Chapter 193: Story Without End. Amen

One of the most tired refrains about the writing life is that the joy comes not in the work itself but in having done it. As in: I like to have written. As in: I like to have flossed.

I appreciate how difficult and painful writing can feel. Like so many writers I know the relief we feel when the work is complete – a sensation akin to standing with your hands on your hips as you catch your breath and wipe your brow after a long and arduous run. Done, at last.

I also know that for all the huffing and puffing, for all those moments during a workout when you ask yourself why for the love of God am I doing this, there are also moments that feel good, and sometimes great.

The same holds true for writing, and at the risk of being so presumptuous as to tell you what you think, I suspect you feel it, too. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do it. So we kvetch, whine, and berate ourselves for our struggle to capture on the page what we’re trying to convey, all the while hoping – and, yes, knowing - that a moment of delight, pride, satisfaction, or exhilaration is only a word or two away.

It is not considered cool to say you love to write. This would suggest you are insufficiently miserable, which is how writers are supposed to sound – so much so that entire books are filled with quotes from famous writers expounding on their particular miseries.

For a long time I found those quotes useful, in that they gave me license – and the august company – to voice displeasure about work that, in truth, brought moments of joy unlike any other. So central is the idea – the belief – in the virtue of literary unhappiness, that it can inform how we think about our work as well as the work of those we admire.

I have just read Kiran Desai’s new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It is long – 670 pages – and it is amazing. The novel has been praised by critics and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, an award Desai won in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. Yet, the acclaim is not the prevailing narrative about the book. Rather, it is how long it took to write.

Twenty years.

When decades elapse between books, writers are said to have “disappeared,” which was the operative word in a New York Times profile of Desai: She Won the Booker Prize. Then She Disappeared for 20 Years.

Disappeared has sinister connotations. It can also suggest sloth, or extended writer’s block. But none of this appears to have been the case for Desai. She hadn’t vanished. Instead, she had embarked on a journey whose destination was unclear, and, as she told the Times, elusive. And yet, now that that journey is over it sounds very much as if there was no place else she’d have rather been.

“It was so much my entire world that life seems very thin on the other side of this book,” she said. “I don’t quite know what to do with myself. It was my companion all these years.”

“All these years, wherever I was, the book was with me, so to be without it and to not be intensely involved in the story, is unnerving,” she added. “To leave real life for artistic life felt very lucky.”

James Joyce spent 17 years writing Finnegan’s Wake. Donna Tartt spent 11 years on The Goldfinch, which was how long Junot Díaz spent writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Friends have spent years on their books, starting in one place before shifting direction and heading off in another.

I, on the other hand, came from the world of deadlines – hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and, in time, deadlines measured in years, though not too many. Like most nonfiction writers I knew, I took pride in delivering on time and unfairly judged those who could not. Being a pro meant finishing when you said you would, or when the contract demanded it. The longest I ever spent on a book was four years. It felt like an eternity.

In truth I found that prospect of spending too much time on a writing project terrifying. What if I lost my way and never found a path out? What if I fell down a bottomless rabbit hole? What painful lessons would I learn about myself if I found a reason to stop and delay starting again? Who was I without a deadline?

I was aware of the backstory before I started The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. That knowledge did not affect the pleasure I took in the reading. But as I found myself ever more caught up in Desai’s tale I would step back from being a reader and find unexpected inspiration as a writer.

This was hardly an easy book to write, Desai told the Times. At times she despaired at ever finishing. Seven years in, she decided to print out what she had: 5,000 pages. “I was horrified,” she said. “I hadn’t understood what a dire situation it was.”

In time she found a pathway, a device to pull all the disparate elements together. Only in retrospect does this approach make all the sense in the world.

I hadn’t known about those 5,000 pages before I read the book. I had not wanted to know about how she did it. I was less interested in technique as I read than I was in the idea of the immersive experience she allowed herself.

I wanted to imagine what that must have felt like, and what it might be like for me.

I have been working on a book for five years. I cannot say it has been a joy. It emerged from a story I wrote, a story so long that I assumed in 15,000 words I had said everything I needed to say about the loss and life of my best friend, who died in 1984. My editor asked “is there a book in this?” I told him that I believed there was but I did not know what it was.

We went back and forth, trying to place the book in the context of other books that touched on the same subjects, and more importantly what the core, animating question would be. We had spent a long time trying to sort this out when he finally sat me down and said, “you need to approach this book like a novelist.” Make it fiction? I asked. No, he replied, the only way to find your way in this book is to write it.

If he thought I’d be discouraged, he was wrong. I was thrilled at the prospect of just being able to write the book – and not a proposal that my agent would try to sell. I had written six books but I was also a terrible proposal writer; I found it hard to sell a book built on a story and characters I did not fully know.

I mentioned my editor’s idea to several nonfiction writer friends, sure they’d tell me that this was a very dumb suggestion. Instead they thought it sounded wonderful – imagine, they said, just being able to write, without worrying about the market, the deadline, or pleasing an agent and editor.

But that delight did not last. I felt unmoored and lost. I researched, gathering material that I hoped might reveal a path, a direction, a way. Finally, my wife and brother said I needed to start writing. I did. I started a Google doc. Then another and another. I wrote what came to mind, and where my imagination took me. I must have started a dozen docs, arranged by theme and place and character. And still, the book eluded me.

Having parted ways with my agent, I felt I needed to find another one, because this way I might impose some order on this process by giving my book, and myself, a home: an agent, an editor, a publisher – a safe harbor.

That would come, however, at a price: expectations. It was as if I was prepared to abandon the joy of driving alone on the open road and instead invite along a companion holding a map, saying turn left in 20 miles and you’ll need to step on it if we want to make it to the next stop before sundown.

Frightening as this journey was, I needed to do it by myself – which is really what my editor had told me.

So I am. It has taken me a long time to see what the book is about, and the question I need to answer. I have moved from docs to chapters. The book is beginning to make sense. I have a way to go. I do not know how long it will take. I struggled to accept this.

Then I read The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and what Kiran Desai had done, endured, suffered, and delighted in experiencing to bring her book to life.

I am giving myself license to disappear.

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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.