Ten to Two: A Writing Manual

                                          1.

            “Don’t whine,” was my first writing teacher’s advice. “If you’re going to be a writer don’t whine like the others. Writing is hard work, but it’s also a privilege.”     

            Professor Cannavale was a thirty-year-old long-haired graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, a place I’d soon learn that I was supposed to revere. He had an adjunct gig at my college and he gave out free books to the most promising writers—I acquired Dog Soldiers in the first class. I picked the book less for winning the 1975 National Book Award than the machine gun and heroin needles on the cover.

All the students liked him. Some too much. I dropped by unannounced at his house once to find a classmate ironing his laundry.

            He announced he was throwing a party at his house one night. He wanted to show some Kurosawa films. Only me and the poetry professor showed up.

            I arrived a half hour early with a six-pack of Yuengling that I’d end up drinking alone. Professor Cannavale wore a button down. I followed him down a beige hall, past a mattress on the floor and Kerouac’s journals on the nightstand. He unsleeved Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” popped open a laser-disc reader and hit play.

            In the twenty-minute vignette, “The Blizzard,” a team of mountaineers scales a mountain through a blizzard and drop one by one. A beautiful snow spirit, a Yuki-onna, descends…at first you might believe it will encourage the beleaguered climbers, but then the snow spirit reveals itself to be a demon. The last climber fights her off. The snow abates, and he triumphantly leads the others to glory.

            My teacher showed me this, and I intuitively understood. This was about writing, and life. I stared into the blue night and felt singled out for something amazing (forgetting I was the only one there, so I was literally singled out). Something merged within me. The night had no boundary and felt infinite. Someone else’s dream became mine.

            This was art.

            I was a writer.

            I was chosen.

                                2.

I wrote my first novel in two months. It was exhilarating.

I sent it out to agents. No one cared. I put it in the drawer. I lived.

I joined AmeriCorps and traveled the country, volunteering. I volunteered at schools and Habitat sites. I met a beautiful girl. I attended graduate school at NYU. I fought wildfire for the Forest Service for several years in New Mexico. I had an aggressive Hemingway phase. I wrote two more novels and revised. I went to Bread Loaf, met my first agent (who died of pancreatic cancer a few days before I sent her my manuscript).

I signed with a new agent, published in some journals, inked a shopping agreement for a tv show. I married the beautiful girl. Together we gut-renovated a house in Jersey City and had three daughters. I was accepted into a fully-funded MFA. I adjuncted and read as many books as I could get my hands on. I’d always been a reader. In my MFA, I recommended books constantly, much to the consternation of my cohort—I was probably perceived as pretentious, but novels had been my guides through life.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. Not always anything good. People asked me when I found the time with kids and all.

“Ten to two,” I told them.

“That should be the name of your writing manual,” they said.

That was an idea.

                              3.

When I was sixteen, I was sent to military school.

In military school, we woke at dawn, spent most of the day doing pushups, getting verbally abused, disciplined, etc. At ten p.m., we bowed our heads to taps. At that hour all the lights snuffed to darkness across campus. Except the one at my desk. I stayed up late, reading either Vonnegut or Camus mostly.

            “Do you have late lights, Erkkila?” Master Sergeant asked, shining his flashlight in my face.

            “Yes, Master Sergeant,” I said, handing him a permission slip, confirming I had the privilege to study one hour after taps.

A perfect bureaucrat, he checked my permission slip every night. The only other memory I have of the Master Sergeant was the way he sucked his teeth before he lost his temper.   

            I have never wanted to be part of the world that checks boxes and permission slips and abuses others. Those nights, I traveled deeper and deeper into pages. I opened the window and smelled the night air. In the brisk December wind, dogs howled. Church bells tolled. The moon watched. The wind blew. Those lambent winter nights, Valley Forge always smelled like snow.

From my window, I saw the library’s white columns, the old oak cadets touch for luck spreads its bare limbs to the sky. Winter mornings cadets struggle to climb the steep icy hill that rises past the barracks, even with overshoes.

            Valley Forge Military Academy was a year of my life, and first attempt at a novel. Those nights are what I remember most. I channeled the Catcher in the Rye. I imagined the Revolutionary Army’s ghosts. Some nights before taps me and a few friends would race around the parade field as many times as we could. I felt a ruckus in my soul. My whole life was ahead of me and I was writing—opening pages that lead deeper and deeper into other places. We were just children, and our days were dictated to the smallest detail. The only way to survive was to blend. I will always remember those late-night moments at my desk most happily in my life, because at night, while everyone else slept, I was free.

                                  4.

Life isn’t a straight climb.

At home, bills piled. Diapers ripened. Babies cried (for no reason!). My hair grayed. My house filled with stuff I didn’t recognize. I’d written every day for two decades—millions of pages. It was a long pandemic, holding crying babies while the world ended. There wasn’t enough money. I became a cliché—the dead-eyed dad, watching the 11 o’ clock news, nursing a gin and ulcer.

When would I hit the mountaintop? It was a stupid question. But I still asked it every day. Life’s blizzard loomed. Blank pages devoured me.

Most days I worried that I’d wasted my life writing or worrying about finding the time to write. Or worrying about not being noticed for my writing as I tried to escape the intense pain of writing/not writing.

The mountain had been a pyramid scheme. There were no deep transformative truths in books, only despair.

In my clearer moments, I knew this was untrue. Books had saved me from the dark sophomore days of being a wannabe thug, bringing guns to school, selling weed laced with pharmaceuticals, and getting arrested for fighting.

In the evenings, I didn’t sleep (But that’s normal with young children.). I wrote from ten to two, but I felt like a failure.                        

 “Am I a writer?” I desperately asked my wife.

Get away from me! is what her eyes said. But she said, “yes.”

                                 5.

An agent accepted my manuscript, and I felt as though I’d reached the mountaintop, finally, at the ripe old age of 27 (literary years = dog-years).

Unsurprisingly, he said I needed to revise, the book needed to be more commercial.

This is how he phrased it: “You’ve written a highly polished work of literature. The dirty truth, however, is that agents are part of the world of commerce. We need to eat, and in order to eat we require lucre.”

“Lucre?” I asked.

“Money,” he said.

Something clicked.

Ok, I said, quietly horrified. That made sense.

                                   6.

The last time I saw my agent, he recommended I read E.M. Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel.” It might help with some of my plot issues.

I ordered a copy. It had lots of practical advice I didn’t want to hear.

The MFA later confirmed much of Forster’s practical advice (I didn’t want to hear); Back to basics: Keep it simple. Stick to the plot. Think of one event as a domino effect that leads to the next. Beautiful sentences don’t matter. Or, they only mattered in the same way cake frosting matters.

Find a way to keep the reader turning the pages.

Freytag’s pyramid, the “master-plot” was a mountain.

Fuck.

                                    7.

  I stand in the blizzard.

“This is the writing life, Erkkila,” my creative writing teacher screams through raucous snow. “You do it for yourself. It takes everything, but gives it all back. So, don’t whine.” 

“When do I reach the mountaintop?” I wanted to shout but even in a dream held off. I knew this was whining.

On the worst days, it’s easy to feel despair, regret, complain.

The truth is no one cares. No one cares if you write. You’re free. Free to scream into the void or with joy that you’re a writer, trekking deeper and deeper into the unknown, the country of being alive.

In a chapter of “Aspects of the Novel,” E.M. Forster defines “Prophecy” as the quality that sometimes happens in the writing when the universe speaks through the writer’s pen; the result is a journey beyond to a place where the reader leaves the physical world.

The mountain.

            One thing I feel strongly about is the deeper I go into the writing, the more likely I will find the next thing. From a maelstrom of ideas and phrases, a story emerges. There is no mountaintop, only an uphill battle, a blizzard of pages, one step forward, then the next.

Sleepless nights, I return to that moment in the blue night. The promise, and path ahead. The writing life. It pushes me forward.

I tell myself one thing, and you should too—the book you are writing teaches you to be brave again, or at the very least brings forth the courage already there. The best thing is not to talk about the writing, but to get up and start again.

There is only the mountain, the blizzard, and whoever dares to climb.

To begin, begin.