<p> David Isaak of Tomorrowville fame is conducting a survey on his blog about how novelists write their books. Some are planners, some are freewheelers while some freewheel before backing up from the edge of the precipice.
<p> David invited me to join the discussion by posting my process here on this very blog. His email arrived just as I was typing “the end” on a manuscript in one of those bizarre we are the world coincidence moments so frowned upon at famous writers school. I should add that the novel just completed has reached this stage before and will reach this stage again in a few weeks after I “step away” from the project which means going into the kitchen and eating olives directly from the jar. I use a spoon because olive jars have narrow mouths like rattlesnakes or claims adjustors and very few famous writers that I’ve ever heard of contend they cannot work because their hand is trapped inside a jar of olives. That’s more of a movie star thing, and God knows, we’re not movie stars. So, I use a spoon.
<p> Essay wise we’re also battling the headwinds of the inescapable fact that while I have completed manuscripts none of them have been turned into books but rather returned to me, the creator of these manuscripts, with varying levels of thrust so that it may be said my process is limited to those preliminary rounds you used to see at Madison Square Garden where guys would go three rounds in a veil of cigar smoke thick enough to endanger great swathes of otherwise innocent citizens leaping from chairs crying “kill the bum!” If only novel writing, or manuscript writing, handed down from generations of monks in their cells, delivered that sort of audience participation or at least a solitary business mogul with hair a Florida orange might claim as its own, then you’d have a process on your hands.
<p> To summarize: it seems to me that Nolan Ryan used to soak his fingers in pickle brine to avoid blisters on his fingers and he could throw a baseball one hundred miles per hour past a man with a bat in his hand and a prayer on his lips. From now on I won’t use a spoon, I’ll take my chances with the rattlesnake and just reach for it.
This post, of course, wins the “most succinct” award, since the title says it all.
As to olives, the brine is not only useful for soaking fingers, but also for FDR’s favorite drink, the Dirty Martini:
2 oz gin
1 tbsp dry vermouth
2 tbsp olive juice
2 olives
There’s also a Hot and Dirty Martini, but I’ve never had one…