After You Pass Page Eight Hundred...

You are on your own. Maybe you have something or maybe you have nothing. The book has gotten so big that there are parts you are not sure how they relate to the whole and still it doesn't end. You just keep going with the thought that the book must end somewhere and then what will that end look like? After all these pages will the end justify the commitment. Or will it just dribble out like a fire finally burning down to some coals and then smoting into night.

You don't know.  And in a sense you don't care. You just want to finish that first draft that is plowing along like the Titanic and creating such a wake that everything else is put on hold. After I finish the book. After I finish the book. Then I will deal with the world but of course the world has a nasty habit of pushing into your world anyway. Kids and dogs and schools will do that. So you carve off part of you to get the work done and each day you wonder if there is any gas left in the tank.

Because you have certainly burned through all sorts of reserves to the point you barely have anything left over for blogging or essays or anything. But your secret pride is that you tried it in the first place. That you took a shot and if it is just your great silent catastrophe...that is alright too.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Kamikaze writing the Big Book

My mother in law asked me what I was working on. Usually I just say something vague, but I told her I was working on a big book and that I was six hundred and sixty pages into it. She paused, then looked at me and said "who the hell wants to read a book that big?" Fair enough. It gets worse because I will probably break a thousand. But when writing the big book you are a bit like a kamikaze where you are not sure you are coming back from this one.

First of all no one wants a really big book anymore. They are expensive to publish. And there is that old thing that peoples attention span is getting shorter not longer. Look at Kindle singles. Look at what is selling. Look at twitter! And there you go, writing an opus along the lines of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Talk about insane. Your agent doesn't want you to do it and yet you persist. Why?

Maybe because you can. Maybe because you wont ever do it again. Maybe you just want to see if you can write the big book and take a swipe at the "whats it all about sweepstakes." Why not? You have written everything else. Why not throw in everything but the kitchen sink and go for it. You only live once right? And so you strap yourself in, start the motor, and fly toward your final destination. A human torpedo headed for total destruction or total nirvana.

That's the big book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Women Writing Big Books

A piece in the New York Times Book Review lamented that women are not taken seriously in the Big Book arena. That men are given preferential treatment for the literary heavyweight title and that women are relegated to relationship novels. I can see why some people may think this way but certainly as a male writer of literary fiction I sometimes wish I were a woman. Why? Because women read fiction and it would seem a natural fit for editors to choose a book by a woman over a man.

I get the top of the mountain stuff for the Big Book. I think it is probably given over to men in some way. Can a woman bring the world view into the Big Book that is required for someone to say...now there is a great literary novel that sums it all up. I would say yes, but that is sort of esoteric coin of the realm stuff. Most of us just want to keep getting published and read and let me tell you as a white male writer you feel sometimes you just cant get a fair shake.

Of course it is the work that matters. And so maybe all of this is frivolous talk about who gets preferential treatment in the grand sweepstakes of literary glory. I suppose women see men as still dominant in the Franzen top of the mountain epics...but for this writer, I sure wouldn't mind being the gender that loves to read fiction.

Being a man, I think I'm stuck.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/