Plowing

When I left New York ten days ago my editor told me she would read "The Gods of Arizona" pronto and let me know. My agent told me he was off to France for a week but that when he returned he would follow up with her pronto and let me know.

I still don't know. That's to be expected. Nothing happens fast in this business. There is no pronto in publishing and writers can become paralyzed with the waiting. Paralysis is my greatest fear. So I have spent the past week thinking a lot about the third book, the one about ballroom dancing, the one I'm tentatively calling "The Nature of the Dance." I am trying to produce a sample chapter and a 500-word pitch of the idea.

This is the exciting part of the process. The beginning, when the horizon is flat and broad and there is the sense that the story could go anywhere and that your heroine could become anything.

This is also the part of the process where you go into a bit of a fog. First drafts are physically exhausting to write. They really force you to go deep into the subconscious mind. My grandmother used to use the phrase "plowing the field" to describe complete exhaustion as in "I feel like I've been plowing the field all day." She was born in the rural south in 1905 and knew what plowing really felt like. I've never had my hand on a piece of farm equipment but first draft writing feels like a kind of plowing - taking this unbroken landscape and beginning to dig ruts in it, to create perameters and rows, to decide what goes where....to begin to enforce a type of order onto nature. You have to throw your back into it. You strike a lot of rocks.

So I walk around in a fog, obsessed with the story. The kind of headspace where you walk into the kitchen and wonder why you're there, where you pull off the road into a parking lot and begin to scribble notes onto a receipt you dig out of your purse. Oddly happy and oddly distracted.

When I first started writing, I never thought about publishing....or, if it did flit across my mind it was only in the context of "I need to sell enough to allow me to keep writing." That's pure and proper - publishing should always be in service of writing. But at some point things shift. The publishing part of it grows bigger in your mind and if you're not careful the tail begins to wag the dog (another one of my grandmother's pet phrases) and you find yourself spending a lot of time wondering what will make a book sell. Instead of "I need to publish so I can afford to keep writing" you begin to think "I need to write what I think they'll publish." In some ways that doesn't sound like much of a shift because both are important - you won't have any sort of career in the long run unless you give serious thought to both the creative and the financial side of your decisions. But even taking into account that both matter, the writing still has to come first.

When I told my editor I was thinking of a book about a ballroom dance studio her eyes lit up and I thought "I can sell that book." All I had was a concept. But in the ten days since that my mind has been furiously churning....who is this woman who has begun dancing? What does she want....and will I give it to her? I guess I'll give it to her slant, as in Emily Dickenson's line "tell the truth but tell it slant." That seems the way people always get what they want - they might get what they originally wanted but then find they don't want it anymore, what they think they want changes over time, they come to an understanding of themselves that renders the original desire moot. There are a thousand variations of this story and the parallels between Abby's pursuit of dance trophies and my pursuit of publication are not lost on me.

I may have started this book based on my editor's reaction, and the fact I thought I could sell it but the deeper question is: Can I fall in love with it to the degree that I would want to write this book even if I knew I could never sell it? In the meantime I just wander around dreaming the story, stopping sometimes dead in my tracks when a phrase or idea strike me as being real.

This is the exciting part of the process. But god do I need a nap.