On a Tear

On a Tear

Have you ever noticed that there are times when you are more productive than other times? Sometimes it happens for very understandable reasons and sometimes it just happens for no particular reason at all. I am in such an Uber-productive state right now for some reason. If anyone noticed, yesterday’s post came about an hour later than normal. That was because I suddenly realized at 7am (my normal PDT publishing time each day) that I did not have a story in the queue to publish this morning. I usually run with two to four stories ahead so that doesn’t happen. I am quite good about writing whenever and wherever …and even about whatever strikes me as it strikes me. I do this through all the physical home project work I do. I do it around my teaching as the post yesterday shows, since it was mostly written while I was patiently waiting to teach a course on Sunday. I do it around my Expert Witness testimony since it too has all that wait around time I have mentioned. But the times when I get most behind in my blog posting are when one of two things happen, either I am traveling and therefore must write very conscientiously in the evening or morning when I am not behind the wheel, and when I am writing other things.

It seems that writing can become like any other activity and you can only do so much of it before you need to take a break. In life we call those breaks recreation. That is a perfect word to describe the breaks one needs to take while writing. Writing is a process of creation. You are engaging your mind and you are seeing what you want to say lay itself out in front of you. Then it is just a matter of how quickly you can compose and type. Both activities, composition and typing lend themselves to practice, practice, practice. If the topic I am writing about is securely in my head and especially if it relates to something about which I am very familiar (like something that relates to my personal history) I can compose and write like the wind. At other times I have to struggle and plod my way through something where the composition does not come so naturally or peters out quickly and requires more than normal amounts of creativity to keep the thread alive. I know exactly when something comes naturally and something is forced. Strangely enough, that alone is not an indicator of how good the story I produce will be. Sometimes a labored piece can be brilliant and sometimes something that flows naturally can turn out to be trite. One never knows until its done and reread.

I have mentioned that I am writing a book with an old colleague and motorcycle buddy. That effort is called War Games (the working title) and it is about the stories that come out of peacetime military service in the early 1960’s. The idea was from my buddy and the stories were a short set of vignettes which probably totaled no more than five or six pages worth of summaries. I somehow managed to turn that into a 200-page book with 100% made-up characters, all woven together in a storyline about how these young military guys met and lived together and shared the experiences of military men during the peaceful days before the reality of Vietnam was foisted upon the nation.

I have probably also mentioned that I was asked about four years ago to help a dear friend and motorcycle buddy to write his career biography. In that case I produced a 435-page biographical tome that got skewered by a literary advisor and was then rewritten by me into a 400-page marginally shortened book with a tad more sizzle. Well, after three years of mostly silence, that buddy has resurfaced and turned his attention to the commercialization of that book. He has asked, somewhat sheepishly, if I am still game to try to mold it into something a publishing consultant thinks can be sold to a third-party publisher. Who doesn’t like a challenge, and who wants their work redrafted by others rather than doing it themselves, right? So I agreed. I received a full set of recommendations on structure and overall content with a specific page-by-page evaluation of the manuscript. I found it very rational and am generally in agreement with the principles this advisor is suggesting for the rewrite. This book is about a fascinating high-level marketing career and how it reflected the business themes of the nation over the past fifty years.

Naturally, the newly reborn project came just before I finished the new military book, so they were both in scheduling conflict with one another. My comment to each co-author was that I could handle the two simultaneously. Fortunately, this all came at the exact moment (within days, literally) of stepping down from my CEO role in the venture company I have been running for three years. I say fortunately BOTH because I had more time to devote to the two tasks and because I probably needed projects to take my mind off what I was no longer responsible for doing. Oh, and this also coincided with finishing my long and protracted deck project. Again, that serves two purposes. I have less to deal with on the deck and I have reclaimed the deck as yet another venue for writing. The deck has sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean and the lovely chaparral hillsides, so it is an inspiring place to compose my thoughts.

This all has led to me being on a tear all of a sudden. My military buddy has already been amazed at the speed with which I write so he may not have noticed when I shifted into high gear and wrote the final three chapters of the book and declared the first draft as finished. I have told him that we both need to read it now and see how it flows and what’s needs to be adjusted to make us happy enough to publish. I have also sent it to a half dozen people to read for input. Since this book involves humorous peacetime military stories, I feel the need for input as to whether it is as funny as my buddy thinks or as funny as I have tried to make it. I simply am not a good judge of that reality as the primary author. the point though is that while some future polishing will be required, the project is more or less completed for the moment.

I am also now officially on a tear on my other revision of the big 400-pager. I waited to finish the other book before I started, but in one day I managed to completely write the first chapter pretty much from scratch and then produce the severely redacted (from 12,000 words down to 6,000 words) previous first several background (from I was born to I graduated business school) chapters. I have to believe that my friend and his wife are pretty amazed that I have cranked it out so quickly. I will be interested to hear what their literary advisor thinks both in terms of timing and content. I feel very good about the revision and am quite amazed as to how easily I have been able to get back into something I labored at three to four years ago. It makes me feel good about the facility of my aging mind.

So, in the last week I have wrapped up a big home project, given a guest lecture, finished a 200-page book, started and gotten a good jump on the revision of a 400-page book that needs to be a 250-300-page book and…..still written seven daily 1,300 – 1,400 word stories for this blog. I call that being on a tear.