Windows of Writing

(I didn't have time to edit this before posting.)

It’s mid January and it’s finally snowing. As the afternoon dark gets rolling in, I finally have a break in the day to go for a walk. Acre is restless. He’s been stir crazy with the cold we’ve had. Montana dipping well below zero for the last few days has resulted in shorter walks than normal and he’s ready to run. We set out in the snow up the hill behind our house, slowly climbing to an overlook of the town and the valley’s below.

It’s been a quick January already. This was supposed to be a slow month in my mind, but it’s been anything but. After a busy holiday season at work I always look forward to a slow down so I can focus more on writing. I’m finishing up my second novel and need only a few weeks of dedicated time, ideally 4 days/week to finish it. But dedicated time comes only in waves and currently I’m still in a trough.

As I walk up the hill I think to myself what it would be like to have nothing but time. On one hand I am fully convinced that to be busy makes us more efficient. If you need something done, find a busy person to do it. But on the other hand, the writer hand, I can only imagine how efficient or thorough I’d be as a writer if I had nothing but writing as my day job. As it stands, I have a very full time business to run, which means writing is an hour here and there when time permits. I know a lot of writers like this. And some very prolific. For me, it is a constant state of juggling and prioritization. Kids. Work. Writing. Exercise. Sleep. I want and need them all.

But what if the work and writing were one? That is the day dream I’ve had for years. In my twenties I thought I’d get there by the time I was 30. In my 30’s I set the time frame to 40. I’m 50 now. And while I have more time than I did 10 years ago, it is still a challenge to find the time to focus in that deep focus way that is necessary for longer projects.

Writing a novel is a unique challenge in that it is not something you have to stay focused on for a few hours, or even a few weeks, but it is a months long endeavor. Years long in some cases. I say I’m finishing my second, but in reality it is my third. My very first one is something I’ll probably never show a soul. It’s long. Long winded. Weird. Feels heavily drugged. It involves MKULTRA and a factious character I hoped might someday have his own persona, Matternon Hallowchock. I’m not sure the story is tied together at all. Quite a bit of random. And so on. It was a challenge in writing though, and I took it seriously. I had a single idea I was working from and I set the goal of a 1000 words per day. And I did it. For a long time. I think part of that novel reads more like notes on itself, intertwined with the story. It is incredibly solipsistic. But I learned a lot during that process, one important factor being, I have a lot more to learn about writing. That was in my twenties.

I didn’t write my second novel for several more years in my 30’s. It came about after writing a story as a screenplay three times over. It went like this:

Our first daughter was born and I quickly imagined that I wanted to write a story for her. Her name is Gretel, and the idea struck me that it would be fun to re-write Hansel and Gretel, making Gretel the true hero of the story. This was before Disney remade Hansel and Gretel so it felt like a unique take. So I wrote the screenplay, feature film length based on the original story of Hansel and Gretel. I actually wrote the thing fairly quickly, in under a month if I recall correctly.

Then, while finishing that up I had another idea. What if I told the same story, but set it in modern times in north western Montana. I had a specific location in mind. The goal would be to make the movie there, on my friends property in Olney, MT, up Good Creek.

This screenplay was a lot of fun to write as it required coming up with an adaptation for modern times. Why would two kids get abandoned? How could any father do that? This was in 2015 (I think) and the solution I came up with was to have the father reacquaint with an old high school girlfriend that had just moved back to town from an unspecified time away, likely a prison/institution sort of thing. A virus breaks out wreaking havoc on the area. NW Montana gets cut off from the rest of the world. The woman, still in love with the father, kills his wife, the mother of the two children, but does so surreptitiously. She then drugs the father and convinces him to abandon his children. That in my mind was the only conceivable way it could play out.

The kids go on to spend the winter in survival mode and in the spring make plans to get their dad back, and to deal with the evil step mother. In doing so they happen upon a cabin deep in the woods. The evil step mother it turns out is a witch. And she has plans of eating any children she can. She captures the children and begins fattening them up. Gretel ends up saving them. It follows the original tale, but in the modern world.

But while writing this I had another idea. What if the old world, with its folk allure and classic forest darkness combined with the new world? What if the children found small windows/portals in the forest that carried them between these two worlds?

So I set out and wrote a third variation of the screenplay, during which I realized what I really wanted to do… I wanted to write it as a novel, a way I could explore the deeper mental nuances of the story.
So when I finished the third variation of the screenplay I set out to write the novel.

This would be my second novel. I gave myself the goal of writing it in one year. I marked my calendar. With young kids distraction is a real problem for writing. So I set up our Vanagon which was parked in the garage as my writing space. I put a space heater in it and used its small fold out table as my desk. During the year I’d retreat to the Vanagon whenever possible to work on it. It took one year and one month, exactly. This was 2018. Writing this one was unique because I had the story already written. All I had to do was convert the story from screenplay to novelistic prose, which was work, but with a map laid out, I never got stuck very long. I could always just push it into the next part, which I already knew.

Since then I’ve mapped out several more stories. Currently I am finishing up the Bison and the Magpie, a story of a young woman spending a summer in the hight mountains as a shepherd. My next novel will be based on a Christmas Tale, set in the polar region as a young man discovers he’s in line to be the next Santa Clause. After that I will either write the Adventures of Peep and Piper, two exploring parrots, OR The Last Night On Earth, a love story based on an idea I had a few weeks ago about a fateful night of two lovers just becoming reacquainted with one another.

And the point of this, if there is a point, is that stories live in us, and regardless if we have the perfect situation to write them or not, if we pick away at them, we can make progress. I do hope someday to make enough from writing to be able to focus even more on it, but even if I don’t, writing is part of my every single day. Life’s passions often go that way. We don’t know why we love what we do, but there are things we simply can not give up on, even if they do not “fit” with the rest of our lives. Writing is one of those for me. I have nothing to gain necessarily by doing this, but I can’t stand the thought of losing it. I have too many ideas I want to see on paper, stories I want to tell. The words come to me easily once I sit and take the time to make it happen, so I just continue day to day and when the windows offer up their time, I’m ready.

So why am I sharing this? I don’t exactly know. This blog is part mental warm up, selfishly for myself, but also, I hope, a place to inspire others who I know have things they want to work on, want to do, and don’t have time for. I am hoping to offer a glimpse of reason to keep going with those things, a reason to fight the urge to throw in the towel. Don’t. If you love a thing, even if it makes no sense, pursue it. Go for it. Do it. Who cares if no one ever sees it. Who cares if it never feels complete. The only way it will ever get there is if you keep pushing, and going. These projects likely take longer than you ever imagined. Here I am thirty years after I’d planned on being a successful writer, and while certainly not financially a “successful writer” I do have a ton of writing to show for my years, with the goal of even more in the years to come. So if you take anything from this, I hope it’s that you want to keep going with whatever you are working on. And share it. If you don’t know with whom to share it, send it to me. I’d love to check out your work.
It’s snowing. My phone rings. I’d planned on writing this piece and then diving into The Bison and the Magpie, but it’s work calling and I can’t ignore it. There is a broken part of on a roaster. I’m not getting my window of writing today. Maybe tonight. But that’s life. Onward and upward… Thanks for tuning in. I’d love to know what you are working on!