Lawrence Block - Step by Step

I wasn’t that crazy about writing, either.

I could still do it. The book I’d written earlier that year in New Orleans, Hit and Run, got stronger than usual reactions from everyone who read it, and it had certainly absorbed me fully while I was working on it. I was in fact happy enough with all of my recent books, and my readers seemed content with what I was writing.

Yet it somehow seemed to me that I was done. I kept at it because it was, after all, what I did — and, not incidentally, because I still needed to make a living. Would I continue to write if I didn’t need the money? Maybe, but maybe not. It was impossible to say.

The list of books I’d written no longer fits on a single page, and it was pretty clear to me that I’d long since said everything I had to say, and written all the books I had any deep inner need to write. My Matthew Scudder series, sixteen books long, seemed to have found a natural stopping point, and the character to have earned a comfortable retirement. Bernie Rhodenbarr, my burglar, could probably go on, since he didn’t age or change from one book to the next, but I’d just be repeating myself in any further adventures I fashioned for him — and it seemed to me I’d done so already in the last book or two. Evan Tanner, my insomniac/secret agent, had taken twenty-eight years off between his seventh and eighth appearances, and I’d decided the fellow had the life cycle of a cicada, and could certainly wait another twenty-eight years before he showed up again.

And as much as I’d lately enjoyed writing about Keller, I had a feeling Hit and Run would be hard to follow. My characters were all apparently ready to hang it up.

Maybe they were trying to tell me something.

Ever since we’d met, Lynne and I had shared a passion for travel. And that was waning, too. We didn’t have any trips planned, and I’d found myself tossing out cruise and adventure travel brochures after no more than a cursory glance.

Reasons came to mind. Air travel gets more unpleasant all the time, for one thing. For another, we’d been to 135 countries, and there weren’t that many places left that we felt an urgent desire to visit. Finally, we’d had three trips in succession that, for one reason or another, had proven disappointing. We didn’t feel the need to pawn our suitcases or let our passports expire, but we could see travel playing a less prominent role in our future years.

And there were other pleasures that no longer provided much enjoyment. We hardly ever got to the theater these days, and the prospect of so doing felt almost like punishment. It was all I could do to go to a movie. My Writers Guild membership gets me invitations to no end of screenings, and in the pre-Oscar season my WGAE card gives me free admission to most movie houses. I hardly ever get to a screening, and rarely manage to card my way into a theater. Easier to stay home. Easier to find something on television.

One night not long ago we went to a party. It was a nice enough party, as parties go. We had a few conversations with some reasonably interesting people, and contrived to leave early. Walking home from the subway, I turned to Lynne and said, “I’ve got to remember never to leave the house.”

Of course I was joking. Sort of.

My concern went beyond walking. “When a man is tired of London,” Samuel Johnson observed, “he is tired of life.” I seemed to have tired of walking — and of reading, of writing, of roaming. Had I observed similar symptoms in a fictional character, I’d have supposed him to be not long for this world. There he was — walking through his house, turning off the lights. Shutting down, preparing for it all to be over.

Was that what I was doing?

The thought saddened me. I had always wanted a long life, if only to find out what happened next. But if I was no longer much inclined to turn the pages of a book to learn what happened next, or to make a similar determination in a book of my own, maybe that lifelong curiosity had run its course.

Sometimes i told myself that my life wasn’t ending, that it was merely changing direction, and doing so in a way that was not inappropriate for my years. I still had interests and pleasures, even passions. They were simply different from the ones I’d had before.

For Christmas, Lynne gave me the first two seasons of The Wire on DVD. I’d tried the show early on and had been unable to keep the complicated story straight or make out what the characters were saying. Now, watching one episode right after the other, and letting the subtitles clarify the dialog, I got completely caught up in the show. Within two weeks we’d watched both full seasons and ordered seasons three and four.

And my stamp collection continued to hold my interest. Like Keller, my wistful hit man, I’d collected as a child, and into early adulthood. I sold everything when my first marriage ended, and forgot about it, only to return to the hobby in the mid-1990’s.

I could spend hours poring over price lists and catalogs, sitting in auction rooms, working on my albums. It absorbed me completely.

Keller, who took up philately again when he contemplated retirement, elected not to specialize, collecting the stamps of the whole world from 1840 to 1940. (The hobby ate into his retirement fund, so he’s still working.) My collection was similar, though humbler; I lacked his discretionary income.

But didn’t stamp collecting serve as a substitute for the travel that had so obsessed me? Wasn’t this a more leisurely and less hectic way to collect all of those far-flung countries?

One way to look at it. Another was to note that my pleasures had become inactive, sedentary, and housebound. Instead of racing, I took my time. Instead of traveling, I stayed home. Instead of exercising, I watched young men play football. Instead of reading or writing, I looked at TV shows.

Wonderful.

I was depressed, of course, and I knew that sitting around and doing nothing was a recipe for perpetuating the depression — but I didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it.

Come the first of the year, I told myself, I’d force myself to get moving. For starters, I’d return to the gym. You don’t burn a lot of calories sitting in front of a television set watching more active chaps play football, or sell drugs, or shoot each other. The same thing goes for sitting at a desk and mounting postage stamps in an album. Since those were my pastimes, and since I was eating like an offensive lineman bellying up to the training table, well, I had better do something about it — and I decided I’d somehow find the will once the new year got under way. I’d get back on the treadmill, and I’d cut back on the carbs.

I needed to exercise, because my clothes didn’t fit. I needed to get something written because we were running out of cash. I didn’t wait for January to sit down at the computer. There was a short story I’d agreed to provide for an anthology, and they’d already paid me half the money in advance, the manipulative bastards, so I really had to write the damn thing. And it would be good to try something that would take days rather than months to finish.

I wrote the story in a week’s time, and it turned out okay. That was encouraging, it told me that those muscles still worked, and that I could rise to an occasion when I had to.

January came around, and on the morning of January 2 I got myself out the door and walked the block and a half to my gym. Remarkably, I still remembered which locker was mine, and the combination of my lock. I worked out that morning, and the next morning, and the morning after that.

And then I stopped.

Well, I told myself, I evidently wasn’t ready. Not yet. Besides, the exercise took time and energy that I needed for my work. So I returned instead to the computer, and plunged into work on a novel featuring one of my series characters. I thought of an opening, and wrote that, and then I remembered a plot element I’d thought of years ago, and incorporated that, and the words began to mount up. In a couple of weeks I’d produced around twenty thousand of them.