This Writer's Life

There's a phrase that strikes him as he lies in bed trying not to move so as to leave his wife sleeping. Sometimes, if he's lucky, it's a person or an incident from the forgotten past. But it strikes. If he lets it go, it may never come back and he is left with a migraine that will wake anyone's wife.

So he finally gets up and goes to the living room and sits in the darkness. No one he knows has this problem. Few have it.

Some nights he doesn't write a word. Just forms it in his mind or whispers the phrase, the line, the character, the story, maybe a plot. Some nights he starts putting what strikes him onto paper. Years ago he was refurbishing his duplex apartment and began outlining and plotting a novel on a wall. Blue was this character. It connected with red, that character and they produced conflict until chapter seventeen where he put a black vertical line. A yellow line threaded its way in and out of chapters. At the far end of the wall there were all sorts of lines converging together. No matter how many layers of paint he put over the novel, he could see the story. No one else could, of course, but it was his first book.

On this night he will put it down on paper and the whole mess begins.

Far into the night and into the next morning he wrestles with words. He thrashes at adjectives weeding them out of sentences. He stabs at adverbs and piles up the dead participles. He murders those darling phrases that sound as bad outloud in my whispered breath as they look on the paper. Should he keep the phrase to use later? He writes it down and circles it. Throw away nothing.

Beheads whole sentences. Juggles paragraphs. Screws the timeline, inserts lines like fresh victims. Are they needed? Doubts.

He writes into daylight on some nights. When it's there, like a blessing, he discovers a story and gets ready for work.

(from Cimarron, Fall 1993)