People are always telling me they want to write a book, that they just need to sit down and write it out. All I can say to that is, godspeed.
I’ve written nine or ten books, depending on how you count. Several of them are long books. But even the relatively short ones have been a kind of splendid agony, if I may paraphrase Mr. Jefferson. You not only have to write the thing, which is trouble enough, but then you have to revise, fact check, let some perfect stranger, a copy editor, stomp all over your favorite passages insisting on this or that change. Assuming you can endure all of that, then you wait about a year to see it in print. That’s when the fun begins. Either the book sinks like a sack or bricks and makes absolutely no ripple in the great world or the critics (who have never written a pamphlet and couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag) come bulldozing in either to totally miss the point or to blame you for not writing the book they would have written, except, hey they have never written a book and never will.
Sounds like fun, huh?
For a couple of years I have wanted to write a book of essays about my beloved North Dakota. Wow, that’s what the world needs, a book about the last and least visited state, North Dakota, a place even one of the state’s greatest individuals, Eric Sevareid of CBS news, called “a large rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind.” Terrific. My daughter, who is my greatest fan, well, second greatest after my new superfan Martha of Georgia, said, “Dad, may I make a suggestion?” As you know, nothing good ever comes after that sentence. My daughter said, “Maybe don’t use the word North Dakota in the title, papa. Why not give the book a chance?”
So, let’s review. I’m writing a book that nobody wants to read, particularly my fellow North Dakotans, who are humble and incredibly modest, but who don’t particularly want to be criticized, even by someone who is one of them and who loves the state with all of his heart. If you write anything like the truth, I can tell you from experience that some people are going to get a little, let’s call it edgy.
My scheduler Nancy, who tries to look out for my interests, and to protect me from myself, says things like, “You know you can earn more money by giving a single lecture somewhere than you will ever earn from writing this book. In fact,” she says, “you actually lose money by writing books, because the cost of ink and paper alone comes to more than all the royalties.”
Well, I can tell you that I am going to persevere and finish this book, and see it through publication. Aside from my book on The Character of Meriwether Lewis, I think this may be the most important thing I will ever write.
So how do you write a book? It’s a little like the cliché about mountain climbing. How do you climb Mount Fuji. Answer, one step at a time. You write a book by tapping out sentences on a laptop computer. About twenty thousand of them. Noun verb noun. Noun verb adjective noun. I saw a feature recently about one of America’s greatest biographers, Robert Caro, the author of (so far) four fat volumes on Lyndon Baines Johnson. He’s 83, and he is racing the clock of human mortality to finish what will be the definitive biography of LBJ and one of the greats works of American biography. He said on the news report that in his will he has explicitly ruled out the possibility that someone else would finish the fifth and last volume if he should fall short. He is aware, probably, that William Manchester died before he could finish his biography of Winston Churchill. A superfan and whippersnapper named Paul Reid had to wrap up volume three. Unfortunately, you can literally recognize the moment where Manchester left off and the able (but no genius) Paul Reid took over. Caro writes in longhand first, then types his revisions on a Smith Corona typewriter, and finally turns over the typescript to a cleric of some sort who keys it into Microsoft Word. Hard to argue with so gifted a writer and biographer, but I’d say, might want to change to a more efficient method of getting words on paper, Mr. Caro, if you mean to finish.
This past weekend, just back from the coastal islands of south Georgia, I did virtually nothing but write a key chapter of my North Dakota book. I have not quite finished it, and it is by now far too long, but I probably wrote 7,000 words from the time I left the Jacksonville, Florida, airport mid-day Friday, until twenty minutes ago on Sunday when I set it aside to write this Jefferson Watch essay. I’m exhausted in all sorts of ways. And at key moments over the last two months I have fallen into all varieties of depression, frustration, insecurity, and self-pity. The following sentences have been rattling through my head: “I have no talent.” “I have absolutely nothing to say.” “Nobody wants to know what I think.” “The yellow pages under podiatry are more interesting than this.” I’d rather have root canal every hour for the rest of my life than write this book.” “Blah blah blah Lawrence Welk.” “If I publish this book I’m going to have to live in the Unabomber’s cabin in Lincoln, Montana.” And so on.
I estimate that I’m approximately 45,000 words into this book, which will top out probably at 125,000 words before I finally say “uncle.” My plan is to be finished by Thanksgiving. I’ve loved North Dakota all of my life and it is one of the handful of things I think about and brood over virtually every day. I know what I want to say, and I think it amounts to a contribution to the history and culture of North Dakota. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to transfer my half-baked thoughts to paper.
Now that I am this far in, the book has essentially taken over my life. No hour goes by without my thinking about some chapter, some theme, some sentence, some phrase, some fact that I need to track down, some fact I need to check or recheck, some book or article I need to consult. If I wake up in the night now, I cannot get back to sleep. At that point I have to get up and write at least a couple of sentences or I’m up for the rest of the night. At the end of a day of writing, I feel clammy the way you do after a flight from New Zealand. At the end of a day of writing, I just want to watch old reruns of the Three Stooges and eat pizza or puffy Cheetos.
I waste a lot of paper printing out drafts. My MO is to write until I am so numb that I don’t know how to spell the word “circus” or “wonton.” Then I take a break, usually to read something entirely unrelated. Later I print out the draft and either go to a coffeehouse or bar where I read through what I have written, penciling in corrections and entirely new sentences. But by then my handwriting is so broken down by fatigue that if I don’t key those corrections in first thing the next morning, I may as well be reading a Turkish manuscript. One day I change two sentences and some punctuation in chapter three, and two days later I change it back without even knowing what I had written the first time.
I woke up this morning roaring to write. Aside from a couple of breaks and an errand or two, I wrote all day. In a few moments of dementia over the past few weeks I have thought, what if this book winds up making a difference? What if lots of North Dakotans (and others) read it, and it helps to create a statewide or regional conversation about the future of the badlands, the identity of a former farm state like North Dakota, how energy development could be pursued with a genuine respect for the land, for places sacred to Native Americans, for the cultural heritage of my fellow Dakota citizens? And then I snap out of it and realize that I have absolutely nothing to say.
By godfrey but this is fun.
People are always telling me they want to write a book, that they just need to sit down and write it out. All I can say to that is, godspeed.