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Writerland Chapter 9: The Curious Joy of the 18 Hour Day
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
I asked my friend and colleague Dale Maharidge what he was working on and was immediately concerned because he only had five projects going. I knew that Dale was healthy and so assumed that he was either going on vacation or had discovered the gift of sloth. Dale does not typically work on five projects at once. More like eight. Or ten. Dale has recently discovered podcasting and that will surely mean a few more sleepless hours in a day that I shudder to imagine without naps and caffeine.
He has a new book just out – his eleventh – co-authored with his friend Jess Bruder, as well as the 30th anniversary re-release of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, And Their Children After Them, (with a new introduction and afterword) as well as a new novel he just sold, this one set in the weed country of northern California. A fictional podcast next on his plate will be set in Youngstown, Ohio, the benighted steel town that embodies so much of what of Dale has been writing about for a generation – the toll the Rust Belt’s decline has taken on the lives of people Dale knew growing up in Cleveland. Did I mention that Bruce Springsteen wrote the introduction to Dale’s book, Someplace Like America, having been inspired by his work to write the songs “Youngstown” and “The New Timer”?
Dale’s father – the subject of his book Finding Mulligan – was a machinist who came back from fighting in the Pacific never quite the man he was before he enlisted in the Marine Corps. There is not a lot of happy in Dale’s stories.
But that in no way suggests that Dale is a gloomy sort. Quite the opposite. Dale, who is 63, is among the most eager and effervescent writers I know, and I say this knowing he is planning a drive across the country to chronicle communities caught in ever harder times. Maybe for a magazine story. Maybe a book. No matter. He’s going, notebook in hand. Dale is not so much old school as he is Paleozoic. Paper. Pens. I do believe that were it within his power all writing would be done on Royal manual typewriters. He considers Word’s track changes a disease. He actually says this. He loves printouts, by the carload.
Dale’s office is down the hall from mine and when the door is open Dale is generally sitting with a student, his feet on the desk – Dale wears hiking boots and dresses in black and not in a way that is cool, at least not outside of Humboldt County, California, where until recently he lived when not teaching at Columbia – and he is just so eager to hear what that student is working on. In the years when I was editing but not writing Dale would ask when I was getting back to work.
“My mother used to say I worked too much,” he wrote when I asked about the joy he finds in working in ways that some might think border on lunacy. Yes, I have thought this. But mostly what I feel is admiration. Dale has a vision and it is the vision that matters. “She was my first reader, and she supported what I did, but she didn’t get it. Mom drove a school bus. For a tiny bit of time, I had blue-collar gigs. I know what work is--that stuff. What I do in front of a computer has never been work, even the 18-hour days.
“People say I’m productive. I don’t feel productive. That doesn’t count the projects that fizzled. I developed a method when I was a general assignment reporter at the Sacramento Bee. I wanted to publish books. I tell my students that newspapers and magazines are the editor’s medium. Books are the writer’s.
“That system meant getting placed on the 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift. When there wasn’t breaking news, I left the newsroom and walked five blocks home, where I promptly went to sleep, usually ‘til around 9. I made dinner and ate at my computer, writing. I’d work ‘til four in the morning, sometimes five. I’d sleep ‘til 10:40 a.m., get up, splash water on my face, walk to the office and start over. I did this for all of the 1980s. The reasoning for these two shifts? There was no way I could come home after reporting and writing all day and be able to write fresh. The nap reset my brain. I’d awaken raring to go.
“Today I use the same system. I have my day job--teaching--and the night job that begins after the nap.”
As to the work itself?
“I’ll write books until I die. I love the entire process, but mostly I really love the writing part. Writing doesn’t scare me like it appears to do for some people. I often quote Somerset Maugham: ‘There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.’ That quote applies to literary nonfiction as well. Each book has its own voice and it’s my job to find the voice for my material. I wish there was a shortcut. That’s why I say I don’t feel productive. I spent a lot of time on failed drafts. I’m like a mule. I plow, eyes on the ground, until the field is done. I wrote two quite shitty 100,000 drafts of the book that eventually became And Their Children After Them. Even after I found the voice, editors rejected the material, some with nasty comments. But I believed in the material and I made it work.
“Winning the Pulitzer was validation, but not as exhilarating as having an editor actually like and buy it. A myth among many who don’t know better is that editors are waiting for your next book. Hah. I’m a proven money-losing author. I guess writers who sell experience that kind of love. You don’t sell, you have to claw and scramble your way into the temple.
“I feel most alive when I’m immersed in the words at three in the morning. I follow the advice I give students. I never think of the whole book after I’m done outlining. I don’t even think of the chapter. I think of the tiny piece of the chapter that I’m trying to finesse that night. Otherwise you end up like the opossum: when scared, they flop over and drool. Thinking of the entire book does that to me.
“What many people see as pain--you have to see as salvation. Otherwise writing a book isn’t for you. Others have said that writing is cheaper than going to a shrink. It’s how I’ve figured out a lot about my life. But it’s more than this. It’s the simple act of creation. I love a journal entry Jack Kerouac made in 1949 after, in despair, he talked to his editor Bob Giroux about this. In part he wrote about this conversation, ‘I told him there were 'no laurel wreaths,' i.e., the poet did not find ecstasies in worldly fame, nor in fortune...He quite sensibly told me that the laurel wreath is worn only in the moment of writing.’
“I like to think of that at three in the morning.”
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. The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.