Fascinating Authors

The writing craft

Writing is discipline and joy. It’s a lot like architectural design. Writing requires you keep at it on a regular basis. Joy is the reward of a sentence well crafted and solidly fixed to your intent. Design is a well-crafted combination of physical elements that carry a cultural significance. You have to keep at it to be good.

I try to write something every day: the draft of a blog, my thoughts in my journal, or even an e-mail of some substance. I am exercising my writing muscles. I try to keep a regular schedule. Mornings I am most alert and most creative. Mornings I begin new work.  The afternoons I review and rewrite as time, energy, and obligation permit. Joy doesn’t arrive every day, but are enough times when the writing “sings” that it makes the slog worthwhile.  “Keep at it, keep at it,” is my mantra.

When I wrote the first draft of bipolar bare I was living away from my home town on assignment for a two-year project designing an extension of the San Francisco BART system from Oakland to San Jose. Living in a room in a house in Berkeley, I arose every morning at 5:00 a.m. and wrote for an hour to an hour and a half before going to work. This was a very productive time. I had a paper chain draped over my windows in the rooms where I slept and wrote. My wife gave me this chain of varied colored paper links to measure the weeks of my two-year assignment and encourage me in my effort to write my book. At the end of each week I would tear off a link from the chain — when I began the chain stretched in from wall to wall in four deep loops — and read a statement from my wife on the inside face of the paper link.  The statements were brief. A typical one was “Keep going, you can do it!” or “Don’t give up now! Think of how far you have come.” I am given, as can be guessed for anyone who suffers from mania and depression, to times when I am ready to quit my projects as unattainable.  But I didn’t quit then. I kept up the grind and at the end of my two years I had a first draft. The paper chain was gone, and I was full of joy.

That end was just a beginning of a longer process of rewriting and reorganizing. Writing, I believe, is fundamentally a process of iteration and re-iteration. It is not unlike the profession I was trained to do – architectural design.  First one does a preliminary design. Call that Draft One. Then you develop the design. In architecture this can mean several iterations of the design – sometimes many if there is the budget for it – call these, Drafts Two, Three and Four. My book went through four drafts before I was satisfied with the result. During this process I was helped by a book coach with whom I interacted. Two and a half years were spent getting this right. Getting it right included such concepts as making the arc of the story correct and giving the right character to one of my main protagonists, Carlotta.  This work took a lot of discipline to keep at it, because you can grow tired of rewording and rewording again the same passages until you are sick of them. At some point the joy pops out when you realize you have it right or you can’t make it any better than it is and it time to move on.  The joy is not as sweet as the first gasp of creativity in initial creation, but there is something lasting, an aftertaste in this sense of accomplishment and capture.

At last my book was ready for the end stage. For a building, a design goes into working drawings. This is where the nuts and bolts are conceived and counted that put a project together. For a book this is the final edit for content, grammar, and spelling where all the little errors and inconsistencies are worked out.  This process took almost half a year. Surprisingly this timetable was about as long as the working drawings phase of a typical medium-sized architectural project.  We are down in the weeds now in a back and forth process of microscopic views. Is this the right word and the right spelling? Or does another word or phrase work better? By now I was fed up with bipolar bare.  It’s the same with a building.  The details may be changed and corrected repeatedly. Details are deleted, combined, rearranged, and different materials used. By the time it is over you are “blue in the face.”  Completed book in hand, I staggered to the finish line, joyful only to be done.

Finally the book went to publication.  This is when the joy emerges. All the struggles and the compromises are forgotten. The book, the almighty book, is in hand and I can be proud and humble at the same time. This is just like a building too, when construction ends and our viewpoint changes. The flaws inherent – no project is ever perfect, and the compromises it took to manifest a building are overlooked.   Once a building stands there, we become full of joy at its creation, since creation is so difficult to achieve. I felt the same way when I finally put my hands on my book after five years.  The joy was out. The long haul was worth it, and I am charged to begin my next endeavor.