The Work of the Writer is a Brain Stretch and Never Truly Finished

Pain and gain — two sides of the same coin for a novelist

The alarm goes off at 3:50 AM, and I’m up and heading for the coffee maker. While that’s heating and brewing, I’m doing a full set of yoga stretches. Without fail, this routine is followed every morning and has for the last three years. By 4:20 AM The pen is in hand, and what is now the fifteenth notebook is getting some kind of writing. Sometimes stream of consciousness, sometimes a scene for whatever book I’m working on. The learned discipline is to write. It’s an easy shift to the computer keyboard to type a more finished version of the handwritten pages. Somewhere in this process, a Journal page is started and that will collect material throughout the day. I owe this process and discipline to Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way (25th Anniversary).

That usually gets me to about 9 and more coffee and breakfast. After that short break, I’m back with more review re-edits or really moving on to work on new chapters of Hawthorne Mythos — raw writing: Once I know basically everything about the scene, I can write it. That process takes me into the fantasyland of my book and I’m gone from the real world. The writing can take one hour or the rest of the day until about 4 PM. If there is lunch, then there is a nap for about thirty minutes. Sometimes I dream of a better solution to the scene.

I don’t use a real outline and usually, there is a fragment or a rough version of an event for the novel that exists in my morning writing notebooks. Through the process, I develop a chronological list of events that are very generic and like chapter goals. Quite often the characters themselves logically decide what is next or fear what might happen. There are stickum notes in many notebooks with material for the novel. More about that later.

I might add, there is another novel within those fifteen notebooks that I’ve tabbed with colored stickers, but nothing about content. It’s another science fiction story that I’m not touching on now.

On another day the new material has to be edited to the first draft, read out loud, then more rewriting and revising, or go to my writing group for review and comments. My housemates get corralled and I read several chapters out loud and get an instant reaction. If they fall asleep while I’m reading, that’s a message also.

See, being retired, I can work as a writer as long as I want. No matter how long I work, I still feel there’s more to do — especially writing. To get away from it, there is a walk during the sunset hour with friends. We catch up on all the day’s events and gossip. The trade winds are blowing, the skies are beautiful. With darkness check the moon, check Venus. Dinner is finished by seven PM, which means check the news and reading someone else’s writing. Boring stories put me to sleep, perchance to dream…

Gale Peterson (iguanamountain)

Belize, Central America