The Bomb in the Closet

If you want to get unstuck, sometimes you have to blow some shit up.

I’ve been working on a proposal for my third book for about a year and a half now, and I’ve arrived at the most difficult part of the process, at least for me. I have completed a lot of the initial research as well as some early interviews, and have written the sample chapter. Here’s where things get tricky: it’s time to write the table of contents and chapter summaries.

Book proposals are so hard. It’s like gazing down at a naked, unformed infant and attempting to paint a detailed portrait of the adult they will become. I know I will get some parts right, but I have to leave white space for everything I can’t know yet, all the ideas, learning, details and circumstances that will reveal themselves to me through the writing process. So much depends upon this small naked baby, but I can’t possibly know who he truly is yet.

I’ve been here twice before: the way I push through the uncertainty is to focus on the real purpose of this proposal. I have to help my editor see what I see. I don’t have to have every detail in focus yet, but I still have to show her that the finished product will be unique and useful and interesting and beautiful, whatever it looks like in the final telling.

For the past month or so, I’ve had a table of contents in mind, and at first it made a lot of sense to me from a storytelling and organizational perspective. I thought I had it. And I was quite pleased with myself.

But then, when I put my butt in the chair and committed the ideas to the paper (screen), it made no sense and worse, it was boring. It took all the life I’d created in the sample chapter and sucked it dry.

I kept at it, like a good little doobie. Butt in chair, head in game. I cut and pasted and turned it every which way and nope. Still not working.

I knit four hats and spent some time watching the new miniseries of The Stand with Tim.

And that’s when I remembered something Stephen King wrote about the crisis he encountered when writing the The Stand. He was so far in, over 500 pages in to a book that was suddenly dead in the water and he could not figure out how to save his “giant boondoggle of a manuscript.” On page 203 of On Writing, King writes,

For weeks I got exactly nowhere in my thinking—it all just seemed too hard, too fucking complex. I had run out too many plotlines, and they were in danger of becoming snarled. I circled the problem again and again, beat my fists on it, knocked my head against it…and then one day when I was thinking of nothing much at all, the answer came to me. It arrived whole and complete—gift-wrapped, you could say—in a single bright flash. I ran home and jotted it down on paper, the only time I’ve done such a thing, because I was terrified of forgetting.

[SPOILER ALERT: If you have not read or watched The Stand and might someday, stop here. Otherwise, proceed.]

King’s solution, his “quick, hard slash of the Gordian knot,” was a bomb in Nick Andros’s closet. King blew it all up and forced his reduced cast of characters to start over.

King continues:

If there’s any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects. I have heard it called “thinking about the curve,” and it’s that; I’ve heard it called “the over-logic",” and it’s that, too.

I did not have the sort of wide-angle clarity King refers to—I am, after all, talking about a table of contents, not a mass narrative exodus from Boulder to Vegas—but I did get there via similar means.

I blew it all up.

By “blew it up” I mean I saved my doomed TOC it in my “deleted fragments” document. Total destruction goes against my compulsive need to save all my ragged little wordy bits in case I need them.

It’s not like this is an altogether new lesson for me, as I’ve been here before: I try to shoehorn some overly precious idea I’ve fallen in love with (usually because I think it makes me sound clever or erudite) and it’s only when I knock (or blow) it off the page that I am able to let go of my own ego and find the fix.

The answers fell into that blank space this morning at a little before five AM, so rolled over in bed and emailed myself some notes. Five minutes later, I gave in and got out of bed so I could get down to the work of finishing the proposal so the book can begin.

Here’s to new beginnings.