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When
I was a young man working hard at becoming a writer I lived
in several different places from time to time. They were
always inexpensive places and the neighborhoods were never
good. But it was all I could afford because I was trying
to live for a year on the revenues from a few months' work.
I would work for a few months as an accounting clerk at
a steel factory in Pennsylvania, for example, then live
all year on those hoarded wages in a drafty cabin in the
woods. I would sweep floors for three months in a hospital
supply factory in Clearwater, Florida, then retire to a
rented trailer until the money ran out. From the time I
was 21 and fresh out of college until I was 32 and freshly
married, I lived this way. I did not care what the job was
because it was not my vocation. It was a way of paying the
rent and buying another box of macaroni and cheese until
my true vocation began to pay off.
It
was wonderful then being young and with no responsibility but to
write and believe in yourself. To write more so as to write better,
that was always the goal. Publication would come eventually, you
never doubted it. Well, sometimes late at night you doubted it but
you were young and had great recuperative powers. Just to write
and to live hard so that you had something to write about, that
was the thing. If you had not eaten that day it did not matter because
you could stuff yourself on words. There was always writing and
reading no matter how many meals you missed.
The
only thing that could slow the writing was the cold. If you had
no money for heating oil and the house was so cold with winter that
ice formed on the insides of the windows and you could see your
breath with every exhalation, then writing became difficult. It
is not easy to write when your teeth are chattering and your fingers
are stiff and blue. So you would bundle up and go outside for a
long brisk hike, and when your mind was warmed and racing you would
turn back. If you had timed your walk properly and were energized
rather than worn out you could hurry to your chair and pull off
your gloves and write for a half-hour or so until you had to start
blowing on your fingers again, and then you knew it was over for
a while.
It
was easy in those days if you kept your dreams to yourself to believe
you were a great writer or on your way to becoming one. It was easy
because you always had the energy and the desire and the optimism
to write. It was wonderful when it was easy, and even though you
are better at it now it can never be as good.
Sometimes
it works like this: You are crawling through your story
on hands and knees, moving an inch at a time because the
brush is so thick that it lets in very little sunlight.
You can not see the next tree in your path until you run
up against it. And every time you manage to get past another
obstacle you feel that you have gotten turned around somehow,
off your course. You do not know how to get back on track
or where you will end up. The only option is to keep crawling
forward, to trust in movement, arduous as it might be. But
you grow weary. The air is stale. Faith falters. Hope subsides.
This route was a mistake, a waste of precious time. A fool’s
delusion. This thicket is endless. It will no doubt be the
death of you.
You pause to catch your
breath, clear your head. If you pause too long, then sometimes,
yes, you die in there. The story will die, be abandoned
in the dark, and whatever piece of your soul was attached
to it will die with it.
But sometimes, suddenly,
for no reason other than because you have been too stubborn
to stop pushing forward, the tree blocking your path tumbles
over, just like that, felled by a sigh, and there before
you the path lies exposed, wide and clear of all obstacles,
waiting to take you again from scene to scene, chapter to
chapter, all the way home to a place you have never been. 
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