"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." (Boswell's Life of Johnson)
The quantity of good writing here on Daily Kos and in other online forums astounds me. I've written professionally for much of my life – mostly for video and multimedia, but also in local publications and blogs – and I know how much research, writing, rewriting, and hair-pulling goes into many of the informative, funny, and heartfelt diaries that show up here. Most astounding of all is that the fact that these writers have no expectation of ever being paid for their work. This diary and its planned successors are about my latest effort to write, and to avoid blockheadedness by getting paid for it. I hope some of my fellow writers here find it amusing and instructive.
Over the past few years, my main gig hasn't been writing. Instead, I ran two large estates, one on Long Island and the other in the Hudson Valley. In both cases, I worked for very wealthy families, and in both cases, I encountered some interesting characters. My experiences in Long Island, where I was first a gardener and second a property manager, were especially noteworthy: noteworthy as in "You had to fix a bidet?" and "Tell me again what she told you to whack off?" When I would relate my stories to friends and family, the response was predictable: "You should write a book!" Everyone tells everyone else to write a book, but thankfully, relatively few of us are stupid enough to take them at their word. In this case, I barely had enough time and energy to sign my name to receipts, let alone write a book.
After three years and bit in Long Island, I took another job at a much larger estate in the Hudson Valley. I was less of a gardener there and more of a general manager. It was a better job in most respects, but there were fewer funny and outrageous events, and no one ever asked me to write a book about my experiences there. The funniest thing that happened, I suppose, was getting fired, but I won't write about that. My former employer had enough sense to get my signature on a non-disclosure agreement, and has enough money and lawyers to make sure it gets enforced in perpetuity.
At this stage, having time and little else, I began writing my Long Island book. I had written a few sketches before, but now I was trying to write a book that other people – people that I didn't know and wasn't related to – would actually buy and read. I scrapped the sketches and began sifting through my memories to find enough material to build a whole narrative. In addition to raw material, I needed a blueprint, some structure on which to hang all these stories and observations. The stories came easily at first, complete with dialogue that was surprisingly accurate, or at least, seemed accurate to me. (I was a lot wittier than I originally thought – funny how that happens!) The blueprint was harder. I finally decided to force everything into a calendar year: a natural structure that fitted my horticultural subject matter (although bidets don't seem to observe the passing of the seasons.)
I also decided to follow the inspiring example of one of my favorite authors, Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials). He writes a thousand words a day. Pullman, however, writes out his thousand words in a beautifully disciplined longhand, which he took courses to perfect. I can't read my own handwriting anymore, so I decided to stick with the computer and my erratic two-fingered typing.
A thousand words is a modest enough goal, but sometimes it was hard to hit five hundred. Some days, it was hard to start at all. When you're juggling a job search with a writing project, trying to conduct a long-distance marriage, and occasionally reviewing the broken fragments of your misspent life, just sitting down and typing that first sentence can be an effort.
At last, I had a manuscript of a little over fifty thousand words – a little on the short side, but it had a discernible structure and flow, I thought it was funny in the right parts, and there was enough horticulture in it to attract my fellow gardeners without putting off the merely curious.
In the next installment of Confessions of a Blockhead: My manuscript's entry into the real world, and what it finds there.