WIn John Ehle's novel, The Road, Weatherby Wright is driven by a single-minded pursuit to build a railroad through the mountains of western North Carolina. Right away, an engine and the engineer inside it are sucked into a mud sluice. There is a fire, a devastating cave-in, a pneumonia epidemic, and obstacles throughout the novel that are hard to imagine, let alone overcome. Weatherby himself is marked by the mountain when he falls and breaks a leg and is forced to spend the night in a cave infested with snakes. For a time, he takes to his sickbed and wishes he could be shut of the road, once and for all. It's a great burden; his conscience bothers him. The road has taken the lives of men and brutes alike, and will take many more. Reluctantly, he returns but the morale of the convict laborers is low. Some resent Weatherby for sending them into the caves and tunnels when he himself is too scared to enter them. They are making little to no progress. He needs the engine in another location, four miles up the mountain, but there is no way to get it there. Another character named Cumberland muses about the possibility of dismantling the engine and re-assembling it at the other site, but Weatherby says it would take too long. The group recalls the heroic efforts of the men pulling the first engine out of the mud sluice by hand. Would it be possible, Cumberland asks, to pull the engine up the mountain to the other site? Yes, Weatherby says, and they undertake the impossible task of pulling the machine four miles up the untamed mountain. As they attempt to drag the engine over a weak bridge, the big power wheel breaks through the planks and threatens to topple the whole machine over into the creek. "It takes a strong stomach if a man's to build a road," Weatherby tells the new engineer. "Everything fails a time or two before it succeeds."
So it is with writing. I like this idea of having a strong stomach to accomplish something gargantuan and treacherous and important like building a road or living a life or writing a novel. When I think of my own life, I'm grateful for every heartache, every bad decision I've made.
In an earlier chapter of the novel, Weatherby awaits news about the number of deaths from a cave-in of one of the tunnels he's building through the mountain. Ehle writes: "Weatherby ate nothing, nor did Henry Anna. Her father ate as much as usual. 'It brings us up short agin the wall, don't it?' he said, chewing on the food greedily. 'We go through life not thinking about it, and suddenly we're up agin it, and it gives me heartburn. Don't death give you heartburn, Weatherby?'"
Strangely, I remember just this same kind of experience when my father was dying, a sharp pain in my stomach like none I've ever experienced before or since. A pain that pulled me inside myself and out of the hospital conference room where the doctors were delivering us news I didn't want to believe. I was virtually incapacitated.
A sour stomach can make it impossible for us to write, too. I'm not talking about butterflies. We ought to be smitten with our work and feel a little fluttery inside when we think about it or sit down to it. I'm talking about that pit you sometimes feel in your stomach when someone asks how the novel's coming along, that acid reflux that creeps up on you as you stare at the blank page, that nervous bowel that threatens to embarrass and utterly destroy you.
As creative types, we are perhaps better at imagining our impending doom than others. We foretell in gory detail the dangers ahead, the rejections, the laughter and scorn, the wasted years of our lives, the drinking and dissolution of our marriages, the estranged children left to raise themselves while we finish the damn novel, the realization 300 pages in that we still don't have a friggin' clue where we are going.
A few years ago, I had a once in a lifetime chance to see a coral reef, purportedly, the second most beautiful reef in the world. Had I known we'd be trailed by a "curious" barracuda or that I would become confused and ascend too quickly and possibly get the bends or be left stranded in the ocean like that couple in Open Water, I would never ever have even considered doing it, let alone taken those quick lessons in the pool.
To write a novel, you have to get in the water knowing it's teeming with wild creatures with barbed tails and serrated teeth and jaws that unhinge, knowing you're only an adequate swimmer but hoping you'll get stronger with each incoming (or outgoing!) wave. Realizing you might be left stranded, or kidnapped by Somali pirates demanding a ransom you know you're not worth. To stick with the road metaphor, you have to anticipate the bears and wolves and snakes, the laurel slicks that twist you up and trap you fast, the mud slides and cave-ins.
Your novel, sooner or later, will very likely make you sick at your stomach. You'll have to toss out hundreds of pages of drek. You'll have to scrap that outline you've been holding to fast or realize three drafts later, you've needed one all along. You'll have to kill characters and reward others who don't deserve it. The whole thing might become diseased and need to be burned. You might finish it and lose it on the subway. You might finish it and wish you'd lost it on the subway. You might show it to an agent who tells you it's writers like you who are to blame for global warming (all that wasting of paper).
When that happens, think of Weatherby. Tell yourself, "I'm building a road" and remind yourself that "everything fails a time or two before it succeeds." Expect casualties, anticipate set-backs, learn to think on your feet, draw up new plans, strategize with trusted confidants, scrap whatever's not working, but persevere. You can never tell how close you are to breaking through until it's done.
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