Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual THE PERILS OF PROLIFICACY I seem to have written another book, my eighteenth. I'm gratified that the ecologists haven't thus far come after me for destroying so many trees. The most...
...One of the two chief ways of writing a book is to read everything available on the subject, talk with all the people who might be helpful, do such legwork as is required—and then, after however long this requires, sit down and begin writing...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...Only a devotion to craft combined with a grudging unwillingness to return the money to the publisher has, in the case of a number of my books, kept me at my oars, hoping eventually to sight land...
...The most ambiguous compliment a writer can receive is to be told that he or she is prolific...
...Usually I don't even treat myself to a Snickers bar...
...I reread and rework each chapter as I write it, sometimes several times...
...Writing a book is often compared to having a child...
...The best I seem able to come up with is to fritter away the next few days, putting in order the books and notes accumulated in composing the recently finished book, answering email, allowing myself some desultory reading...
...The other way, my way, is to start writing the book and do the research as you go along...
...they fear, is another common response to their latest creation...
...I feel less than triumphant when I've completed a book...
...These can sometimes be exceedingly touchy questions...
...One difficulty with my way is that, less than half way out to sea, you begin to feel that writing this book is a serious mistake...
...How come I'm so stupid today...
...Still, there are mornings when I have to ask, what, exactly, is the story here...
...If every sentence is well made, if each paragraph works, I tell myself, then things can't be in entirely wretched shape...
...Only a year or more later, when for one reason or another I might open the book and find a passage that pleases me, do I say to myself, "Not bad, not bad at all...
...Some writers are more patient than others...
...My next book is to be about Fred Astaire...
...The chief feeling I have upon completing a book is that it is a pity the book is finished because I'm only now ready to write a fine book on this subject...
...I fear that I may be getting prolific, if I'm not already there...
...I'm too frightened to discover that it doesn't...
...I wish I had a better way of celebrating the completion of a book...
...But until the book is completed I never go back and reread all the chapters that I've written to see if what I've done thus far hangs together...
...I enjoy revising my books, eliminating repetitions, correcting errors of fact and grammar, tightening things up, battening things down...
...You tell yourself you really don't know diddly about the subject, you certainly haven't anything interesting (let alone original) to say, and you wish you hadn't already spent the publisher's advance...
...I wasn't stupid when I wrote that...
...Basta...
...My problem is that I don't have the organizational power to do all the necessary groundwork and then keep everything in good order until I need it...
...Give it a dust-jacket with a golden retriever on the cover and it could be a big seller...
...George Santayana worked no fewer than 45 years (not continuously, let me add) on The Last Puritan, his only novel, which turned out to be an unlikely bestseller and a Book of the Month Club selection, which not so secretly delighted him...
...I don't think my way is better...
...This usually means the freedom to start thinking in a more concentrated way about my next book...
...in fact, the first way sounds to me much more sensible...
...I feel instead a calm pleasure in having finished a task I've set myself...
...Pop open a jeroboam of champagne, buy a vicuna coat, book a flight to Paris...
...What having a book and having a child do have in common is the unresolved question of why anyone who goes through it once would want to go through it again...
...Having a child is obviously much the tougher assignment...
...Fortunately for me, land has always turned up, even if the destination isn't quite where I had imagined it would be when I first set out...
...I've neglected to mention that my recently completed book is about Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Why, apart from the hope of lucre and a bit of temporary fame, am I writing this book...
...To revert to the cliché childbirth analogy, neither do I feel anything like post-partum depression...
...Although I've had some commercial and critical success with my books, I've never written a book at whose completion I felt that, like a gymnast making a perfect landing, I've nailed it, a perfect ten...
...I do have a sense of qualified freedom...
...Oh, him again" is how prolific writers suspect their new books are greeted...
...I am among the others...
...At quick glance, the analogy seems cogent enough: Both entail, in a rough sense, conception, gestation, and birth...
...Perhaps I ought to combine the two and call it Dancing in Democracy...
Vol. 11 • March 2006 • No. 26
