it was easy, anybody could do it." And as someone else once said, "Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm."
And courage. You have to have courage to tackle something as big and hairy as this.
Wish me luck. And energy. And perseverance. And guts. And willingness. You have to be willing.
-- Roger
© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle
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