Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Some runners reported sightings of bears and moose. I did see an eagle, perched on a dead tree and outlined against the sky, but I wouldn’t have noticed the bird if someone else hadn’t given a cry and pointed him out.

My net time was 6:22:06. I’d gone the twenty-six miles and change, and the usual aches and pains came and went during the race, but in the main I held up well enough and finished in decent shape. The horrible toe pain that I’d endured in two successive marathons, Huntington Beach and New Orleans, didn’t show up this time; I’d escaped it in Minnesota as well, and figured a change I’d made in footwear deserved the credit. I’d been more anxious about my lower back, and it never gave me a twinge.

I rode back to my hotel and stood under a hot shower for a while, and a few hours later I walked downtown and ate salmon.

I got up the next morning, booted up my laptop, checked my email, took a deep breath, and started writing.

More specifically, I started writing this book.

I’d been thinking off and on about writing some sort of book about my efforts at racewalking. One thing that held me back was the concern that no one but family members and indulgent friends would have much interest in reading it. It seemed to me that I couldn’t assign high priority to such a book, not when I had another book I was contractually committed to write, a book I was already late in delivering. A book I might have been able to deliver on time, if I wasn’t always out there walking day after day...

That book was Hit and Run, and I completed it in the course of my post-marathon stay in New Orleans. Once I’d turned it in, I realized there was something else I had an urge to write, and it was sometime in April that I began working on this book’s opening, actually reworking a message board report I’d posted on the New Orleans race. I got a little work done, but not very much; as my training for FANS picked up, I let the writing go. Now, though, I had a long week all by myself in a city where I didn’t know a soul. And training wouldn’t be a distraction, because my legs needed a rest at this point more than they needed more miles on them.

And my performance at FANS had me feeling genuinely good about myself as a walker, and my leisurely pace in Anchorage hadn’t changed that. So I’d brought my laptop along, and Sunday morning I got to work.

This was not my first venture at memoir. Sometime in the mid-1990’s I’d gone to Ragdale, a writers’ colony north of Chicago in Lake Forest, Illinois, to work on what would eventually take form as a Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery, The Burglar in the Library . I spent a week establishing that I wasn’t ready to write that particular book, then set it aside and wrote some other things — an introduction for the first hardcover edition of The Canceled Czech, and a pair of short stories which became chapters in Hit Man . It was a productive stay, if not what I’d had in mind when I booked the time, but I still had ten days before I was due to pack up and head home, and I got up one morning and started hitting computer keys, and it was the damnedest thing. I couldn’t stop writing.

I’d been toying with the idea of writing a memoir of my beginnings as a writer. I started young, while I was still in college, and spent those early years producing a vast amount of pseudonymous trash, along with my first efforts at crime fiction. I’d written a great deal since about writing, I had a monthly instructional column in Writer’s Digest from 1977 to 1990, and I’d certainly referenced some of my early experiences in that column and the several books for writers that had grown out of it. But I’d never really told my story, had never been inclined to do so, and had in fact made a point of brushing aside interviewers who wanted me to discuss those early days.

In the months before my Ragdale stay, I’d gotten to the point where I felt that recounting my beginnings was something I might want to do someday. But not yet, certainly. Not until I was ready.

Well, it was beginning to look as though I was ready. Because I batted out something like six thousand words the first day. I couldn’t drag myself away from the computer. I barely got to the dinner table on time, and it’s rare indeed for me to miss a meal.

I did the same thing the next day, and the day after that. And in eight days I’d produced something in excess of fifty thousand words.

It was an extraordinary experience. I’d start writing about some incident I hadn’t really thought about in decades, and almost before I’d finished exploring that particular chamber in my memory, another door would spring open, and I’d be remembering something else I’d forgotten entirely.

I’d had words come at this pace before. Some of us are apt to describe a book as having virtually written itself, but that’s not really what happens; if it did, one wouldn’t feel so utterly exhausted at day’s end. But, tiring or not, I’ve had books that were written very rapidly, and I don’t know that they ever suffered for the speed of their composition. Some of the work I’ve liked the best, and that was the most favorably received, had a very short gestation period and an easy birth.

But this was different. I found myself working all day and returning to work after dinner, because I seemed to be incapable of staying away from the computer. One memory would lead to another, and I couldn’t shut the process down.

I wrote a little over fifty thousand words in eight days. (If you’re not accustomed to thinking of length in terms of word count, this book you’re reading is, as I type these very words you’re reading now, just over 100,000 words. My daily stint, for the past four very productive weeks, has ranged between a thousand and twelve hundred words.)

I flew home from Ragdale with what I estimated at somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the projected volume. That didn’t mean it was anywhere near half done, as what I’d written was in rough form, and would require more work. It was, in fact, less polished than my usual first-draft copy, because I hadn’t taken the time to tweak it as I went along. I’d been too busy writing the damn thing.

But it was readable enough to include in a submission when my agent negotiated a four-volume deal with my publishers. It wasn’t by any means a key component, it was the literary equivalent of a player to be named later, but it was designated in the contract, with a specified portion of the advance earmarked for it.

That made it simpler a few years later, when I had to buy it back.

Because, curiously, I never wrote another word of that book. For the first month or so after I got back to New York I didn’t write a word of anything, or do much of anything else, either. I was exhausted, and shortly after I managed to get up each morning, it was all I could do to stretch out on the living room sofa, where I spent most of my time until it was late enough to go to bed. Lynne would pause now and then on her way by to dust me.

I’d known I was going to need some downtime after the effort I’d put in, but this was a lot more than I’d anticipated. I’d worked intensively in the past, it was in fact my preferred way of working, and I went to writers’ colonies because they facilitated this kind of total immersion in the work. This was vastly different, and when I thought about it — a few weeks down the line, when I was finally able to think about anything — I realized that the energy debt I’d incurred this time around was not only mental and physical, but emotional as well. You could argue that I’d been through a short course of do-it-yourself psychotherapy, and perhaps I’d turn out to be a better person for it, but in the meantime it was all I could do to chew my food.