Lawrence Block - Step by Step

I wasn’t crazy about what I’d written. And I wasn’t at all certain what ought to happen next. So I stopped writing, waiting for it to clarify itself in my mind.

Maybe, I thought, I ought to write another short story. Maybe it would be good to write something that I knew I’d be able to finish. I had 75,000 words of a memoir lying around, and I couldn’t summon up the slightest interest in writing any more of that. And I now had 20,000 words of a mystery, and it seemed to have run out of gas. Finish something, I urged myself, and sell it to somebody, and bring a few dollars into the house.

So I started a short story. And wrote a couple of hundred words, and returned to it the next day, and wrote a couple hundred more. And a day or two later I realized that it didn’t want to be a short story, that what I’d actually written was the opening of yet another novel, about yet another of my series characters.

And how far would it go before it ran into a wall?

I asked myself that question, and pondered it some, and when it was time to get to work the following morning, I decided not to bother.

I’d been waiting hopefully for January, and it had come and gone. Depression, I’d learned over the years, was a self-limiting syndrome, running its course and moving on, but this time around it seemed to be renewing its own option and extending its reach.

I wasn’t going to the gym. I’d done some writing, but that had stopped, and I couldn’t see much reason to get back to it. I had twenty thousand words of one book that wasn’t going anywhere, and two or three thousand words of another. Neither one throbbed with life.

And, looming in the background, I had perhaps two-thirds of a memoir to which I no longer seemed to feel any connection whatsoever. That was a lot of work to no purpose. But there was a precedent for it. It wouldn’t be the first memoir I’d abandoned.

Then something happened.

Around noon on Sunday, the tenth of February, I was one of a few dozen people sitting in a room a few blocks from my apartment. When I stopped drinking thirty years ago, I began attending meetings of a group of like-minded individuals, and over the years this Sunday gathering had become my regular weekly meeting. Unless I was out of town — or racing in Central Park — I was apt to be there.

At some point during the meeting my mind wandered — hardly an uncommon occurrence — and I found myself reflecting on all of the things I wanted and needed to do, and seemed incapable of doing. I had to get to the gym. I had to return to the Atkins diet. I had to resume writing, and get something written.

This was hardly news. I would acknowledge these three imperatives several times a day, day after day, but acknowledgment seemed to be as far as I could go. The days would slip by, and nothing would happen. I sat around doing nothing, and yet I never found time for the things I had to do.

And a thought came to me, as now and then one does. I remembered something I’d heard in a similar meeting, very likely in that very room, almost thirty years earlier. “If you need to find a way to make time for the things you have to do,” someone said, “go to more meetings.”

How’s that for counterintuitive? When I first heard that bit of wisdom, I was reminded of the old story about the fellow who complains to his rabbi about his cramped living conditions. He and his wife and their four children live in a two-room shack, along with his wife’s parents and his old grandmother. There’s no room, and it’s driving him crazy.

“Hmmm,” says the rabbi. “You have chickens? Bring the chickens into the house with you.”

Guy goes back to the rabbi a few days later, says it’s even worse with the chickens. “Really? Hmmm. You have a goat? Bring in the goat.”

And so on. I think there was another animal. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a pig. A dog? A cow? Never mind.

Guy goes back again, says it’s worse than ever, no room to turn around, and on top of everything it smells from all the animals. “Hmm,” says the rabbi. “Go home and take all the animals out of the house.”

Guy does, returns beaming. “Rabbi,” he says, “you’re a genius. There’s so much room it’s like a castle!”

So. Go to more meetings? Sure, why not? Then when you stop you’ve got all this free time.

Except that’s not how it works. Go to more meetings, and keep on going to more meetings, and somehow you get more accomplished. I don’t know why this works. (I don’t understand non-Euclidean geometry, either. I mean, how can parallel lines meet? If they do, don’t they stop being parallel?)

What I’d learned, years and years ago, was that it worked. I might not know how it worked, or why it should work, but I don’t really know how electricity works, and this lack of knowledge doesn’t keep me from turning the lights on.

Tomorrow, I told myself, I’ll get up at six o’clock and go to the gym. After my workout I’ll go to the nine o’clock meeting. And after that I’ll come home and spend two hours at the computer. And, oh yeah, while I’m doing all this, I’ll eat in a way that would make Dr. Atkins smile with approval.

And that’s what I did.

Monday i put in an hour on the treadmill, and it was a daunting experience. I set out at what once would have been a very easy pace, four miles an hour, fifteen-minute miles, and found I couldn’t comfortably maintain it. I had to dial it down. By the hour’s end I had worked my way back to fifteen-minute miles. I spent ten or fifteen minutes lifting weights, had a shower, got some coffee, and went to my meeting. At ten o’clock I came home and sat down at my desk.

And did this again the next day, and the day after. I continued in this fashion through Friday, varying the length of my treadmill workouts, never exceeding an hour, and sometimes limiting myself to forty-five minutes. Every morning I went from the gym to the meeting, and from the meeting to my computer, where I worked a little on that short story that wanted to turn into a novel.

It didn’t seem to be all that eager, though. I got a little done for the first three days, and Thursday I took a nap instead. Friday I got home from the meeting in time to catch a cab to the airport; Lynne and I were to spend the weekend in Florida, visiting my Aunt Mim.

Mim’s the last surviving relative of the generation before mine, and I hadn’t seen her since before my Uncle Hi’s death several years ago. The previous fall, before the debacle in Texas, I’d planned a Florida visit at the time of the AIA Marathon, a small race beginning and ending in Fort Lauderdale, and passing right in front of my aunt’s apartment building in Pompano Beach. I never did sign up for the race, and abandoned racing altogether. Instead I picked a time when my cousin Peter would be visiting, and that turned out to be the same weekend as the marathon. (Its course did in fact go right past Mim’s building, and past the hotel we stayed in a few miles up the beach, and we thought we might get out in time to watch the runners. But by the time we were through with breakfast, they were on their way back to Lauderdale.)

I didn’t get to any meetings in Florida. I used the treadmill at the hotel one morning, and the walk to and from Mim’s was long enough to make each day a gym day. And I stayed with Atkins, and I relaxed and enjoyed the good company of my aunt and my cousin, and I thought about stuff.

I realized there was a change I had to make in my new regime. The components were all present, but in the wrong order. By the time I got to my desk, I was fatigued from my workout. The fatigue was not unpleasant, but it blunted the mental edge I needed in order to get good work done. If I made writing the first thing I did, and then went to my meeting, well, I might be mentally tired by the time I got to the gym, but so what? Quick wit and verbal agility were wasted on the treadmill, anyway.