Francisco's Journal an author discusses the art of writing

In a week or so I will be done with the editing process for the fourth book: The Last Summer of the Death Warriors. That book is slated to come out March 2010. Sometime later in 2010 (my wonderful editor Cheryl Klein is also very flexible and kind) I need to deliver a rough draft of the fifth book. What I want to talk about here is what it feels like to not know at this moment what that book will be about. I should be looking for something to write about. I should be calculating. Instead I am waiting. I am waiting in what feels like a kind of darkness. A couple of weeks ago something happened that made me think that I was indeed waiting and not just avoiding the matter. I was walking and a glimmer of an idea came to me. It just came. I treasure this idea and protect it with my silence although I am also full of doubts about it. It may be just a passing fancy. It could be that the idea points towards a challenge I don’t feel I can meet. So I wait some more. Maybe another idea will come. Or maybe this humble and lonely idea will stay and grow. Maybe with time I will believe that I am strong enough to meet the challenge it presents. I don’t know how much longer to wait before just diving in. I wish I could sit down one day and write an outline of a book. Here are the characters and here is what happens. I wish I could calculate more. Instead I am cursed with a sense that it is okay to wait a little longer. It is not easy to wait in this darkness. It is scary. It is scary because we don’t know what will come or when. It is scary because there’s a little voice that asks “what if you are just being lazy?” I think here of how much faith and waiting have in common (“For the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting” says T.S.Eliot in the Four Quartets). Waiting begets faith and faith begets waiting. What makes the waiting worthwhile, what fills the waiting with faith is the expectation or certainty that something will come. At the right time I will know what to write. The voice of the young person I want to write about will come (the voice always comes first) and the story will follow.

Marcelo in the Real World has been out there since March and I have been overwhelmed by its reception both critically by the professional reviewers as well as by the many, many people who have reviewed the book in their blogs or have commented upon it either publicly or by contacting me personally through this website. I am so happy that the book has already touched as many people as it has. I know that it will continue to do so. And yet, I confess to feeling a certain detachment from all the good things that are happening to the book. Maybe it is the length of time involved between when an author finishes writing a book and when the book is published that creates that distance - the sense that the book is no longer one’s own and all the praise (or criticism) that are heaped upon it are not to be taken, well, personally. Did I really write that book? I remember the years and the days and the hours of struggle and joy but they seem so far off now. I feel as if the images and the words came to me, were given to me, and that I was fortunate to have a good editor who set me on the right path. I’m not trying to be humble. I’m trying to convey what happens after a book is written. I think this natural separation from the work is sort of what a woman goes through in forgetting the labor pains of the prior child so that the next child can be conceived and born. Maybe in the case of writing, it is not only necessary to forget the pain of creating the previous work but also the praise received for it. It is just as easy to get stuck in pain as it is in praise. But forgetting pain and praise is not the right term. What is needed after a book is out is the gentle remembering of the gift-like qualities of the book’s creation. It is this remembering that will carry us steadily into the next work.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether good writing is preceded by a particular frame of mind. Do you write better when you are calm or do you do your best when your mind is moving fast and thinking hard? The question came to me in the midst of some editing that I was doing. There was a particular scene in the book that I knew wasn’t right, my editor knew wasn’t right as well, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to solve the problem. For a couple of weeks there, I wondered whether I would ever be able write again. How do you pull out of that kind of muck? In my case, I was fortunate enough to go on vacation to a warm place for a couple of weeks. I didn’t touch the manuscript at the suggestion of my editor and in the middle of the second week, while I was pouring myself a glass of ice tea and not thinking about my work at all, the idea, the piece that was missing came to me. I think that along with the relaxation, what I needed to recover was a sense of humility – an inner comfort that what I have is good enough to share. It seems now as if I got stuck because I was trying too hard and the manuscript missed a subtlety and naturalness that comes when you write with the knowledge that all you can do is write from the depth of your heart, listening all along to a kind of music that guides you.