A Book-in-Waiting
fogginess and all
The other day I listened to a podcast with Chelsea Handler. The guest asked her about how to write a book, something Chelsea has done several times to much success. She said all you have to do is start. Pick a day to open your computer and just start writing. Write that first page. She says it’ll be horrible and you’ll hate it. Then on the next day you go back and write a little more. Then the next day you do the same thing. Do an hour every day. At first it will suck entirely and you’ll question all your life choices. You will question your sanity and whether you have any talent. The road gets really foggy.
She said it’s critical to continue sitting even though you can’t see the finish line. You will begin to doubt that there’s a finish line at all. So long as you sit every day, the process eventually sucks less and less. As you put more road behind you, the less painful it is, the closer you get to that elusive finish line. Those pages eventually begin to resemble a book. The more it looks like a book the more you will like it, compared to those early days as an amorphous blob. Soon enough there’s some structure and shape. Eventually there will be enough meat on the bone that you can start to carve it. And that part of the process is fun.
But it all starts with day one.
At least, this was the subtext of Chelsea’s advice, what I heard between the lines.
There’s absolutely nothing new in this advice. It’s a tale as old as time - the journey of a thousand miles blah blah blah. Just start. That’s it. Period. You can’t finish something if you don’t start it. Chelsea’s way of putting it, though, really resonated with me. Resonated and stung a little. See I fall into a slightly different category.
Most people don’t have a book because they haven’t started a book. But what if you’re someone who has started a book? What if you started your journey of a thousand miles but just decided to sit down for a decade or two? What’s the advice to that person?
When I was 18 I took my first stab at book writing. This early attempt was a collection of comedic essays called Cheese Ain’t Cheap. At the time I was living on my own in Chicago. Finally I was out of my high school cocoon, in the big leagues, a real grown up. It was during one of my first independent grocery shopping trips that I had an earth-shattering discovery. As I loaded up my cart with all things processed and synthetic (like most 18-year-olds do), I made my way to the dairy aisle. Holy fucking what! Cheese is expensive?! How had I made it almost two decades on planet earth without knowing this? Cheese is a staple in the American diet. It should be free, included with utilities or paying taxes. Or at least cheap. But it ain’t. Cheese ain’t cheap. Thus a book title was born.
I began my work. I sat down at the giant desktop PC I hauled all the way from Atlanta and began writing. After a few days I had a few baby chapters, some pages with words on them. It was the most exciting thing going on in my life (aside from being newly adulted which I would eventually discover kinda sucks). I told my family about Cheese Ain’t Cheap. I told everyone about Cheese Ain’t Cheap. If memory serves me, I read aloud some chapters to friends while visiting St. Louis for the weekend.
As happened a lot in my teens and 20s, I abandoned this thing that excited me most. I walked away from the cheese. Maybe the disillusionment of adulthood pummeled the excitement out of me. Perhaps I just needed to push through the hard part. Lack of discipline. Wandering interests. In any case, Cheese Ain’t Cheap got shelved and eventually became family lore.
A few years ago I came across some of those cheesy chapters. Let me just say, wow! Shit. Is. Bad. It’s almost unreadably bad. I was trying to write comedy and, to my credit, those pages made me erupt into laughter. The writing is quippy yet clunky, and tries very very very hard to be funny (which is almost a bulletproof way to be unfunny). At the time, my friend Suzanne gave it a B+ which I think is the most generous assessment of that wet hot garbage anyone could give.
The particular chapter in question was about people who walk up escalators. Yes, I devoted an entire chapter of my future book to people who opt to walk up a moving staircase. Apparently at 18 I was incredulous that anyone would do such a thing. To be fair, walking up an escalator is the opposite of its intended use. The purpose of an escalator is to stand your fat ass still while a machine moves you to the kitchen appliance department of Sears. To actually walk goes against god and nature. At best, this could be a Jerry Seinfeld bit. And a very short one at that.
After all these years, the desire to write a book is still strong. I want to reach that summit but I also want to feel the expansiveness of the journey. Once I get around to it, maybe I’ll call it Cheese Ain’t Cheap, at least as a working title. It will likely be a book of essays, largely comedic, in my classic PDW tone and rhythm. Or maybe I venture into fiction at some point and produce a novel. Perhaps I’d do better with a collection of short stories first. Maybe I dive head first into a memoir. Who knows.
What I do know, having been on the creative frontline for awhile, is that all things happen in their time. Cheese Ain’t Cheap wasn’t ready to be born 15 years ago. I wasn’t the right writer for it, at least not then. Whenever the book brewing in my bones is ready I will know. Hopefully at this point in my creative journey I will know when it’s time and have the discipline to sit down everyday, just like Chelsea said, and wade through the process.
Fogginess, finish lines, frustration, and all.