CAN’T HURRY THAT NOVEL

By El Ochiis

Some novels take time to write. Just as one shouldn’t pan-fry brisket, sometimes one can’t hurry a novel that needs to be slow-cooked. Karl Marlantes, a Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar, slow-cooked his powerful novel, Matterhorn, for 33 years. Published in 2009, it was set during the Vietnam war – he was also a decorated soldier of that war.

I mention this because, lately, I’ve been dreading the days on the calendar due to a hopeful decision, well, promise, to complete a piece that I had been working on before the end of 2021. That deadline will not be met. There is a professional colleague, editor/coach, who will ring me up and make me feel even more guilty than I already am by admonishing me in the manner one does with a two-year old:

“Turn off the internet, make a writing schedule, stay inside for a month and just work on your piece, meditate procrastination away, work less hours,” she will cajole, as if I had not tried all of the suggestions she has texted, emailed and left so many messages, my voice mail on both phones are full.

But, the one criticism that she uses to break my soul is:

“Not getting any younger, time, there is no time,” she warns, in her seventh voice message.

Ouch, that one so hurts my feeling, not because I have any deep-rooted issues with getting older, rather because I haven’t been able to commission some entity, Julius Caesar, maybe, that I need more hours added to the day, more days added to the week, more weeks added to the month and, finally, more months added to the year – Caesar’s solar year was already miscalculated by eleven minutes:

Listen to me, miss ‘Negative Nancy’, Harriet Doerr was 74 when her debut novel, Stones for Ibarra, was published; It went on to win the National Book Award. Eudora Welty was 75 when One Writer’s Beginnings was published; Edith Wharton, 75, when The Buccaneers was published (after her death), still counts; Herman Wouk, at 100 years old, published: Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author. – And, he was still alive past April 2019.” I will rattle off, in my head, too ashamed to pick up the phone and confront the deadline demon.

Did I forget Stan Lee, creator of Marvel Comics, who died in 2018 at the age of 95, he kept going till the very end. Margaret Atwood redefined herself and her work in her mid-70’s when The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, reached the small but powerful screen in 2017.

May Sarton—who wrote dozens of books, including poetry, fiction, children’s books and nonfiction into her early 80’s—quotes Humphry Trevelyan on Goethe: “It seems that two qualities are necessary if a great artist is to remain creative to the end of a long life: he must on the one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grow complacent...”

I’ll just keep writing, and, moving up that deadline, because, you see, it’s my humble opinion that writers and artists tend to go until they can’t go on any longer – brisket anyone?