Brian Hodge

This is for the ones who despair. This is for the ones gripped by the feeling that it will never get better. That they will never get better.

I promise you this much: It can. And you might. That’s the best guarantee you’re going to get. Can and might. There’s only one certain guarantee, and that’s how to make sure that it doesn’t and you never do:

Quit. Whatever you’re doing, just stop right now. I mean it. Put down the pen, close the Word file, toss the notebook in the trash, click that folder full of story files and half-formed dreams and punch the Delete key like you mean it.

There, now. Just relax. Breathe. Doesn’t that feel better?

If it does, if it genuinely does, then go ahead and empty the trash, real or virtual, stop reading right now, and go about the rest of your day, the rest of your life. You’ve just been spared years of toil, doubt, and heartache.

But if it doesn’t feel better, if in fact it feels kind of awful, then you’d better fish those temporary discards out of the trash before something bad happens. Clutch them to your breast and promise to never treat them — or, more importantly, what they represent — with that kind of disrespect again.

Respect is important, because there’s work to do.

The Agony And The Ecstasy. Mostly Agony.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been digging among my roots. I’ve just finished prepping my first two novels for new editions. Both predate my migration to word processing, so I’m working with files generated by OCR scans of the original books. You have to proofread these things. Carefully. Sometimes OCR software has a whacky sense of humor about what it thinks it sees.

I’ve had no need to look at either of these novels for more than twenty years. Now that I have, I can honestly say I would’ve been happy to let them sit another twenty, if only to spare myself the daily torture.

I thought these novels were awesome at the time. And they still have their moments.

But now they’re like that TV show you used to love as a kid. You know the one I mean. The one you were absolutely nuts for, that you couldn’t get enough of. The one you’d run miles to get home in time to watch.

The most merciful thing you can do is never watch it again, ever. It never holds up. Better to leave it alone and let the sepia-toned memories remain intact.

Here’s how I described my reaction to this process the other day, in a new Afterword to one of the novels:

“Here and there are bits that make me glad I wrote them, that wouldn’t look or feel out of place in later work, but mostly I just groan a lot and want to bang my head against the desk, unable to believe that this was the published draft.”

Which sounds polite for general company, but really, it’s more like this prayer:

“Please, oh Odin, god of battle and poetry, please make it stop! And if you can’t make it stop, make it better. And if you can’t make it better, please send your ravens to pluck out my eyes.”

Yeah, that bad. To me they are.

There are a lot of things about these formative works that should console me: That agents thought they were worth representing. That publishers thought they were worth publishing. That reviewers said good things about them. That there are readers who remember them fondly, maybe even loved them the way I did, and that even now there are publishers who want to bring them back into print.

While I’m enormously grateful for all that, I can’t say there’s much consolation in it.

But then there’s this. This summation of the gulf between then and now, of all that’s come in the interim, and all that’s still to come. This may be the finest thing you could ever say about yourself when comparing where you began with where you are today:

I would never write that now. It would never even occur to me. Or if it did, I wouldn’t write it in remotely the same way.

It’s so clear: Things got better. I got better. Mostly as a consequence of not stopping. Not stopping, and an unrelieved sense of dissatisfaction.

Through The Looking Glass

Pure serendipity. The other day, not even knowing what I’ve been up to lately, my longtime friend Clark Perry cued me into the quote below. Clark is one of the few spawning salmon who made it all the way upstream, past a million belly-up floaters who gave out, to get hired writing for TV.

We were there at the very beginning, for each other’s origin stories. We saw each other through years of the exact process that Ira Glass, host and producer of Public Radio International’s This American Life, describes in this clip from 2009:

“…all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.

“Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you’re just starting out or you’re still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It’s only by going through a volume of work that you’ll close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions …

“It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”

Except there’s one thing Glass doesn’t address here: Okay, so how do you fight your way through?

The Good Fight

People analogize the creative process and the crucible of improvement in different ways. Me, I like finding the parallels with, appropriately enough, fight training. It resonates.

If you’ve never done any fight training, just know this much: The bag work, the mitt work, kicking pads and drilling your footwork and head movement … it’s all just theory. True practice comes when you take what you think you know and match it against something that hits back. And when you start sparring, it’s a humbling, humiliating experience.

How did this guy just hit me six times and I couldn’t do anything about it? What openings did he see that I wasn’t even aware of? That I couldn’t see on him?

Simple. Once he (or she) was where you are now. He was the one getting hit six times. She was once the one without the experience to spot the openings.

It’s nothing personal, this pounding you’re taking. Or if it is, it’s personal in a good way. You and your sparring partner are actually there to teach each other. True, it’s a hard way to learn. It’s also the only way.

Your partner got through it by doing what you have to now: find something to love about the process. Something you love more than you dislike the discomfort. Something that never gets old, that keeps the experience alive and fresh for you. Something that keeps luring you back from the pits of discouragement.

You get through it by learning to live for the little victories. Maybe next week you only get hit four times in a row. Or she swings and you’re no longer there. Or you nail him with a sweet counter.

And so it is with writing, with every other creative endeavor.

Everything you think you know from books, from blogs, from classes … it’s all just theory. Everything you work up behind closed doors and leave there in the dark, that’s theory too, just another kind … still something you haven’t yet put to the test.

True practice comes from putting it out in the world, daring to risk the vulnerability that goes with this. Feedback readers, critique groups, submissions. Especially submissions. That’s when the ordeal begins. That’s when you have to find the thing you love enough to keep you going despite the rejections, the cheap shots, the indifference, and the clear-eyed recognition of the gap between your work and your ambitions.

That’s when you have to learn to live for the little victories. Do you know how many successful writers have had their day made, their week made, when a rejection came with a personalized note of encouragement from the editor? All of them.

That’s how better happens. By increments and milestones and thinking in timeframes that most people don’t have the patience or guts for.

So put in the time. Take the hits. Keep going.

It does get better. And so will you.

***** Sure, that was a lot to absorb. Take a breather anyway, pack a light lunch, and come on over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, and glean some ideas for 2012 from “Rock Your Writing This Year With The 30-Things Challenge.”

[Photo by Eric Langley]

There are a lot of places where I and everything else in sight don’t make for a comfortable fit. Where the drummer has one rhythm going and my feet twitch to some other cadence entirely. Most people will eventually cop to the same. Once we drop our pretenses, we’re all a bunch of square pegs staring at a world of round holes.

The fun begins when you stop looking at this as something to overcome and instead start embracing it as a bonus. Maybe even a career requirement. Artists of all stripes do this all the time: reframe their inability to mesh as just another life-enhancement quality.

 “I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.” — Orson Welles

I’d love to know the greater context for that quote. I’ve only ever managed to find this much. (If you know, please, do tell.) The phrase “with it” makes it sound like a product of the 1960s or early ’70s, but the principle that Welles appears to be espousing is timeless: that one’s art shouldn’t merely reinforce the status quo, and bob along pushed in the direction of the prevailing winds.

It seems valid to extend this principle beyond what your work conveys and into the day-by-day backdrop out of which that work emerges. Parting company with the world’s habits, the better to see it and reflect it more clearly.

(1) Leave the earbuds out of your ears.

If future archaeologists were to find hieroglyphics from our age, they’d surely wonder what was up with those white cords unspooling from everybody’s ears. There was a stretch when I wore my iPod out for most solo trips — post office, grocery store, wherever — so I could listen to books and podcasts. Seemed like an expedient use of time.

I gave it up. Because I noticed that when I left the iPod at home I had a higher number of pleasant random encounters with people. Encounters that might not have occurred if those white cords had been telling everyone, “Leave me alone. You’re not as important as this recording I can listen to anytime.”

Art and the soul that brings it to fruition are shaped by random events. Be open to them.

(2) Stash the laptop computer for a change. Along with the Kindle, iPad, and smartphone.

Same deal, different technologies. A couple years ago I heard about a coffee house in … San Francisco, I want to say … distinguished by a radical new gimmick: no wi-fi, plus a ban on using computers at all. They were intent on returning the concept of the coffee house to what it used to be: a place where people might gather and, you know, actually talk to each other.

Tough call. I do love taking my laptop along for a mocha or a pint. But I look around at the other laptop-luggers and it seems like, for all the joy they exhibit, they might as well be in office cubicles. Then: Do I look like that?

With a little luck, you won’t be alone, as long as there are a few others like this fellow, quoted in an article from New York’s The Local East Village:

 “I never bring my laptop when I come to Ost or other coffee places because I like to see people,” said long time East Villager Hal Miller. “It’s the weirdest thing to walk by shops and see people just staring into screens. It’s so cold.”

(3) Cultivate friends of all ages.

Compared to most of the rest of the world, ours is an ageist and age-stratified culture. A generalization, sure, but we do tend to dismiss people much older than ourselves as out-of-touch, and those much younger as not having sufficiently lived yet.

A creator can’t afford these prejudices. Anyone can be a muse, a teacher, a window into another of life’s dimensions.

At the school where I practice Krav Maga, I’ve trained with everyone from kids in their early high school years to those who’ve long been eligible for AARP. It’s the most egalitarian environment I know. Nobody sees age, really, just other people. I can learn from any of them, and have. It’s a continual reminder not to dismiss anyone in the world beyond class merely because of demographics and chronologies.

(4) Cultivate selective ignorance of current events.

The 24-hour news cycle has created a breed of addict that couldn’t have existed a generation ago: the news junkie. Yet I’m astounded at the number of highly accomplished people I’ve read about in recent years who tune it out by default, all the better to focus on their contribution to the world. Even Dr. Andrew Weil’s 8 Weeks To Optimum Health recommends a once-a-week news fast as a part of the program, to take a break from the fear-mongering and let your sense of optimism recover.

(5) Disconnect even further.

Who are you without the barrage of media imagery and other propaganda trying to sell you, enlist you, persuade you, advocate for someone else’s view of what you should think and do and be? It can be deceptively easy to forget. Pick a day or two or a week or more and pull as many plugs as you can. Leave the TV off, the radio silent, the magazines untouched, and avert thine eyes from billboards. If you can breathe fresh air under an open sky, or beside the burble of flowing water, so much the better. As a 21^st-century Thoreau, in your own private Walden, the remembering gets easier.

(6) In cyberspace, no one can hear you argue.

Did you ever wonder, if all the pie fights were deleted from Web, like draining a swamp, how much data storage space would suddenly be freed up? The Internet makes it easy to call anyone any name you want with no risk of getting punched in the nose. Just as easy to find troglodytes eager to roll in the mud with you, for as long as you’ll let them. Yet I’ve encountered exactly no one who claims to be left energized by this … just depleted and angry and wondering where the hours went. Time and energy that could’ve been used to create instead of pretending to destroy.

(7) Remember you’re not a machine without an off-switch, and stop treating yourself as though you are.

Every study on work and the workplace that I’ve ever seen reaches the same conclusion: expecting people (or people expecting themselves) to perform like machines, running constantly and required to produce more and more with less and less, is counterproductive to the point of stupidity. The results: burnout, increased job dissatisfaction, elevated stress levels, diminished health, and so on. Yet this is the default template for the average American workplace, and the default mindset for most would-be achievers. Why does it persist? Mostly inertia and because it delivers short-term results.

The approach that generally works far better for the long run: periods of highly focused activity (usually an hour or two) interspersed with short periods of renewal. Brain breaks, I’ve heard them called.

If you write full-time, this may help you get more done in a day, and if not, leave you with more for the page once you can get there.

(8) Explore old books, old movies, old music.

We often operate as if the world didn’t truly exist before we were born. It’s not a literal belief, of course … more that the world didn’t produce much of anything that mattered until it produced us. So we ignore most of the culture that came before, because it’s just. So. Old. But here’s the thing about gems: They don’t age. And I always love it when I see a kid wearing a T-shirt for some band whose heyday, even demise, came years before he was born.

Eight steps to out-of-step. You have nothing to lose but a few ruts.

[Photo by KellBailey]

What do you get when you mix our hottest August on record, a proclivity toward summer lethargy (for which, come to find out, the Japanese have a name: natsubate), and weed allergy season? For starters, me behind on just about everything. Hence this rerun, a well-received piece from 18 months ago. And please pass the Kleenex…

I like life lessons that are simple enough to apply across the board, and they don’t get much more stripped-down than lessons you can learn from boxing. Win or lose, there’s something every fighter wants to be able to say after a bout: “I left it all in the ring.”

You might have heard a variation of this during last month’s Winter Olympics, from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno: “I left it all on the ice.”

Meaning that by the time the final bell rings, or the race is run, that’s it for you. You’re done in. You don’t have any more left for that day, that hour, the very next minute, and in this moment, at least, the outcome pales beside one fact that can never be taken away:

You’ve given it everything you had.

I don’t think I ever truly, madly, deeply appreciated this until last December, when I took my Krav Maga orange belt test. At first it started out fun. Then it got a little challenging. Then a lot challenging. At about hour five I joined the push-it-til-you-puke club. Came back out and dug in to finish the last 45 minutes as strongly as I could, even though I was afraid I’d blown it.

Never in my life had I been this miserable without food poisoning being involved. Got home and could barely make it up a flight of stairs, two-handing it up the rail, clump-clump, clump-clump, one step at a time. I slumped into a hot bath and … OK, I didn’t pray for death, but if I’d noticed a scythe blade in the doorway, I’d’ve told the Reaper, “Come on, ya moldy bastard, there’s an extra five in it for you if you make it quick.”

Exhilarating, though? Like nothing else. Except for one thing.

The best writing experiences I’ve ever had have left me feeling the same way. The best writing experiences I’ve ever had were the ones that concluded with a collapse. Sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. Sometimes it felt as if it were the rest of the world that had fallen away, and I lingered above it in floating tranquility.

These are the ones I remember in sensory details of time and place. These are the ones that make me wonder where the words really came from. The ones that spit me back into the world with the surreal, stumbling dislocation of a teleporting misfire. These are the ones in which I rode all the way to the end on a wave of jubilant terror that I wasn’t going to make it, but somehow did.

The ones when I left it all on the page.

As creators, we sometimes have a tendency to conserve, to hold back. Maybe it stems from the admonitions we’ve heard since childhood:

•          Don’t spend it all in one place.
•          Put away a little something for a rainy day.
•          Be sure to save some for later.
•          Put that back, you’ll spoil your dinner!

 All those bits of code designed to program us into obedient, frugal, regulated little models of prudence and moderation.

Fine. Live like that away from the desk if you want to. But if you bring it to the page, it’s like showing up at the pub on Saint Paddy’s Day wearing a solemn face and a T-shirt that says, “Kiss me, I’m Amish.”

This creative reticence comes in two major forms:

(1) The temptation to hold back ideas

Tell me you haven’t been here before: You’re about to introduce a character, inject an idea, or just lay down a nice turn of phrase … and then stop. Not because it isn’t good enough, but because it seems toogood for now.

You want to save it for later. Later in the same work. Later in life, for another work altogether.

Don’t. Don’t sit on it.

Introduce it, inject it, lay it down now.

You’ll never have quite this same blend of energy and enthusiasm and freshness again. Ideas left to ripen have a way of going stale, shrinking as the juice evaporates through their skin.

You’re sending yourself a bad message, too: that the well is running low, so you better not drink as deep, or that you’re incapable of coming up with an even better idea when you think you’ll actually use this one.

Ideas are there to be used, not rationed.

(2) The impulse to hold back ourselves

Like an archaeological dig, writing fiction proceeds in layers. When you do it right, you’re doing more than uncovering the intricacies of story and character, the minutiae you couldn’t be aware of during the planning phase. You’re revealing pieces of yourself, too, maybe parts you didn’t know about, or didn’t understand, or were afraid to confront or embrace.

Sometimes it all spills out the first trip through. Other times it builds up little by little, another thin, sedimentary layer with each pass of revision.

Whatever works.

As a reader, the stuff that gets to me, stays with me, makes me want to come back for more, isn’t the stuff that skims the surface. It’s not the stuff that reads like a padded outline or a head exercise with no investment of heart. All top motion. All ripples and no undertow.

 

Instead, what hooks me are the ones where I get a sense of the writer having dived as deep as she possibly could to get to the truth of her tale, not stopping until she was up to her elbows in the silt at the bottom.

For myself — and from myself — I don’t want the novel, the story, that anyone could have written, given access to the same notes. I want the version only one of us could’ve written. The version pulsing with a feeling that, to the author, every day and every paragraph mattered as much as breathing.

I know — they all feel like they do, at the time. Even the ripple-skimmers.

It doesn’t always translate. Not when it hasn’t been pushed sufficiently hard. Whatever lay behind it, not everything made it all the way to the page. Instead of going for more sweat, tears, blood, and heart rate, somebody settled for his idea of close enough and called it a day.

The orange belt test…

As it turned out, I passed. But I had serious doubts. Didn’t feel one bit good about how I’d done, and they don’t pass you for showing up. They don’t even pass you for finishing.

Just as editors and publishers don’t say yes simply on the basis of your having a completed manuscript. The same way readers don’t love something just because you wrote “The End.”

Instead, Yes and Love are earned through toil that sometimes hurts. A lot. I got the impression I’d earned that new color coding not in the first five hours, but in those last 45 minutes.

It’s true, though — no single work can be everything to everybody. Regardless of how deep you dug or dove, not everyone is going to get it. That’s OK. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how many do.

The surest way to get there? Again, boxing has an answer, in something fighters are always wise to do: Never leave it in the judges’ hands.

Meaning that win, lose, or die trying…

They go for the knockout every time.

[Photo by Intangible]

I once knew a photographer who credited a lot of his favorite work to happy accidents … those creative outcomes you don’t intend, don’t try for, or that come out totally wrong but manage to be just right after all.

This was in the days of film, when early digital cameras cost as much as a car and had resolution we’d now sneer at in a cell phone cam. To a far greater degree than digital, film made room for happy accidents. There was no checking an LCD to see if you needed an instant do-over. You didn’t really know what you had until you got it home or sent it to the lab. And sometimes what you had were deviant exposures or focusing blunders. Film that slipped the sprocket so a negative ended up double-exposed. All kinds of darkroom voodoo gone awry.

Not right, yet, sometimes, somehow righter than right.

Words can be like that, too. If a picture’s worth a thousand of them, just imagine the margin for error.

Reading With One Eye Tied Behind My Back

As of last week, I have a new title. For something. I don’t know what yet. For now there’s just this title, and the promise of whatever it will ultimately suggest goes with it:

“Scars In Progress”

For whatever reasons, the sound of this, the look of it, light me up inside. I wouldn’t have it if I’d been paying full attention to what I was doing. I was hurrying through some dull text and read it wrong — saw it wrong for an instant — and a geekier, more mundane origin I can’t imagine. Here’s the actual phrase:

“Make sure there are no anti-virus scans in progress.”

This isn’t unfamiliar territory. Here’s another from several months ago — a typo, because the I and O sit next to each other on the keyboard:

Blondfolded.

I still don’t know what it means. Where it fits. Whose world or perspective it comes from. But it definitely strikes me as evocative.

It’ll keep until I know. They both will. Ideas, and fragments of ideas, are the most patient entities in the world. The resonant ones have a shelf life of … oh, roughly forever.

What’s Reviled But Essential, And Happens All The Time?

In spite of their everyday ubiquity, mistakes aren’t looked kindly upon by our era, our culture, ourselves. It starts early. If your school papers were anything like mine, the angry red checkmarks were more vivid than any commentary on whatever I did right. We exalt perfection, however unattainable it may be, and praise precision as the way to get there.

In the meantime, if it hadn’t been for somebody’s oopsies, we wouldn’t have Ivory Soap. Or Post-It Notes. Or vulcanized rubber.

Typos, misread words, misheard remarks … when placed in the shadow of perfection, they sound like silly moments of no consequence. And often they are.

Sometimes, though, they’re pure creativity asserting itself. Here, mistakes are shortcuts, wormholes between dimensions. They’re salvation from the tyranny of routine predictability. They’re like DNA mutations that end up benefitting the organism, or even leading to an entirely new spinoff lifeform.

Tune In, Turn On, Screw Up

And here’s where the navigating gets tricky. Can you, should you, resolve to make more mistakes? You could, if it was just a numbers game, but really, it’s the quality of one’s flubs that matters.

The magic of the right mistake at the right time is its bolt-from-the-blue randomness. Happy accidents are all about surprise and serendipity. It’s hard to engineer that.

The best we can do is remain open to them, and resist the urge to repel them as character flaws. And, maybe, at least goose the odds of their happening by refusing to spend every moment trying to be perfect, precise, and productive, and embracing the ambiguous.

I once read an interview with Tom Waits in which he spoke of his love for hearing music coming down the halls and through the walls of cheap hotels. Details would get filtered out, leaving holes for him to fill in on his own. A lot of his own music in the last 10 or 20 years has reflected this very quality.

That’s one way.

Or maybe it means giving yourself permission to be thought a flake every now and then, and loosening your gaze to soft focus. Reading too quickly, typing too carelessly, turning your eyes from the shadows before you know what is and isn’t there. Or only half-listening to something that someone else thinks you should pay close attention to.

The key is not taking it all in. Leaving room for replication error and gaps in knowledge. When we don’t have the full picture, it creates a vacuum that nothing can fill better than imagination. It’s as if the subconscious (which, as if to prove a point, first came out as sunconscious) takes over, grabs the Scrabble-like pieces it’s been given, and immediately rearranges them into something you need to see.

“Scars In Progress” … it even sounds like one of my titles.

I, the conscious part, was just the last to know.

***** Where to next? May I suggest over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “You’ll Never Know Until You’re Pushed,” is cued up and ready to go.

[Photo by jurvetson]

If you were to start combing through the sound bites of current productivity wisdom, it probably wouldn’t take you long to come across a couple of the more oft-repeated nuggets. Without quoting anyone or any version in particular, they go more or less like this:

Specialize. Specialize specialize specialize. Narrow your focus and your activities with laser-like precision. Because success and achievement come not from the many, varied things you do, but because of all the things you’ve had the steel to peel away from yourself and leave behind.

And this:

If everybody else is caught up in doing something, that should be your cue to do the opposite.

You see how a case could be made that the one cancels the other out?

Now, I’m probably misconstruing the whole spirit of this hyperspecialization advocacy, and yes, it’s no doubt the proper road to take for some people.

For a writer, though, it sounds like death. Slow, suffocating death.

*

Just to clarify: I’m all for relentlessly focused effort. I’m all for a laser-sighted, heat-seeking mission to accomplish a goal. All for sacrifice in the name of getting better.

But if all this is so unilaterally directed that one thing is all you know, all you’re passionate about, all you can talk about, then sorry … but sooner or later you’re going to inspire most everybody who doesn’t share your particular fervor to feign an excuse to disengage from the tedium of your company.

The call to hyperspecialization has its own version in the writing sphere:

Live at the desk. Learn to live at your desk.

As a battle cry, though, it just seems to land with a big, wet thud. While it may pay off short term, for the intermediate and long terms, it doesn’t actually sound much like being alive after all.

*

I suspect that most of us who love language have certain words, certain phrases, the mere sight and sound of which ignite us to our core. It’s the way they look on the page, the way they feel on the tongue, the way they hang in the air like magic incantations … which, for those of us so affected, is exactly what they are. Because they light up the skies and make low-hanging fruit of distant stars.

Here’s one of mine:

Renaissance man.

Or, if you prefer the non-gender-biased alternate, polymath, although that just doesn’t have the same cachet. But. A rose by any other name, no?

Renaissance man…

The phrase is usually defined as someone with many talents or interests; one whose expertise ranges over lots of different areas. So dry, though. I’d rather dwell on what it might’ve looked like in action. Say, someone who spent the morning exploring the flora close to home; who opened a notebook and made sketches of leaves that would do justice to any botany textbook today; who came home to the clavichord and composed a pastorale inspired by the outing; who finished the afternoon perfecting fencing techniques and rounded out the evening with poetry. The next day, tending to business and investments.

Such well-rounded days flowered from the Renaissance conviction that there were no caps to limit human growth, and thus people were obligated to learn as much as possible, in as many areas as possible, and develop their potentials to the fullest extent they could.

As a model, a template to follow, this is endlessly inspiring and evocative to me.

It also seems like an ideal approach for a lifetime of writing. Because if your work is to live and breathe, it does so only because of the breath of life you’ve huffed into it. And while the desk may be where you work, it isn’t where you truly live.

At its best, the desk is just a place you visit during your travels, where you bring back the intangible treasures you’ve picked up along the way.

*

This past August, an article in The New York Times book section took a 40-year look back at James Dickey’s novel, Deliverance. Here’s an excerpt sketching out the basis of the novel’s DNA, and how much it shared with its author:

Off the page he cultivated swaggering hobbies: archery, fishing, guitar, the banjo. Dickey began writing Deliverance in the early 1960s, basing the novel on canoe trips he’d taken with friends … His hobbies paid off: the prose about rivers, music and archery is acute. The ‘Dueling Banjos’ scene, made famous by the film, is just as good on the page. The narrator notes how the rural boy’s ‘fingers moved only slightly, about like those of a good typist; the music was just there.’

No one can say what Deliverance would’ve been like, if it would’ve had the same resonances, if James Dickey had not lived so many of its elements. No one can say whether the novel would’ve existed at all if he hadn’t. It might’ve. Jack London, remember, never made it anywhere close to Alaska.

Just the same, I’m glad James Dickey charted the course he did.

A wonderful thing is imagination, and empathy an invaluable virtue.

But there’s nothing quite like writing from within the heart of experience.

So the more you seek to connect with readers, then the more you owe it to them to live. To live, to learn, to aspire to dwarf sequoias with all you grow to be. To live with as little headroom as you can get away with.

Because the world needs those who’ve loved and lost, who’ve lusted and won, who have sown and reaped in a hundred fields, who have followed their bliss and dared to fall on their faces, who have yielded to temptation and prevailed against it, who’ve shrugged off the arrows in their backs, who have risked looking ridiculous in cultivating whatever abilities and compulsions they find inside themselves whether or not the engines of commerce tell them there’s any good use for it.

The engines of commerce may not need all that. But the world does.

And so do your readers.

Because, if nothing else, the tapestry it weaves eventually becomes the basis of wisdom.

And there’s never too much of that to go around.

***** It doesn’t have to end this way. You are discreetly invited over to my blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Agree To Disagree: The Key To Constant Conflict, Part 2” is ready ‘n’ waiting.

[Painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Photographed by dbking]

Back in February I did a piece about the immediate productivity boost I got just by yanking the cable that connects my desktop computer to my Wi-Fi router.

It worked for a painfully obvious reason: the elimination of a major distraction: das Internetten. But, in my carryover-from-childhood inclination to tear things apart and see how they work, I’m often not satisfied with surface explanations.

And I came to the conclusion that there was another reason why that tactic was effective, a reason that may ultimately be more powerful, running much deeper, than the obvious one.

However unwittingly, I’d established a distinct new ritual for the sole purpose of readying myself to perpetrate creative productivity.

The Function Of Ritual

Life is full of rituals great and small, simple and elaborate, formal and informal, but there’s a common denominator between most of them: Their core purpose is to usher us from one state of being into another.

The wedding ritual exists to mark the union of two into one.

The funeral ritual, to formalize the transition of life into death.

The awarding of a martial arts belt, to signify the satisfactory completion of a block of training.

Pass through this type of ritual and you become something new, something different from what you were before.

But the transitions don’t have to be permanent. Their effects, the states of mind they conjure, can be temporary, too. Intentionally so.

Think of a liturgical ritual like the Mass. Its underlying goal is to usher the believer from a state of mundane, earthly consciousness into a state focused on the spiritual. Medieval theologians likened this process to the tuning of a bell … but instead of metal, tuning a person so that he would resonate at a higher frequency than he did before.

In this context, ritual is a shortcut. A bridge. A wormhole in space between two distant galaxies that can get you from one to the other much quicker than if you were to traverse the full gulf between.

When compared to the mundane places we often occupy, what is writing, then, if not a higher, more resonant state of mind?

Why Ritual Works

The mind adores patterns. It hunts for them everywhere. It loves to link things together and it thrives on making order out of chaos. And it’s a whiz at bundling specific states of mind with associated physical cues.

As a kid, I would sometimes see baseball players — pitchers, usually — go through the most peculiar sequences of activity before ever throwing the ball. It looked to me then like blatant superstition. And maybe, even to the players, that’s all it was. But they did it anyway.

However, specialists in Neurolinguistic Programming would see something quite different here: that what the players were doing was repeatedly taking the heightened state of focus necessary to throw the pitch how and where they wanted it, and anchoring it to a unique sequence of behavioral events.

Repeat the events — tweak nose, swipe thumb along bill of cap, rub opposite elbow — and, ideally, this silly little sequence will usher you into the desired state of focus.

Every pitch, then, becomes its own ritual.

Revisit the liturgy for a moment. Think of the incense, the candles, the Latin chanting, the presence of the altar and the the stole around the priest’s neck. Think of how quickly these cues work together to induce a change in state of mind. You don’t even have to be a believer to feel some kind of tug. Because their symbolic power runs centuries deep.

Now … imagine the potential waiting to be tapped by pairing a few unique cues with the belief in yourself, and in the tale you’re telling.

Establishing A Ritual Of Your Own

Long before there were ever such things as priests, there were shamans. The shaman’s job is simple in description, complex in performance: to journey between the worlds of matter and spirit, and bring back something of value for the tribe.

Not everybody approaches writing that way.

Just the ones that resonate. Even if they don’t know it, or think of creating in those terms.

With the shaman, it’s ritual, usually involving a drumbeat, that serves as the vehicle for the journey.

For the writer, looking for an expedient route from the mundane world of bill-paying and car-pooling to the enveloping realm of story, ritual can take a hundred thousand forms. It’s whatever works. It’s the cues that mean infinitely more to you than what they appear to be on the surface. Whatever actions reach inside and flip your switches.

You might have a ritual already without even realizing it. That singular coffee mug you only ever fill before you sit down to write. That CD or iTunes playlist you only cue up when it’s go-time.

Whatever the ritual is, though, there are a few qualities that should shape it. It is:

Unique. Whether a solitary act or some nose-cap-elbow combination, it should belong exclusively to your writing preamble. Nothing else. Even the act of disconnecting from my router, as simple as that was, wasn’t something I did for any other reason.

Performed mindfully. You know how you absently swat your hand at the light switch when you enter a room? Don’t do it like that. Whatever action you’re taking should command not just your full attention, but your full intention. When unplugging that cable, I pause and remind myself that what comes next is sacred time.

Repeatable. When it’s simple enough to do without worrying whether you’re doing it right, that leaves you free to focus on intent. And it’s probably best if you can do it anywhere. Sure, you swear by tucking one foot to your belly and hopping one-legged across the room … but do you really want to do that in Starbucks?

Self-reinforcing. Some things we do over and over again to the point of rote meaninglessness. An effective ritual takes the opposite trajectory. Its power should grow in the doing. It should accrue the weight of legitimacy. Because it works. For you, it works.

So journey well, and happy trails.

Now come back with something wonderful.

***** It’s 2-for-1 day! You are most cordially invited over to my blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Agree To Disagree: The Key To Constant Conflict,” will be going up shortly. Ish. Shortlyish.

[Photo by Paul Stevenson]

I’ve had a lot of satisfying creative experiences while traveling this peculiar and sometimes baffling path I’ve chosen. A lot of kicking at dirt clods and falling blind drunk into ditches, too, but never mind those. Of the highlights, I can think of only two that I would be eager to re-experience afresh, if such a thing were possible … if, say, someone put out a home kit where you could pop the lid of your own skull and poke around with an electrode to stimulate memories.

One ranks up there for reasons that are more Hunter S. Thompson than anything, and doesn’t belong here. The other, though, a seeming product of the favor of angels or demigods, has always stood for me as an affirmation of what may be possible for any writer, allowing for a brush with that elusive energy some call grace.

It was a novelette titled “As Above, So Below,” and I wrote it as the capstone for my second story collection. At over 23,000 words, it wasn’t a quick dash from beginning to end — there was time and complexity enough to fall deep deeper deepest into it — and it wasn’t light material. It was about a guy who’d come to the end of countless incarnations and was the first to become … what comes next.

Four years ago I saw someone on an online forum pay me a compliment that I don’t expect to ever be bettered: “This was the story that got me to seriously consider that Hodge is some kind of literary shaman.”

I don’t mention that out of self-aggrandizement, or to try to drum up a few bucks in royalties. Used copies of out-of-print books don’t generate royalties, and the piece has never been reprinted — one of the perils of droning on for 23,000 words — although it was selected to hold down 1998 in a century’s best anthology that’s been due out … oh, any decade now.

Instead, this was a compliment for subtler cause than what it may look like on the surface. And I repeat it because I know no other way of conveying the degree to which it clicked that someone, somewhere, felt in the reading what I’d felt in the writing.

More specifically, in the completing.

That is what I would relive, if I could.

I finished it late on a spring afternoon, and soon went for a walk in the park we lived near. How to convey the numinous character of that walk…? I doubt I can, entirely.

• But imagine moving through a landscape at half-speed, without quite touching the ground, yet seeing, feeling, every molecule of earth and air. Like that.
• If the angel of death — Neil Gaiman’s version, preferably — walked up and held out her hand and said, “You have to come with me now,” I wouldn’t have argued that it couldn’t be time, that there was more to do. Because, right then, there wasn’t. Like that.
• Celtic legends tell of hapless folk who walk between just the right pair of trees, or past the right mound, and end up in some other realm, and don’t return for years, even though they swear they were only gone one night. Like that.
• A sense that doorways had been opened and anything could come through, could happen, and whatever it was, it would be exactly right. Like that.

Like all that. Times ten. Twenty. More.

I don’t know what made this one so different, so transcendent. The feeling took a few hours to fade. I’ve never experienced anything like it since, although it hasn’t been for a lack of longing, or identical habits, more or less. I’ve dug as deep in other works. Toiled the same feverish hours. Felt the same push and pull to the end. There’s nothing else to try, and that’s probably just as well. Addicts kill themselves trying to recapture a high like this.

In tribal cultures, the shaman is the one apart who rides the beat of a drum all the way to another world, and comes back with something for the good of one or all. Information. Insight. The lost pieces of somebody’s soul.

It’s not usually a role that’s sought, but instead accepted, sometimes only after fierce reluctance, an acquiescing to the demands of forces that won’t take no for an answer and keep hammering until they get their way. If you write for anything other than the shallowest reasons — the old line about sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper until blood comes out of your forehead springs to mind — then that insistent knocking probably sounds familiar.

I’ve heard, too, that in tribal cultures that had only an oral tradition, the written word was initially regarded as an act of sorcery. A thought set down here could be picked up there, verbatim, no matter how much time had elapsed.

An experience like I had with that singular novelette makes me think this wasn’t wrong. It has served as a lifetime reminder of just how potent, how world-shifting, that magic can be.

The thorn in this, however, is having to accept that you can’t force magic to happen. The best you can do is open yourself up to the wonder of process, to the possibility of awe, to the forces beyond and the inexplicable give and take at their core, and if the magic — the deep, resonant, transcendent magic — happens, it happens.

But if it doesn’t…? Assuming you’ve done everything else as right as you can, you should still finish with something to be proud of.

I want to say there’s always next time … but that seems too expectant, maybe a whiff demanding, and that would be wrong.

Maybe we only get one or two of these experiences per path, per life, if that, and their value is a factor of their scarcity rather than the likelihood of repeating them like party tricks. Maybe their worth lies in how long they continue to glow inside, like that first declaration from someone you dared to love who whispered that they loved you back.

If we’re touched by grace, maybe once is all we really need.

Because when it’s real, it doesn’t rub off. It lingers, a lasting confirmation that maybe, just maybe, the path where it has found us is the right one.

***** Why stop now? You are invited to segue over to my blog, Warrior Poet, which explores writing and storytelling from the timeless perspective of the warrior poet ethos. Currently on tap, “You’re Not Getting Worse. You’re Just Seeing Farther Ahead.”

[Photo by Michael Hodge]

“To be dead is to stop believing in the masterpieces we will begin tomorrow.”

— Patrick Kavanagh

Lately I’ve spent a lot of effort fussing about with block time. You know, regimented scheduling as a way to try to fit 36 pounds of day into a 24-pound bag. Focus exclusively, with laser precision, on X from the hours of Y to Z, then catapult into the next block.

It works, or rather it works until it doesn’t, but then the five-year-old inside me is still appalled that it’s come to this, and chafes mightily, because there was a time when there were fewer responsibilities, fewer commitments, with less to do, and all it just seemed to flow better, or at least that’s the burnished way I remember it.

The memory of this has sun-kissed angels singing above it, too. Just so you know.

But there’s value in backing off and seeing a day in this simplified form, each day as a block unto itself. It makes today the basic building block of time, of lifetimes, and we only get a fixed number of blocks to play with. A few tens of thousands, at most. This may seem like a lot, but it’s not, really.

Consider the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. Consensus estimates say it’s made of around 2.3 million limestone and granite blocks.

2,300,000 blocks. 30,000 blocks, and that’s if you make it to age 82. Ponder the differential. Just a tiny fraction of the pyramid, the world’s greatest structure. Now imagine what you can build anyway, with that comparatively small supply of blocks.

What will it be? Something to endure?

Will it be worth studying, wondering how the hell you did it?

And what of it will remain after you, the master builder, are gone?

Now. Count the blocks — the days — you’ve already used up. 365 multiplied by your age. Rounding is allowed.

Next is the blind part, the faith part: guessing your total number of days. You can’t know. But pick a number anyway, and you might as well be generous, because it’s something to shoot for. Use an actuarial table from the insurance industry, if you must, but something closer to home will have more meaning.

I used the age of my longest-lived grandparent.

Then subtract.

This is what’s left to finish your work. More or less. It’s a sobering thing to look at, this number, because no matter how big it is, it’s still finite.

Now take a long moment and look behind you. Look at the blocks in your wake, the ones you’ve already had to work with. If they really were blocks, maybe a lot of what you’ve done with them looks dismayingly chaotic. Over here, say, a broken and jumbled pile from that year you were a mess after that relationship ended. Over there, something that looks solid but incomplete, a career you started but got bored with.

Or maybe a dream project you walked away from. Or never started.

Is it weathered now? Dusty? Pitted from time and sandstorms and neglect? Maybe it’s time to go back. Polish, clean, make it ready for the mortar again, if it looks like a foundation you can still build on.

Or maybe most everything behind you was just practice. Maybe the real work comes now.

Either way, and all guessing aside, you have a pile of blocks in front of you. It may be a lot. Or not very many. It may be a mirage, look like more than what’s actually there. Or there may be more than you think could realistically be present, given some current condition.

However many there are, they’re yours. No one else’s. They’re just waiting for a design, a plan. And for god’s sake, don’t let anyone else talk you into using their plan for your blocks. Trust yourself, that you know what’s best for your blocks, however murky their number may be.

Now start.

Write. Paint. Sculpt. Compose. Shoot. Film. Sew. Saw. Establish. Found. Fund. Raise. Launch. Whatever your verb of choice may be.

Whatever form it takes, make a monument. Not for your own glory, but because it needs to be made. Because monuments inspire. Some make us think, some make us reach, and others expand our spirits. So make a monument, or a series of them, that someone, some day, can encounter and feel glad that you were in the world.

And if you still don’t know, if you look and look and there seems to be no plan…?

A couple years ago, a friend of mine died of pancreatic cancer. He was a Special Forces veteran, and lived as large as anyone I’ve ever known. One of his final acts, on one of his last good days, was to take a chainsaw to an enormous tree stump and carve his own grave marker: a wolf poised atop a mound.

Bob loved wolves. His left arm even bore a scar that one had given him for doing something stupid.

Amazing workmanship, what Bob did with that stump. But his real monument lay, in part, in all the paintings he left behind. Including one he did just for my wall. The paintings and, of course, the life behind them, that reached so many people.

But the wolf is pretty cool too. It’s guarding an inscription:

“Shhh. Be quiet, and still … and listen to the wind.”

When you just don’t know, the wind is as good a place to start as any. Because if you listen just right, what you hear underneath the sighing and the howling can eventually start to sound a lot like what’s in your heart.

The blocks will be waiting when you’re ready.

May you have as many as you need.

*****You are invited to segue over to my blog, Warrior Poet, which explores writing and storytelling through the lens of the ancient-yet-timeless warrior poet ethos. I didn’t plan it this way, but the latest post, “Be Brave. Be Very Brave.”, works as a companion piece to this one.*****

(Pyramid photo by Yasin Hassan)

I like life lessons that are simple enough to apply across the board, and they don’t get much more stripped-down than lessons you can learn from boxing. Win or lose, there’s something every fighter wants to be able to say after a bout: “I left it all in the ring.”

You might have heard a variation of this during last month’s Winter Olympics, from speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno: “I left it all on the ice.”

Meaning that by the time the final bell rings, or the race is run, that’s it for you. You’re done in. You don’t have any more left for that day, that hour, the very next minute, and in this moment, at least, the outcome pales beside one fact that can never be taken away:

You’ve given it everything you had.

I don’t think I ever truly, madly, deeply appreciated this until last December, when I took my Krav Maga orange belt test. At first it started out fun. Then it got a little challenging. Then a lot challenging. At about hour five I joined the push-it-til-you-puke club. Came back out and dug in to finish the last 45 minutes as strongly as I could, even though I was afraid I’d blown it.

Never in my life had I been this miserable without food poisoning being involved. Got home and could barely make it up a flight of stairs, two-handing it up the rail, clump-clump, clump-clump, one step at a time. I slumped into a hot bath and … OK, I didn’t pray for death, but if I’d noticed a scythe blade in the doorway, I’d’ve told the Reaper, “Come on, ya moldy bastard, there’s an extra five in it for you if you make it quick.”

Exhilarating, though? Like nothing else. Except for one thing.

The best writing experiences I’ve ever had have left me feeling the same way. The best writing experiences I’ve ever had were the ones that concluded with a collapse. Sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. Sometimes it felt as if it were the rest of the world that had fallen away, and I lingered above it in floating tranquility.

These are the ones I remember in sensory details of time and place. These are the ones that make me wonder where the words really came from. The ones that spit me back into the world with the surreal, stumbling dislocation of a teleporting misfire. These are the ones in which I rode all the way to the end on a wave of jubilant terror that I wasn’t going to make it, but somehow did.

The ones when I left it all on the page.

As creators, we sometimes have a tendency to conserve, to hold back. Maybe it stems from the admonitions we’ve heard since childhood:

• Don’t spend it all in one place.
• Put away a little something for a rainy day.
• Be sure to save some for later.
• Put that back, you’ll spoil your dinner!

All those bits of code designed to program us into obedient, frugal, regulated little models of prudence and moderation.

Fine. Live like that away from the desk if you want to. But if you bring it to the page, it’s like showing up at the pub on Saint Paddy’s Day wearing a solemn face and a T-shirt that says, “Kiss me, I’m Amish.”

This creative reticence comes in two major forms:

(1) The temptation to hold back ideas

Tell me you haven’t been here before: You’re about to introduce a character, inject an idea, or just lay down a nice turn of phrase … and then stop. Not because it isn’t good enough, but because it seems too good for now.

You want to save it for later. Later in the same work. Later in life, for another work altogether.

Don’t. Don’t sit on it.

Introduce it, inject it, lay it down now.

You’ll never have quite this same blend of energy and enthusiasm and freshness again. Ideas left to ripen have a way of going stale, shrinking as the juice evaporates through their skin.

You’re sending yourself a bad message, too: that the well is running low, so you better not drink as deep, or that you’re incapable of coming up with an even better idea when you think you’ll actually use this one.

Ideas are there to be used, not rationed.

(2) The impulse to hold back ourselves

Like an archaeological dig, writing fiction proceeds in layers. When you do it right, you’re doing more than uncovering the intricacies of story and character, the minutiae you couldn’t be aware of during the planning phase. You’re revealing pieces of yourself, too, maybe parts you didn’t know about, or didn’t understand, or were afraid to confront or embrace.

Sometimes it all spills out the first trip through. Other times it builds up little by little, another thin, sedimentary layer with each pass of revision.

Whatever works.

As a reader, the stuff that gets to me, stays with me, makes me want to come back for more, isn’t the stuff that skims the surface. It’s not the stuff that reads like a padded outline or a head exercise with no investment of heart. All top motion. All ripples and no undertow.

Instead, what hooks me are the ones where I get a sense of the writer having dived as deep as she possibly could to get to the truth of her tale, not stopping until she was up to her elbows in the silt at the bottom.

For myself — and from myself — I don’t want the novel, the story, that anyone could have written, given access to the same notes. I want the version only one of us could’ve written. The version pulsing with a feeling that, to the author, every day and every paragraph mattered as much as breathing.

I know — they all feel like they do, at the time. Even the ripple-skimmers.

It doesn’t always translate. Not when it hasn’t been pushed sufficiently hard. Whatever lay behind it, not everything made it all the way to the page. Instead of going for more sweat, tears, blood, and heart rate, somebody settled for his idea of close enough and called it a day.

The orange belt test…

As it turned out, I passed. But I had serious doubts. Didn’t feel one bit good about how I’d done, and they don’t pass you for showing up. They don’t even pass you for finishing.

Just as editors and publishers don’t say yes simply on the basis of your having a completed manuscript. The same way readers don’t love something just because you wrote “The End.”

Instead, Yes and Love are earned through toil that sometimes hurts. A lot. I got the impression I’d earned that new color coding not in the first five hours, but in those last 45 minutes.

It’s true, though — no single work can be everything to everybody. Regardless of how deep you dug or dove, not everyone is going to get it. That’s OK. It doesn’t matter. What matters is how many do.

The surest way to get there? Again, boxing has an answer, in something fighters are always wise to do: Never leave it in the judges’ hands.

Meaning that win, lose, or die trying…

They go for the knockout every time.

Last month I sang the praises of turning tail and running the other way the moment the going gets tough.

Okay, not exactly. Oversimplification. More like the praises of putting a troublesome project on hold while you wander off for an indeterminate period, doing other things, new things, shiny things, so you can later return to whatever you left in the back of the refrigerator and, one hopes, approach it anew, a beneficiary of the unavoidable mental rewiring you’ve received in the interim. The key is neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize its neurons and their networks in response to new experiences.

I also remarked that this strategy seemed more likely to receive an unqualified embrace by the Eastern mindset, rather than the relentlessly goal-addicted Western mind. As if deliberately given an object lesson in inaction, not two days after I posted the essay, I blundered, without looking for it, across the Chinese Taoist term for the very concept I was molesting with my thoroughly Western vocabulary: wu wei, which in essence means to do by not doing.

This is not at all the same thing as doing nothing. One commentary I looked at gave a thumbnail sketch of wu wei as taking the right action at the proper time to allow what is to be, to be.

How, though, do we know what the right action is? Please be kind enough to share if you ever learn how to lock that down beyond all doubt. For now, I’m satisfied with this: You’ll know it when you feel it, a gut-level impulse that overrides anything the analytical mind can hurl at it.

November’s was my first Unplugged since last winter, and wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stepped out for several months of walkabout. There are times when one of life’s greatest necessities is to clear part of it aside to make room for other things, new things, shiny things. Which can turn into high-grade ore for writers. New experiences have a way of adding their own unique shadings to new work, or stalled work, or work-in-prolonged-progress, like a novel whose beginning and end are separated by seasons. They can unlock doors to formerly undiscovered wings in the houses of words we build, and open windows into characters who have coyly eluded us, and it may only be later that we recognize how the pieces of life-as-lived and tale-as-told fit together.

I dashed off a quick list of a few things I’d done since last we met here, none of which I’d never done before, and indicated that one of them was already paying dividends in the word trade.

It was this one:

Planned, planted, and tended a vegetable garden.

These dividends were not by design. They just happened, the organic by-product of a gut-level impulse.

I must first confess that I’m one of those freaks who don’t like summer, at least not since I graduated college and summer quit meaning three months off. As sand and waves are to the immortal Jeff Spicoli, so to me are snow and ice and all things winter, with the possible exception of hypothermia. Yet this year kindled a passionate new love affair with summer.

Gardening. Right. I approached it with lots of doing by actively doing. Began studying a manual in February. Plotted out the arrangement on graph paper, at a scale of 4 inches per square — three anal-retentive drafts of this. By the last frost date in May, every seed and nursery plant was ready. It was a rousing success. Righteous eats all around.

Except, proving that the Divine Comedy is still in full swing, we had the shortest, coldest, wettest growing season on record. It was the non-summer I’d always dreamed about and never gotten. Now it was here and wreaking unholy havoc.

It forced me to wage a constant battle against Septoria Leaf Spot — a fungus that adores cool, wet conditions — for the soul of the tomatoes. The Powdery Mildew made far quicker casualties of the squash, although this happened late, after I’d already discovered why, past a certain point in the season, you can hardly give squash away. Two artillery barrages of hail in late July. Glaciers and a mammoth stampede, too, although I might have only imagined those.

It all came to a screeching white halt with back-to-back snows when we were barely into the second week of October. In advance of the killing frosts I rescued between 200 and 300 green tomatoes that hadn’t had a chance to ripen on the vine. I boxed the mature ones with bananas, like ship’s passengers crowded into steerage, and they all eventually turned a triumphant red. The immature ones found their way into the alternate-lifestyle sleaze of a green tomato relish.

And I loved it. The whole process, from sod-busting to harvest. Every day I loved it. Except for fertilizing with fish emulsion, the most vile substance you can legally buy on the open market. Never encountered it? Think Moby Dick suffering severe gastrointestinal distress after getting food poisoning from two tons of fish tacos.

I know, I know … none of this sounds like it has anything remotely to do with writing. For most people, most projects, it wouldn’t. But for myself, and my current opus-in-progress, I beg to differ.

It’s a long, complicated thing set centuries before such institutions as the factory farms that keep most of us several steps removed from what ends up on our plate. Its characters, many of them, are agrarian folk, or otherwise depend directly upon them. If it doesn’t get grown, it doesn’t get eaten. There are no Whole Foods stores around to pick up the slack.

They’re aliens, to a degree, the way people of a different time and/or place will always be. But after not quite five months of planning, planting, and tending, I’ve found one more patch of common ground with them, and can empathize with them a little more deeply.

I relate, now, to their daily obsession with the sky, because I’ve shared it, with an active stake in it, attuned to the weather in ways I never had been. Too much rain, or not enough. Waiting on a stubborn sun. And I’ve tasted their fears of failure. Felt hail hitting me in the face, not caring about the sting, only what it might be doing to tender leaves and stems. Felt my heart sink at the discovery of disease and made it a mortal enemy.

I’ve watched with delight as pale green shoots shouldered their way up through the soil to unfurl their first fingernail-sized leaves. Felt pride in standing beside cornstalks that towered two heads above me, and worried over them like broken-legged horses as I righted them and braced them after a windstorm roared down from the mountains and knocked them over like bowling pins.

I ate and shared and traded. Sought advice and offered up a couple discoveries of my own, part of a community of people both different and the same, all of us trying to get it as right as we could and storing up lessons for next time.

Now. Tell me: How could I have gotten all that, for my own book, from somebody else’s? How could I have absorbed all that if I hadn’t lived it, had it wired into me, heart and neuron?

These people I meet across the centuries, also both different and the same … I love them that much more now, for their tenacity and faith and determination. The food was the ground’s gift to me. Growing it became my gift to them.

We’re all richer for it.

And we can’t wait for next year.