This month as I began working in earnest on a book-length memoir about my relationship with my father, has been a frustrating one. Over the last four years I’ve filled four notebooks with free writes and written several small parts of the project, but only now do I have the time to give it my full attention. Perhaps because those four years have been filled with so many interruptions, now I find myself struggling with a mighty case of impatience. I’m geared up for his project. I want the entire book to be drafted, the first three chapters polished to a fine sheen, and the proposal written and sent out to a handful of carefully chosen agents – yesterday.
It should come as no surprise to me that my impatience feels unbearable. After all this Middle English word does come from the Latin "in", which means "not", and “pati”, which means "to suffer" or "to bear." After wallowing in self pity at the fact that writing is such arduous work and after seeing the dark circles beneath my eyes in the mirror, I’ve had to ask myself why the process of transforming a closely held vision onto paper feels like such a tedious agony. I’ve also had to figure out how I can more willingly bear it.
As most solutions tend to be, the answer to my current creative crisis was right in front of my nose. It came in the form of an old snapshot of my father sitting on a Ford tractor. He’s looking back at the two-bottom Dearborn plow hitched behind him, ready to break ground. As the memories flooded back, I began to see that free writes and first drafts are very different and that for me, writing a substantial first draft is a heck of a lot like plowing.
Spring plowing was serious business. Before my father could turn the earth, he first spent hours setting the plow. He had to level it from front to back and from side to side and then make sure the drawbar was at the proper height. He adjusted the depth of the colters that would slice through the sod and the position of the moldboards that would turn the strip of earth to make a furrow. And finally he had to make sure the tail wheel, which carried most of the plow’s weight, was right or the plow would drift and wobble from side to side.
Before the carefully set plow touched the soil, Dad had to plan his plowing pattern in order to cut down the number of dead furrows Œ small ditches created with the soil from two adjoining furrows is turned in opposite directions. He had to avoid making ridges altogether. For my father, who could have easily won a blue ribbon for impatience, all this painstaking preparation must have been pure torture. But he couldn’t afford to view it as busy work and wallow in the luxury of resentment, not if he wanted to have corn or beans or wheat to sell at the elevator come fall.
All this preparation was essential because when he finally lowered the plow and made the first furrow in a field, he couldn’t look back. He set his mark by tying a strip he’d torn from on old white sheet onto the brush that grew along the fencerow at the far side of the field and looked straight ahead, aiming for that rag as he stuck out across the field. If he let himself become distracted by gazing over his shoulder or thinking ahead, the furrow would turn out crooked.
In addition to being serious business, plowing was slow business, too. The ground with its tangled roots of last year’s crop, resisted the blades. And even though it looked to my childish eyes like my father had it easy, sitting on that tractor seat for hours at a time, the tractor bumped and jolted constantly. By the end of the day he was exhausted.
If I really want to grow this book then I have to approach it with the patience of a farmer and acknowledge that a first draft is slow and serious business. All those free writes I did were absolutely necessary, but now the time for erratically zipping back and forth wherever my random memories take me is over. It’s time for me to focus and to gear down.
The packed earth of my experience must be broken and turned into deep, straight furrows before it will yield to the further working of revision. In order to plow this potentially fertile loam, I need to be willing to set the plow, set my mark and move deliberately toward that at a measured pace. To do anything less means I’ll only scratch the surface.
We writers tend to be very perceptive people. We struggle with problems in our writing process, but our awareness gifts us with the ability to see the solutions to those problems. Because we also tend to be very busy people, once the crisis has passed and we no longer feel discomfort, we often forget those wonderful insights just as promptly as we learned them.
This month write about a helpful insight that came to you during one of the darkest hours of your writing process. Keep what you’ve written for future reference. Consider keeping a log of your insights about writing to use as a resource when you have difficulty writing.