Sort of. I have just completed a marathon session (about four weeks straight) of disassembling and revising a novel I thought I’d completed years ago. The rewrite came at a request. I may have news, but not now. That’s for later.
I don’t know about others, but when I finish a big project like that, I tend to have a day or two of complete confusion. I don’t know what to do with myself. For several years, I cleaned house afterward, which occupied the time I might spend brooding, used whatever left-over energy from the writing process, and performed a domestically useful job. But I’ve been home now for almost two years, the house is fairly clean as a matter of course, which leaves only major jobs to do (my office ceiling needs repair, I have to build new bookshelves again, and the garage still requires attention) and I frankly don’t want to do any of that.
After the work is done, I tend to feel depressed. Not gloomy, just enervated. This morning I straightened out my desk, cleaned up some unused files on the computer, and puttered. I have to walk the dog yet and see about lunch. Much of the day will be spent waiting.
Waiting for what? Good question. There are phone calls I’m waiting for, but none specifically for today. Emails as well. I came close, I think, to botching something yesterday of some importance because I got tired of waiting. Waiting requires a state of mind I do not possess. I can act like I possess it, play-act the role of the calm, confident individual to whom things will, by dint of zen gravitas, inevitably come. But that’s not me, not really, not ever.
I have a model kit that has been waiting for me to build it for several years now. Yes, I said years. I acquired it because I had it as a kid and really liked it—the H.M.S. Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship—but I didn’t build it then.
There were three model kits I clearly remember having as a child that I did not assemble. My dad did. There was a balsa wood and paper bi-plane that actually flew (a Jennie, if I recall correctly); a beautiful 1933 Mercedes Benz touring car; and the Victory. I didn’t build them because my dad wanted to see them “done right.” So he built them while I watched.
Well, watched some of the time.
Admittedly, he did an amazing job on all three. When he finished, they were spectacular. He even did the rigging on the Victory with black thread (the kit at the time did not include the rigging, but he found a guide for how it should look). I really liked that ship. So I always thought I’d someday get that kit and build it myself. Just to say I’d done it.
I’m a sloppy craftsman. I admit it. I have no patience for fine, meticulous detail work. And model kits used to puzzle me no end because I have never found joy in the actual building, which is what you’re supposed to discover. The “purpose” of such things is to teach the appreciation of assemblage, of patience, of doing a job of some duration and doing it well.
Screw that, I wanted the finished product. I would probably have been happier if I could have bought the damn things already completed. But they didn’t come that way, so…
My models were always characterized by poor joins, glue runs, and, if I painted them, bad finish. But I was happy—I had the thing itself!
So why am I a writer? (Or a photographer, for that matter?)
Because I want the finished product and I want it to be just so. I have to do it myself. I have forced my natural lack of patience into a straitjacket of control that occasionally slips, but which I yearly gain in competence. Because ultimately the only way to get what I want is to practice something for which I have no natural affinity.
Which leads me to my current depression. What I ought to do is sit down and carefully consider my next project. My impulse is to just open a file and start banging away on a new story. But I don’t have one that appeals to me just now and I have all this other stuff that needs doing.
And I know that, although this rewrite is “finished,” there will likely be corrections once Donna gets through the manuscript.
It might be a good time to start that model kit. But I have no place just now to work on it. I need to clean a space for that. Bother. Might as well just walk the dog and eat lunch.
