It's Like Laundry

Year end preparation is one of those jobs like carrying a particularly large load of dirty laundry to the basement.  Even if you use a big sheet and gather it all up inside, socks and underwear fall out the side, and you end up running back up the stairs to retrieve this lost item or that - and even still, at the end of the whites, you're guaranteed to find one bit left somewhere.  It will come clean in the jeans load, or the towel load, but you get a bit disgusted if something strays so far you don't find it till it's time to wash the towels you use on the dog's bed, or the throw rugs from the bathroom and hallway.  Real clothes just don't go in that cycle.  And you don't want to leave anyone's socks behind.

Over the years, I've learned that what works for me is to do a job at the macro level and then return to go over details, go over details, go over details and finally, only then, hit "go" on whatever it is.  What this does for me is to turn me into an expert.  Enough repetition over a structure, and I come to know it really well.  This is similar to the way I wrote the novel - with the exception that, really, by the time I had completed the manuscript, I still could never hope to know it so fully.

Timekeeping is an easy job.  Umpteen people and my share of stray socks - but it is so concrete it's not hard to familiarize myself with its mechanism.  I have it down to a science by the time I am done, the best method for me is running smoothly; even better, I can find detail and answer questions anyone might have pretty efficiently.

Writing a novel, though ... as much as I love it in the moment of creativity, the substance is so completely different.  In its way, a novel ISN'T substance, at all.  Sure, timekeeping is just bytes behind the scenes and pixels on my monitor - but chapters, scenes, individual phrases are even more slippery stuff.  They come, someday, to occupy fonts and pixels of their own; they may even (even in the judgment of an *author* - though this may be rare!) be "finished", that rarest of states, perhaps not even the goal of anyone pouring them out.

I can remember writing scenes - and yet, reading them is a revelation to me.  I do not recognize the words, their shape and rhythm and beauties - even when I know my greatest need in putting them down is to heed their rhythms, to form their shapes.  To hope for beauty, yes.  The reason I am so able to love my own work is that it is that, in a lot of ways - I don't know it.  It is fresh for me, and not strictly because I am just THAT energized by it and in love with the story I want to tell.  It's because, for me, even as intimate as I am with the point of creation, I am somehow remote as well.  This remoteness allows me to move into the POV of a character with whom I have nothing in common, on whom I could never legitimately lay claim to real familiarity.  It allows me to kill the darlings without horror nor anguish.  I love editing, I like the reduction and brush-clearing of revision.  Last night, late as I started and little as I did, I know that what I did do was minutely, fundamentally important.  I clipped the research without regret, because as much as I like the story it had to tell:  it was not a part of the story at HAND.  I found passivity and turned it active; I noticed a couple sentences that could be made more immediate.  It's small stuff - and it's mostly cutting - but it serves something I agreed to stewardship of a long time ago.

Apparently, I really meant it.  I know how to commit.


I'm actually no less committed to the laundry - or to my job, even admitting that sometimes I too am capable of leaving a loose end.  My days are spent making sure OTHER people's days can be spent on other things.  I take great pride in how good I have become at this, and frankly enjoy the hell out of my work.  It doesn't bore me.  It's not beneath me.  I'm wildly necessary, and fully appreciated.  Who could ask for more?


***


It occurs to me regularly that the work of an author - querying, editing, maintaining some kind of visibility online, networking, even the shilling, to a degree - is remarkably well suited to the skills I've honed in my job.  I wonder sometimes what the proportion of working novelists is who have worked administratively at some point - heh.  For me, the marriage is almost inconceivably blissful.  And yet - who thinks of fancy novelists and boring old admins in the same breath ... ?

Ah but that is me.  I love my contradictions.  I contain MULTITUDES.  Right down to the hideous platitudes.