Writing is a lonely existence. At the moment mine is lonelier than usual – my wife is being a mensch, living with a friend who just lost her husband – but it’s a fleeting and tolerable kind of solitude. We’re a unique pair. We prefer shared silence over continuous chatter, and the time apart has made us more talkative when we do connect.
Meanwhile I’m free to design my days as I see fit. Life without a boss has real flexibility – eating ice cream at midnight, for instance – and a pattern of regular writing is emerging.
I am not a plodder, a plotter, or a pantser. Type-casting would be difficult.
My process has a peculiar gravity to it. Long drafts come without much difficulty, partly because I have a huge backlog of blog posts and journal entries to seed from. I never have to look far for a good idea or a poetic phrase. The habit is to write a complete draft, sit with it a good long while, find the ill-fitting parts and rough transitions, collapse all the wrongness into a single critique of the whole thing, and start again – keeping the best ideas but blending them with a new direction.
The message refines. The presentation morphs. Eventually there’s a story worth telling.
With the book, I’ve finally found stable ground. The bones of a publishable draft are emerging.
The material started as a rocket-science-for-everyday-use manifesto. The geek factor was approximately nine thousand percent too high. Good principles, wrong wrapper.
Late yesterday afternoon I stumbled onto an idea that changed everything: embed heartfelt fiction to make the material accessible.
Enter Maria Dominguez – a New Orleans housewife trying to survive the frontal boundary that is Thanksgiving. I opened with a compressed day-of scene: good Catholic family, feuding cousins, missing ingredients, a critical mother-in-law, a new girlfriend who keeps kosher wading into her first ham-on-Thanksgiving family.
And one undefrosted turkey.
When I reread the scene draft, I cried. Then I laughed harder than I expected.
That’s the signal. That’s when you know you’ve found it – when the material does something to you before it does anything to a reader.
Engineering is just organized problem-solving with the emotion left in. Getting through a complex day – the logistics, the small disasters, the people who love each other badly – that’s exactly the kind of problem engineering can handle. With the right amount of love and compassion mixed in, it turns out rocket science is just Thanksgiving with better documentation.
Start small. Build a little at a time. That’s principle one. Maria’s turkey is proof it works.