Aloneness
Lately, more than ever, I’ve been thinking about a quote by the late, great playwright Sam Shepard: “Aloneness is a condition of writing. You look at all the writers that have come up with something worth its own salt, and they’re utterly alone.”
“Aloneness is a condition of writing.”
I’ve come not just to accept, but to fully embrace, this truth of the writing life.
Now, instead of being depressed by my feelings of being “utterly alone,” I view these feelings as my North Star: If I’m alone, I must be doing something right; I must be on my way to writing something great.
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I’ve also thought a lot about a sentence in Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”
Both of these quotes have resonated deeply with me a lot lately, during walks and workouts, during long hikes on the Appalachian Trail, and especially as I dig ever deeper writing the second draft of my epic novel. The manuscript now totals a staggering 802,000 words, and there are indications that, when the dust finally settles years from now, it could weigh in at a million words.
The other morning, during my post-prandial constitutional—a one-mile walk in my neighborhood when I, like a poet, mentally compose and say aloud sentences I’ll be writing later on—I passed a dog (I think it was a boxer) standing on its front stoop. As I walked along the shoulder towards the dog, his wagging tail told me he was a friendly one. I sensed that he wanted to run over and play with me, but he had been trained not to leave the stoop. We just looked at each other and knew each other’s aloneness. Just as I couldn’t help him with the job he had to do—guarding his owner’s house—he couldn’t help me with what I had to do: go back to work on my gargantuan novel.
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Beside the door outside my office is a bookcase of writing and language reference books, and on top of this bookcase are framed photos of five of my writing heroes: Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler.
In years past, as I’ve gone in to work they’ve given me small cheers of encouragement. But in recent years they’ve gone silent. Now, when I walk by them at five o’clock in the morning, it’s as if they’re saying, “Yeah, dude…we got nothin’. That crazy long teen novel thing you’re writing? Uh…good luck with that.”
Over the three decades that I’ve been writing professionally, during my long, long apprenticeship, I’ve always been able to look to my heroes’ work for examples of how to do something. When I was writing my first Dakota Stevens mystery (A Real Piece of Work), I had several literary touchstones: Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe novels; Robert B. Parker’s Spenser mysteries; and Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers. While writing the stories that eventually comprised The Man, The Myth, The Legend and One Hundred Miles from Manhattan, I had the short stories of Anton Chekhov, John Cheever and Raymond Carver to consult for guidance and encouragement.
But as I’ve forged ahead with my epic novel, I’ve truly gone out where no one (living or dead) can help me.
As much as I admire Fitzgerald and Nabokov for their elegant, pitch-perfect sentences, when it comes to writing a truly massive novel about a subject that has never been written about before in epic form (truly, I’m inventing a new genre over here), neither Fitzgerald nor Nabokov, nor any of the other novelists I’ve grown up admiring—like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, John Irving, Charles Frazier and Jane Austen—can help me. (Allegedly, Hemingway wrote the first draft of a massive novel about WWII—which he termed “the Big Book”—split into three sections: Land, Sea and Air, but it was never finished and never published.)
No, among my favorite writers, the only one who did what I’m trying to do is the monumental novelist Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace—not just two of the longest novels written, but two of the best novels ever written.
But even with Tolstoy’s works, I’m all alone. Although I’ve learned a lot from them about what’s involved in sustaining a long, detailed, multifarious narrative, they’re about a period of time and subjects that are much different from the time and subject that I’m writing about. Besides, to try to find words of wisdom in Tolstoy’s diaries about writing a magnum opus is truly exhausting. Honestly, I’d prefer having to find a lost contact lens on a sandy beach.
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Bearing with the emotional ups and downs caused by the vicissitudes of real life, and then dealing with the emotions and conflicts of dozens of fictional characters (most of them teenagers), has been overwhelming at times—and another contributor to this feeling of aloneness.
Four or five years ago, while visiting my friend Brian Maloney in Concord, Massachusetts, I expressed to him how emotionally exhausted and alone I felt. We were eating lunch in a fish shop (with the best fried haddock and clam chowder anywhere), and when I voiced my feelings, Brian, who has known me since college (and was initially intrigued by me because he noticed I had a different classic novel with me every time I came to class), gave me a perplexed look across the table. He scoffed a little bit and said, “Yeah, Chris, but this emotional work and aloneness you’re talking about…isn’t that basically what you signed on for as a novelist?”
He didn’t have a microphone in his hand at the time, but afterwards I wished he had, because if ever a moment in my life was worthy of a mic drop, that was it.
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Lately, because I’m now in territory where none of my writing heroes have been, and because none of my friends or family have attempted anything like what I’m doing, I’ve felt more alone than ever. For example, during lunch with my parents the other day, they asked me, “So…how’s the writing going?” They meant well, but how can I possibly communicate to them how physically and emotionally draining the work is, how alone I feel every day, the internal battles I fight with myself over the novel’s significance, the worries about whether all of my hard work will ever pay off?
The very attempt at bridging the divide of aloneness makes me feel more alone.
Another example: I used to enjoy reading new pages from the novel aloud to my wife, and getting her feedback, but recently I realized that not only can she not help me in this way anymore, I’m out past where anyone can help me. I’m so far out there that sometimes what I’m doing doesn’t even seem to resemble writing anymore; it’s more akin to exploring.
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As a young boy, before I decided I was going to become a novelist, I wanted to be an explorer. I wanted to be one of those courageous men who went where no person had gone before: Magellan, Columbus, Lewis and Clark, Peary, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Hillary and Norgay, Neil Armstrong. Well, a few weeks ago, forty some-odd years after I dreamed of being an explorer, I realized tearfully that I was an explorer at last.
I might not be stepping foot atop Mount Everest or on the planet Mars, but I am the first writer to venture into this particular vast and uncharted literary territory.
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Many, many days, I feel like those great explorers and adventurers, going well out beyond the map, past where anyone has been before, not knowing where the end or the summit is, not knowing if I’ll have the fortitude to finish, unsure if the over 10,000 hours I’ve invested in this work (so far) will ever “pay off,” concerned that I might die before I finish.
But you know what? I wouldn’t trade my writing life for anyone else’s.
Not for all of hack James Patterson’s international bestsellers and his wealth and any homes around the world he might have. Not for the gushing praise and accolades (often undeserved) heaped upon the latest enfant terrible.
The fact is, I’m going somewhere that 99 percent of other writers can’t go—not because they don’t have the talent (I fully admit there are many, many writers more talented than I), but because they don’t have the work ethic, the fortitude, the self-direction, the confidence, and the faith that venturing into the unknown requires.
And when I’m finished, when I reach the end and finally put this novel into the world, regardless of how it is eventually received by readers or critics I will have accomplished something very few writers in the history of the world have accomplished, and I’ll know what it means to go out past where anyone can help me and to do something that has never been done before.
But…I have to do it alone.
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