When you’re mired in your work you can feel yourself change.

Over the last few months of writing I’ve developed a new and curious interest: the biographies of famous writers. I find that the Penguin Lives series is perfect for this given that they offer well-written and well-rounded volumes no more than 200 pages each. So far I’ve read:

Edmund White on Marcel Proust
Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville
Edna O’Brien on James Joyce

The Cycloptic Genius

Perhaps it’s the sycophant buried somewhere in the darker folds of my brain but I find great fascination in learning about Proust’s morning coffee ritual. I love reading about Melville writing until his hands cramped and he couldn’t write another sentence. I want to know more about Joyce staying up all night typing and muttering and laughing until Nora begged him to go to sleep. What I love most about reading these biographies is identifying the writer’s obsession. I’m starting to understand it.

In Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, Trigorin says:

You know how it is with obsession. The moon, for instance—day and night someone thinks only of the moon. Well, I have a moon. Day and night I’m obsessed—I must write, I must write, I must write. I barely finish a novel when I must write another, then a third, then a fourth. I write without stopping, at lightning speed. It’s the only way I can write. What’s bright and beautiful about that?

I’m nearing the halfway point of my second draft. So far the revision process has mirrored the initial writing process. When I first started at the beginning of June it was agonizing. I only managed a few paragraphs per day when I was working through the first chapter. This was after two months of not writing at all (a mistake I have sworn I cannot make again). After a week or so I started to fall back into the habit of writing and before long I was managing to write every day. I worked through the first seven chapters in June and it felt wonderful. But I’ve noticed something. The more time I give to the novel, the more I want to give. The more I pour over my outline and tap my pen against the paper the more I feel it isn’t enough. Each time I work through a neglected plot hole I feel such a rush of endorphins that I immediately crave that feeling again. For every sentence I’m proud of I want to write a hundred more like it. I fantasize about a life without sleep. Going to work has never been harder because that’s eight hours I could have spent in a booth at The Bad Waitress picking apart and reassembling the next chapter. I want to attack my manuscript with a pen and post it flags from dawn to dusk and then spend the night locked in my office rewriting those chapters I’ve decimated. It’s an image pregnant with irrefutable romance.

It is romantic, isn’t it? At least it’s easy to label it as romantic because it seems embedded in the tumultuous arc of great writers stretching back to the ancient days of biography. It’s a romance that tempts me and every day I think about foregoing a night’s sleep or spending a weekend at a coffee shop. It has me on a constant lookout for benevolent organizations eager to spend money on young and unknown writers so they can focus on nothing but their writing and cultivate what obsession has given them. I feel like my novel gets better with each thought I put into it, with each thread I rip and stitch back into place, but those solutions only give me a greater thirst. You get what you give so why not give every last moment, every last thought, every last sigh and groan and expletive? The idea of letting even one imperfection slip by is horrifying. A novel is so much work. I want to write it in the most violent way. I want to write until both of us are broken—muttering and bleeding on the ground.

Life will just have to adapt.