Binderama60for60

I’ve made a living as a writer, mostly PR, advertising and such. Like many in my trade, I’ve entertained a side hustle as a screenwriter and novelist. Over the years, I’ve penned a few feature-length scripts and a couple of sitcoms on spec, as well as a business-memoir-ish book that I self-published a few years ago. The novel still eludes me. Like it did my Father before me.

I did have a go at it. Early in my SoCal “residency” I started getting the visions, the vapors, something was brewing. Characters and scenarios began visiting me. They moved in and demanded more and more attention. They were determined, colluding to be set loose onto the page.

And then, it happened.

When you are truly ready to start writing anything, big or small, you can’t help it. It’s like trying to manage the night-spins in bed: you feel it coming, you deny it, you fight it back, and then you cover your mouth and race to the nearest receptacle you can find. Then it comes out and in all directions.

That’s how it happened for me. In a matter of weeks, I had written half a novel. 170+ pages. It came fast and furious, it was thrilling, fulfilling, unstoppable. I smoked three packs a day, swilled coffee and Jim Beam, filled page after page, 10 hours a day. I was living like a real novelist!

The characters formed across those pages, relationships and motives developed and coalesced. There was structure and voice. It was working.

And then…

…I thought, let’s take a little break.

Let’s see what we’ve got here. Maybe do a little editing, stroke some details for a more robust climax and payoff. Make sure the characters are still relatable and have continuity. Maybe just reassure myself about all the goodness that’s already on the page.

Here is my advice if you aspire to write a novel, coming from someone who has not written a novel:…

…finish it.

The world is full of half-finished novels. Apparently, there was room for one more.

Thing is, I knew how I wanted the second half to go in order to arrive at the final outcome. I just needed to get there.

We were a mess.

Me and the book.

While it rested, I took time to step away and take some paying work. I sent the pages to friends I respected and a few editors I had connections with. The friends were hugely complimentary and supportive. But they also had notes and qualms. All valid. The professionals were rightfully objective: too much repetition, too dense, and why do I care?

If I was looking for an excuse to abandon the project, I found it. A relief: I wouldn’t have to put myself back together.

Didn’t happen.

A few years after I shelved the project, I was chatting with my therapist and the book came up. He poked a bit. I’m not sure whether he said it or I surmised it, but it was a revelation.

The first half of the book had introduced a half-dozen characters and situations. I realized then that they had all been divined by different, very real facets of me. My past, my traits, my ethics, morals, regrets and tastes. My contradictions and regrets.

To build the characters, I had torn myself and my psyche into a half-dozen pieces, compartments, silos. That might be how novels get written, but I wouldn’t know.

I had created drama and conflict the same way the ego and the id manage to coexist inside us, fomenting a raging balance on the daily. I’m sure there’s a course you could take if you want to learn more. Anyway, here were the main characters I was working with, each inspired by a piece of me:

• Accomplished underachiever. Capable and creative but unsatisfied. A wanderer with no real place
• High-liver. A man of means with an appetite to squander it; he gets his comeuppance early
• Soap opera starlet. Beautiful, overly-sweet and mildly-intelligent
• A spiraling obsessive-compulsive barreling towards a marriage she doesn’t want…
• …to a politician and poseur who can’t say no
• Invisible high-achiever with big plans that he keeps to himself; a well-intentioned defeatist

There were some unscrupulous tinges as well, along with a few lusty cravings, vapid aspirations and people in over their heads. Plus, a rusted Tilt-a-Whirl, Kmart, Yo Yo Ma, Pearl Jam, the Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise, a nudist colony, a man with a shotgun shooting golfballs like skeet shells, and a coastal estate called Bathwater.

From the beginning, I knew how the book would flow: these disparate friends and strangers would come together to build a roller coaster in the middle of nowhere. All I had to do in the second half, in order to build the roller coaster and finish my novel, was to put myself back together. To make me work.

At that point in my life (and in the book), I didn’t know how to make that happen.

The Churn

The working title The Churn comes from one of the characters suffering a panic attack while watching a demonstration of butter-making at Colonial Williamsburg. I’d also considered naming the roller coaster The Churn. Never got there. Obviously, Churn also conveys the realities of life and the challenges of creating.

Epilogue

A friend and colleague reacted to one of the early 60|60 posts with a phrase that sounded distantly familiar: “you contain multitudes.” It’s from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Admittedly I had not read it. So I did, well a bit of it anyway. I noticed similarities to the concept of 60|60, but, you know, his was a lot better.

I also took her comment as a helluva compliment. Trying to write the novel helped me to get to 60|60 in order to further explore and eventually celebrate my multitudes. Long after The Churn, the multitudes still clash on occasion; it can be dramatic, exciting and life-affirming. Sometimes entertaining.

To me (and maybe you), 60|60 feels like navel-gazing on steroids. My advice, as we do all have navels: it’s okay to take a glance downward and inward every so often. Feels good.

Come to think of it, navels and novels sound a lot alike. There might be something there!

Epilogue II

Like most writers, I still think I have a novel in me. Stand back.