Mechanical Difficulties
Hey, I'm only a week behind schedule. Maybe I'll actually recall how to do this blog-posting-on-a-regular-basis thing.
Three weeks ago I drove to Calgary, which is just over 800 km (500 mi) from my home. I was driving an 83 km stretch (52 mi) where there is absolutely nothing along the highway except logging and oil & gas site access roads, when I felt a slight hesitation on a hill. Nothing to worry about.
But then, a few kilometres later, I felt it again. Twice can be a coincidence, can’t it?
Ha. You know where this is going. I was 20 km (12.5 mi) from the town of Whitecourt when the trouble turned serious. My car lost the ability to accelerate. Going uphill - and there are a lot of them on this road - the car would decelerate to barely 50 kph (30 mph), and when we topped the rise, pressing the gas did nothing. The car would slowly, painfully creep back up to 100 kph. And the process would start over.
(Imagine this scene, only with lots of snow.)
I was afraid to stop the car - it might not start again. That stretch of road has very hit-and-miss reception for cellphones and far fewer people stop to help stranded motorists these days because (I’m guessing) they assume everyone has a cellphone. A classic Catch-22 that I didn’t want to test. So I lurched on, making it into Whitecourt without the car exploding or seizing up. The kind folks at the Canadian Tire were having a slow day and had me back on the road in less than ninety minutes. (For those who might be mechanically-inclined, the air intake and filter were completely clogged with snow, courtesy of a snowstorm and lots of semis kicking up even more snow.)
My takeaway from this: who knew the air intake could clog up like that or that it could so direly affect the car’s performance? My other takeaway is that writing can be like that little driving misadventure. Sometimes our writing momentum slows, even threatens to stall. What should we do? I’m of the opinion that we should press on, keep churning out that first draft, keep pushing through until we reach the end. And when we do reach the end, we can be confident that the manuscript can be saved because it’s going to be looked at by a great mechanic, aka our editor. (I’m making the assumption here that everyone uses an editor, whether he or she is a professional who bills you, or a very knowledgeable friend/writer who doesn’t.)
Stalling out can be disastrous for a manuscript, because sometimes we never get back to it. Maybe some other shiny idea comes along. Maybe life gets in the way. Okay, so sometimes an idea is a total dead end, but that is usually evident well before the manuscript is half done. To keep the metaphor going, my car trouble happened at the ¾ mark between two towns, I would have turned around if I’d been at the ¼ mark. So if that manuscript is one-quarter done and your momentum falters then take a long hard look at the idea and see if it needs reworking, but if the manuscript is three-quarters finished, don’t let a loss of momentum stop you from being able to type “The End.” Push through, slowly, ever so slowly, until you type that very last page.
After all, editing is an essential part of the writing process. And a blank page cannot be edited.
Three weeks ago I drove to Calgary, which is just over 800 km (500 mi) from my home. I was driving an 83 km stretch (52 mi) where there is absolutely nothing along the highway except logging and oil & gas site access roads, when I felt a slight hesitation on a hill. Nothing to worry about.
But then, a few kilometres later, I felt it again. Twice can be a coincidence, can’t it?
Ha. You know where this is going. I was 20 km (12.5 mi) from the town of Whitecourt when the trouble turned serious. My car lost the ability to accelerate. Going uphill - and there are a lot of them on this road - the car would decelerate to barely 50 kph (30 mph), and when we topped the rise, pressing the gas did nothing. The car would slowly, painfully creep back up to 100 kph. And the process would start over.
(Imagine this scene, only with lots of snow.)
I was afraid to stop the car - it might not start again. That stretch of road has very hit-and-miss reception for cellphones and far fewer people stop to help stranded motorists these days because (I’m guessing) they assume everyone has a cellphone. A classic Catch-22 that I didn’t want to test. So I lurched on, making it into Whitecourt without the car exploding or seizing up. The kind folks at the Canadian Tire were having a slow day and had me back on the road in less than ninety minutes. (For those who might be mechanically-inclined, the air intake and filter were completely clogged with snow, courtesy of a snowstorm and lots of semis kicking up even more snow.)
My takeaway from this: who knew the air intake could clog up like that or that it could so direly affect the car’s performance? My other takeaway is that writing can be like that little driving misadventure. Sometimes our writing momentum slows, even threatens to stall. What should we do? I’m of the opinion that we should press on, keep churning out that first draft, keep pushing through until we reach the end. And when we do reach the end, we can be confident that the manuscript can be saved because it’s going to be looked at by a great mechanic, aka our editor. (I’m making the assumption here that everyone uses an editor, whether he or she is a professional who bills you, or a very knowledgeable friend/writer who doesn’t.)
Stalling out can be disastrous for a manuscript, because sometimes we never get back to it. Maybe some other shiny idea comes along. Maybe life gets in the way. Okay, so sometimes an idea is a total dead end, but that is usually evident well before the manuscript is half done. To keep the metaphor going, my car trouble happened at the ¾ mark between two towns, I would have turned around if I’d been at the ¼ mark. So if that manuscript is one-quarter done and your momentum falters then take a long hard look at the idea and see if it needs reworking, but if the manuscript is three-quarters finished, don’t let a loss of momentum stop you from being able to type “The End.” Push through, slowly, ever so slowly, until you type that very last page.
After all, editing is an essential part of the writing process. And a blank page cannot be edited.