On August 5, 1999, I reported to Betty that I felt I
was nearing the end of my research for my biography. Most of what I have left on my Read list, I told her, is fairly peripheral, so I think I should
just get going on the thing.
It’s always a tough call for a writer, knowing when to
keep reading and searching, when to slow down (or quit) and begin the writing.
I heard Russell Banks talk about this concerning his John Brown novel, Cloudsplitter (1998). It was on May 9,
2000, not long after the novel’s publication. He was speaking at Western
Reserve Academy that evening, part of Hudson’s ongoing bicentennial celebration
(our town was founded in 1799). The topic of his speech—“Fact to Fiction: John
Brown and the American Artistic Imagination.” The subject was a natural for
Hudson: John Brown had spent his boyhood here (his parents are buried here),
made his famous declaration here about devoting his life to the eradication of
slavery.
Anyway, I remember Banks talking about how he’d had to
do a tremendous amount of research for the novel—including lots of travel, of
course—and how he realized one day that he could spend the rest of his life
charting the river John Brown and its many tributaries. So he made himself stop, made himself start writing the novel.
On a much more modest scale, I was experiencing the
same thing. As I said earlier (probably a couple of times), I had read all of
Mary Shelley’s works, the writings of her parents, her husband, Lord Byron, and
numerous others she associated with. I had read every biography of her, her
mother, her father, her husband (and many others—like Coleridge and
Wordsworth). And now I was reading books about English carriages in the
nineteenth century, about burial practices, about the history of the parachute
(when Mary was a little girl, she’d seen one of the first demonstrations in
London; the guy had sailed right over their neighborhood), about comets and
volcanoes and clothing styles and … And, of course, I’d just spent a month in
Europe visiting all the relevant sites—from Wales to Switzerland to Italy and
Germany. I was a scholarly drunk on a bender.
It really was time to stop (or slow down) and start
writing the story. I just checked my computer files and saw that I began
writing the book on April 2, 2000. So eight more months went by between my note
to Betty about time to get started
and my actually doing so. Here’s an edited version of my journal entry for that
day (nothing added, but some quotidian matters excised):
2nd,
Sun: 8:45; over to [coffee shop] while [Joyce] worked out; read NYTimes in much detail; returned crow book to
Hudson Library [this was for another project]; home: checked a few things on computer,
then headed over to Starbucks to read more about Crimean War for Kirkus; light over [my] chair was out, so it was a
strain on the old orbs, but I read today about the Charge of the Light Brigade
(a “blunder,” I here learn); home: fussed around a bit (ordered new J C Oates
novel about M. Monroe [Blonde] from Learned Owl [local book shop];…began
organizing 1st chapter of MWS bio; wrote several pages, then, after
supper, drove to Hiram with [Joyce] to drop off library books; read some about [Queen]
Caroline [married to George IV, one of the four monarchs who reigned during
Mary’s lifetime] as I waited for [Joyce] to come over from her office; stopped
at S’bucks on the way home (briefly); finished about 1200 words for the day;
watched The Sopranos with [Joyce]; ….
So … Day One I wrote 1200 words, and off I went. My
notes tell me I finished that first draft on May 24, 2001—a little more than a
year after I started. I just checked my journal to see what profundities I
recorded about the occasion, but, alas, May 2001 is incomplete: No entry for
the 24th. I growl and gnash teeth and vow never to miss a
journal-writing day again!
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