29Jan

The Seventh Year

• Saved in: Craft, Fiction Writing, Interview, Novel Writing, Novels, Personal Essay, Podcast, Process, Radio Interview, Rewriting, Technology & the Internet, Writers, Writing Experiences, Writing Life
• by Chris Orcutt
• with Comments Off on The Seventh Year

On Decem­ber 7, 2015, I began writ­ing my epic nov­el (my mag­num opus), and while I’ve also worked on oth­er projects on and off since then, the vast major­i­ty of my time and ener­gy has gone into what I refer to as “the Big Book.” This means that I’ve been writ­ing this book for six years, and I’ve just entered the sev­enth year.

The thing that is some­what dis­heart­en­ing for me is this: I’m still on the sec­ond draft of the book. Because the Big Book is so long (my pre­dic­tion is that, when fin­ished, it will weigh in at 800K to 1M words), it will actu­al­ly be pre­sent­ed in 6 vol­umes, or episodes as I call them. And here’s the real­ly dis­heart­en­ing fact: yes­ter­day I just fin­ished the sec­ond draft of Episode 2. Two out of a pos­si­ble 6.

Actu­al­ly, while I’ve only com­plet­ed the sec­ond draft of two episodes, I did man­age to fin­ish half of Episode 3, so tech­ni­cal­ly I’ve fin­ished 2½ out of 6, which is a lit­tle bet­ter. Look­ing my writ­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty over the entire year, how­ev­er, the num­bers are stag­ger­ing. To fin­ish those 2½ episodes this year, I wrote or revised approx­i­mate­ly 475,000 words (that’s a lit­tle more than 6 copies of my A Real Piece of Work), and wrote anoth­er approx­i­mate­ly 30,000 words in the jour­nal of the Big Book and on my blog.

That’s HALF A MILLION words writ­ten or rewrit­ten. Not bad for a year’s work.

You might be won­der­ing why I’m prat­tling on about all of these num­bers. Well, here’s the deal: writ­ing nov­els is as much a num­bers game as it is a words game. To fin­ish a nov­el, any nov­el, the writer has to con­sis­tent­ly write or rewrite a min­i­mum num­ber of words every day. The writer needs to do this for at least three drafts, and the writer needs to work a con­sis­tent num­ber of hours each day. Num­bers of words, num­bers of drafts, num­bers of hours.

Back in Decem­ber, when I entered the sev­enth year of this project, I real­ized a cou­ple things. First, if I want­ed to meet my goal of fin­ish­ing the entire book by 2024 or 2025, I had to let go of my desire for per­fec­tion in every draft. Instead, by any means—by any dodge, cheat, hack, or pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive rein­force­ment I could conceive—I had to sim­ply fin­ish the sec­ond draft of all 6 episodes. This sec­ond draft will nev­er be seen by the read­ing pub­lic, I told myself, so in a sense it doesn’t mat­ter. Sec­ond I real­ized that, while I might be the most self-dis­ci­plined and self-direct­ed per­son I know, I still need to have iron­clad dead­lines; for me, if fin­ish dates are left open-end­ed, that just gives the per­fec­tion­ist in me more time to tin­ker, and f‑ck tin­ker­ing at this stage.

This stage, this draft, is all about get it the f‑ck fin­ished. Peri­od. So, with these two real­iza­tions in mind, I have cre­at­ed a pro­duc­tion sched­ule for myself for the rest of the year.

Feb­ru­ary and March: Fin­ish the sec­ond draft of Episode 3.

April, May, June: Fin­ish the sec­ond draft of Episode 4.

July, August, Sep­tem­ber: Fin­ish the sec­ond draft of Episode 5.

Octo­ber, Novem­ber, Decem­ber: Fin­ish the sec­ond draft of Episode 6.

By Decem­ber 31, 2022, I want to be fin­ished with the sec­ond draft of the entire epic nov­el. It’s an incred­i­bly daunt­ing goal, but as Lao Tzu once wrote, “The jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step.” Over the course of 30 years of doing this stuff, I’ve become very good at con­tin­u­ing to make that next step. From one of my ances­tors I inher­it­ed this abil­i­ty to just keep putting one foot in front of the oth­er, and to fin­ish big projects by com­plet­ing small task after small task.

Oh, and did I men­tion that my wife and I recent­ly began hunt­ing for a house again (stress), and that I diag­nosed myself as hav­ing stu­pid GERD from my 30 years of cof­fee-drink­ing, so I recent­ly had to give up cof­fee? (One def­i­n­i­tion of a writer: a machine that con­verts cof­fee into words.)

Yeah. It SUUHHHHHHCCCCCCKKKKKSSSS!

But in life, we can either adapt and live (maybe even thrive), or we can stay the same and die. I choose to adapt. It’s Redfin for the house hunt and green tea for the GERD.

Half a league, half a league, half a league onward!

In a recent inter­view with my best friend Jason Scott (inter­net archivist, com­put­er his­to­ri­an, film­mak­er and now suc­cess­ful pod­cast­er, the bril­liant f‑cker), Jason says that he has always admired my self-dis­ci­pline and my “pret­ty impres­sive” rou­tine of writ­ing and fit­ness. Well, as I said in the inter­view, I’m hard­ly super-human. As I point­ed out in one of my recent blog entries, when I am draw­ing near to a dead­line, the stress (self-imposed stress, but stress nonethe­less) usu­al­ly caus­es me to overeat and exer­cise less. For the past month, I’ve only exer­cised three days a week instead of my usu­al six, and I’ve been self-sooth­ing through junk food: Jel­ly Bel­ly Sours, Mike & Ike, Pop­corners (ched­dar cheese), Newman’s piz­zas, and Bread Alone bread. The result is, I’ve prob­a­bly put on an extra 10 pounds. But, as Wyatt Earp says in the Kevin Cost­ner movie (when he’s come back to Dodge City to clean up the law­less­ness), “IT ALL ENDS NOW!”

As soon as I fin­ish this blog entry, I’m going down­stairs to my home gym and work out for two hours. Over the years, my wife has (some­what envi­ous­ly) point­ed out to me that, once I start eat­ing right, drink­ing a lot of water, and exer­cis­ing dai­ly, it only takes my body about two weeks to return to its toned, trim sta­tus quo. I guess that’s true, but I nev­er noticed it until she start­ed point­ing it out. I think it comes from a life­time of being active; my body just knows the drill by now.

Any­way, this is what the sev­enth year on the Big Book will look like: dai­ly writ­ing and rewrit­ing; dai­ly nutri­tion and fit­ness; dai­ly sobri­ety and self-care.

Not a lot of dra­ma, to be sure. But as Flaubert once said, “The nov­el­ist needs to be reg­u­lar and order­ly in his every­day life so that he can be vio­lent and orig­i­nal on the page.”

And I’m doing that, my friends. By keep­ing my every­day life con­sis­tent and dra­ma-free, I’ve been able to put near­ly all of my life force into my writ­ing. As a result, the Big Book is good. I mean real­ly good. Some­times when I read sec­tions of it over again, I can’t believe I wrote it; it’s that good.

But today until Tues­day, no more Big Book. I’m giv­ing myself a much-need­ed three-day vaca­tion. A fit­ness and nutri­tion vaca­tion (and some Red Dead Redemp­tion 2; thanks for the XBONE, Jay!), with some self-care stuff thrown in there—maybe a mas­sage and a hair­cut.

Before I go, I’d like to point out one last thing. If this blog entry wasn’t as smooth-read­ing as oth­ers I’ve writ­ten in the past, or if it ram­bles or it con­tains mis­takes that you usu­al­ly don’t see in my writ­ing, that’s because I only wrote one draft of it. (In the past, revis­ing blog entries three times was not uncom­mon for me.) In oth­er words, this is me let­ting go of this need for per­fec­tion in all things. Sor­ry, folks, but it’s a f‑cking blog entry; I’m not writ­ing mul­ti­ple drafts of these things any­more; as you can see from every­thing I’ve writ­ten here, I’ve got a LOT of oth­er writ­ing to do, and I need to save my ener­gy for the Big Book.

Now, with that, it’s time to go exer­cise, and then, on Tues­day, Feb­ru­ary 1, it’s back to work.

You’ll hear from me again when I fin­ish Episode 3, which has the apt work­ing sub­ti­tle of Dan­ger Zone.

Tagged: Chris Orcutt, epic novel, Flaubert, Hemingway, magnum opus, novel writing, novel writing process, novelist, novelist's work day, Orcutt, rewriting, Tolstoy, writing, writing life, writing process

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