Writing the book.

It took me a long time to write the book. I began in 2000 and by the time I had the first draft ready, it was 2003. Of course it wasn’t like I was writing daily and events in my life (job changes, childbirth, unemployment) gave my writing an “episodic-ness” similar to the stutter and sputter of an old motorcycle. I remember writing the first four chapters and then having to discard my old computer because it kept crashing on me. With my usual carelessness I hadn’t saved the latest version of the chapters on any storage device and so I performed emergency surgery on the old computer and lobotomized the hard drive with plans to anastomose it to the next computer we had bought. This surgery wasn’t without its share of anguish. The newer operating system was having trouble recognizing the file, and I was close to pulling my hair out. I almost had to junk a computer before finally being able to dig into that block of bytes and retrieve my precious thoughts.

When I began writing, I had no idea how the story would end. I neither had a plot laid out nor did the words just fall into place. It took time, effort, some moments of pure inspiration and a lot of desk-warming and daydreaming to conjure up all that I wanted to put down on paper. Slowly but surely sentences began to string together, describing events that began to flow into each other. A bout of inspiration here, an interesting news clip there — all began to fit… often like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, often like a mismatched couple. The one thing that surely helped in this process was re-writing the writing. When I look at my earlier drafts I am shocked at the terrible quality of my work. I am amazed that I thought someone would publish such tripe. If I were a publisher I would have rejected my own writing. It is only through the process of doing the words and the sentences over and over again that I’ve put together something that I’m at least not ashamed of. Which is what brings me to the realization that for people like me with marginal talent it takes a lot of effort to rise to the standards of “publication worthiness”. Unless you are extraordinarily gifted (like Jhumpa Lahiri) or extraordinarily lucky (like … oh well, we won’t name names) the path to publication is potholed with failure, rejection, dejection, remorse, regret and a boat load of angst. I don’t mean to sound negative… I’m just describing my experiences. Maybe you’ll be luckier. But the bottom line is that if you have a tiny bit of luck on your side, persistence pays. Someone, somewhere, sometime, somehow may like something in your story or notice something in your sentences or draw visions of greenbacks from the way you use the English language and presto… you are in business!