Sharing in the Struggle

 I watched a Barnes and Noble interview with Barack Obama the other night about his newest book, The Promised Land. I'll confess, I didn't watch the entire thing, as I had screen/zoom fatigue by then, but what I saw of it was interesting. 

What I found the most interesting wasn't necessarily the content of the book, but the commonalities we share as writers. He was frank and honest about his routines and methods. He mentioned he tends to do his best writing between 10 PM and 1 AM. This is actually the polar opposite of when I like to write. I tend to like writing first thing in the morning and into the afternoon. 

He also mentioned that he writes all of his stuff using longhand on yellow legal pads. He said that is more productive for him and makes for a cleaner transcription. I thought that was particularly interesting given my efforts on my latest manuscript "At the Lake" (Working Title). 

As I've mentioned, I am trying to write this one entirely in longhand first. I've done some of this for my other books, but never start-to-finish. I've found it is much easier to get my thoughts down with a pen and then transcribe (and edit) it into MS Word after the fact. I use notebooks of varying sizes, the most recent one being the back half of one of my son's high school notebooks that had a bunch of unused pages. 

One of my writing instructors used to write his stuff on ridiculously small notebooks and even post it notes. The guy is successful, so who's going to argue. Do whatever works for you.

Along those lines, I passed the 40,000 word mark the other day so am making my best progress ever on a first draft. There is still a long way to go, but the pandemic has been good to me from a writing standpoint. I basically started this book in January of 2020, so am ahead of my projected schedule. 

Anyway, my point is, it's interesting that an ex-President can share the same struggles and successes during the course of his writing as I can. That doesn't make me any better or anywhere near his caliber of success, but it is comforting knowing that we are in the same boat.

Blogging off...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

National Poetry Month: Issue 18

In a rush, a poem from Richard Brautigan from,  The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. A Good-Talking Candle                    by Richard Brautigan I had a good-talking candle last night in my bedroom. I was very tired but I wanted somebody to be with me,    so I lit a candle. and listened to its comfortable voice of light until I was asleep. Blogging off...
Read more

New Chapters

Image
 As many of you know I retired last week after almost 27 years at Waukesha County. It was a bit of a shock to some, in part because I am only 61. Nevertheless I'd given it much thought and talked it through with my family and determined it was time. I wanted to get out while I am healthy and perhaps more specifically just do something different. I am lucky enough to say I've loved my work over the past 37 years. GIS and mapping has been my passion since college and I was fortunate enough to get paid to do something I loved.  I'll be honest, while I looked forward to the date of retirement, I was not looking forward to the celebration. Like my daughter, who is more like me than not, I do not like being in the spotlight. While I've become more comfortable being in front of people in part because of my writing and its related promotion and readings, deep down I'm still an introvert with extrovert flares, as they say. But dreading it as I did, it turned out to be a spec...
Read more

Local Level Need

Image
A week and a half into retirement and I'm here to report that life is good on the other side. I've kept fairly busy so far, in fact when my wife was questioned by friends on "how Jim's retirement is going," she said, "He hasn't sat down." I think I'm still in the manic, must-get-stuff-done mode that happens when people get a week off of work. Gotta cram it all in. Well, I am starting to adjust to the fact that it will all be there tomorrow and next week, and if I don't get to all of it today, it's really okay. It's been a strange adjustment for sure, but one that I am beginning to appreciate more and more.  Before I decided to retire, one of the things I wanted to commit to was a regular stint of volunteer work. When I mentioned it to a friend who works for Frieden's Food Pantry, he suggested I look into helping in one of their four locations. They vary in the number of families that they serve, but they turn over a huge amount o...
Read more