Shhh! The Wires are Talking

Probably my best friend in middle and early high school was Carl Johnson, and his father was a CB radio enthusiast. Carl’s father worked at Radio Shack and made extra money installing massive antennas for other radio hobbyists, those big metal towers you see attached to mobile homes.

I don’t remember much about the guy except two things: he wore a blue sock around one of his wrists for arthritis, and he inadvertently said one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard about writing (and, indeed, all creation).

Carl and I were helping him one day by coiling up a big knot of wire. It was flailing and whipping all around us as we tried to wrestle it into submission, and Carl’s father finally climbed down from the antenna and quickly tamed it into a neat circle.

“Wire talks to you,” he said. “You’ve got to listen to it.”

Now, Carl and I made gentle fun of him behind his back for years after that, imagining a world in which he thought that electronics were eerily alive. But as I’ve worked more as a writer, I’ve come to see his strange wisdom: most difficult things get less difficult when you pay attention to their own patterns and laws. Wires and hoses gladly coil for you, but you’ve got to follow the way they want to coil.

I’m in a tricky place with the novel now, three-quarters through. The first three-quarters is completely finished, rewritten and polished, all but ready to go. The last quarter? Blank pages, emptied by all the changes I’ve made earlier in the book.

Yet now, exhausted by the whole novel process, I find myself impatient to skip the usual step of lousy first-draft writing and snap this last quarter perfectly into place like the rest. I’ve tried to listen to the wires of my novel, and now I’ve got this last tendril that isn’t fitting because I’m not listening to anything but all the rest. I’m trying too hard to force it.

And of course, this waiting for perfection is just delaying the work even more.

So much of writing is lulling oneself into a strange fugue state of surrender, of letting the wire coil itself. That’s all the harder close to the end of something, when you have the promise of all the rest to fulfill.

Sigh. I guess it’s time to bring on the liquor.