A man has to know his limitations

 The coffee is hot. Classic rock plays softly in the background. The neighborhood houses are black lumps against a dark blue-gray sky. I rock slightly in the un-reclined recliner looking out the window at nothing.  It is cold, but not too cold outside. It is comfortable in the old office. 

I usually block off Saturday and Sunday mornings to write. Today, I’m in a lazy mood. I should sit at the computer and write. I don’t want to put in the work. I’ve hit a writers block wall of my own design in my latest novel. I ended the last chapter and started the current one with exposition, not action. I have stated that things happened, not described the happening, if that makes sense. 

For example, I might write that the basketball team lost a tough game in the State basketball tournament. I should describe the hot, sweaty, loud, raucous, competitive atmosphere of Hoosier Hysteria in the gym from the old days of single class basketball. The days when entire towns showed up on Friday night to see the team on the hardwood. I should write what the fans did, describe the smell of popcorn in the lobby, the sweat of the railroad worker crammed on the bench seat next to you. 

See what I mean? I wrote one sentence when I should have written a hundred words. By the same token, I write a hundred words when one sentence would suffice. It is the endless editing and rewriting that sucks the fun out of it. 

I know what I want to happen. I’m just too lazy to do the actual work. As the historian Barbara Tuchman once said, “research is endlessly seductive, writing is hard work.” I’m not talking the writing like here at the old blog, this is ridiculously easy. I sit and words flow stream of consciousness fashion right onto the electronic page. Narrative writing is difficult. I’m afraid I was only moderately successful in my first book. I learned from it. And to Tuchman’s point, since the current novel takes place in the past I am drawn and sucked in by the research. Do I really need to spend two hours researching the history of the Nickel Plate Railroad and the machinations of Jay Gould and the Vanderbilts? 

Oh, I know I can write prose. I can craft sentences that flow, that describe, that are easy to read. Writing an actual story, that is a completely different animal. There were a couple of passages in my first book I thought were good writing. There was also some complete crap. There are chapters and passages that do nothing to push along the narrative. I should have taken an figurative red pen and marked them with a big red X. 

None of this is compliment fishing. Rather, as Clint told us, “A man has to know his limitations.” I know mine. And a big one today is that I don’t want to do the hard work of writing. I think I’ll read a few blogs, then saunter off to watch something, anything on TV.