Jo-Ann Mapson

On Hesitation

"Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt: We cannot live by proof: but could we believe without?"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H." 1850

Full moon, crazy Alaskan weather: Rain, which begets ice. Snow flurries, which appear to give birth to mondo winds that erase the snow by morning. One day it's twenty-two degrees, then the next it's close to forty. All around me, longtime Alaskans strut by in T-shirts and shorts, cheering this unseasonably warm winter. It's seven months since I left California and chose Alaska for my home. By now, I'd envisioned having to wax my skis a second time from so much use. Instead, they're in the back of my car, like doomsday rations, in case I run across enough of the white stuff to try them.

I've spent the last two days chained to my desk, poring over page proofs. This is the "last-chance" stage in publishing to change anything in Bad Girl Creek, my novel that comes out in May. The copyeditor's note informed me that it costs real money every time I move a sentence, or drop and substitute a word, and to choose changes wisely. Finally I can think of the precise word that eluded me all those months ago! But wait, it's nine characters long, and what I have there is four. How badly do I want to change it? Okay, I have to change it. But what about the grammar of that sentence on page 140-speaking of grammar--do I really know the mechanics of English well enough to teach? Last semester, after misidentifying an adverb as an object IN FRONT OF MY DEPARTMENT CHAIRPERSON, I resorted to Laurie Rozakis's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Grammar and Style. It's a great book, but it doesn't stick in my head. Is my gray matter covered with Teflon? Probably my disk drive's full from memorizing all the lyrics to Beatles' songs.

Doubt. Qualms. Misgivings. In Scrabble, my favorite game, these words earn high scores. They're also the stones set in every writer's eternity ring, but to call them gems is maybe going a little too far. I've completed, sold, and published six novels and one book of stories; had poems printed in anthologies, essays, too, and let's not forget my brief foray into journalism... I thought by now I'd feel a little more confidence running through my veins. Yet before every book is published, and sometimes long after, I move back to The Valley of Hesitation, sit down next to the old geezer playing checkers on the porch of the general store, and bite my figurative nails.

Imagine those wonderful endpapers you find in some books. In pen and ink, the whole town's laid out. There are the railroad tracks that designate status; depending on which side the characters were born. The City Hall, where marriages, divorces and legal dramas unfold. The farm where the twin calves are born, with moon-colored faces and sweet, grassy breath. Over there, the abandoned factory nobody's supposed to go into, where lovers always sneak into and tryst. The history of the place is enough to create a backbone for the novel. The edge of the spooky woods (the place I'd visit first) where something pivotal will happen to change the outcome of so many lives. And finally you come to the center of the map where there's a Victorian house, gingerbread and leaded windows, tall, turret-like roof in need of new shingles. This is where the heroine lives, or wishes she did, or where she'll meet the quirky man she's been searching for all her life, or have her heart broken, or something worthy of 500 pages.

In the Valley of Hesitation, flip the map over so it reads like a negative, and everything's backwards, dyslexic, and stumblingly strange, over the rainbow. As the song goes, That's where you'll find me! And probably a lot of other writers who are brave enough to write more than one book. There should be solace in this notion. Why isn't there a Neurotic Writers Union? Surely if we organized we could get major medical.

Lately I've been devouring the books of Jane Hamilton, an epic writer, in my humble opinion. I read her and wonder if there's any possible chance I could see life with such absolute clarity, and then transfer it to paper. I know that's extremely doubtful. I write what I write, given whatever gifts have been bestowed on me. No matter how I try to stretch that muscle, the story comes out the way it wants to. But it doesn't stop me from wishing I could render landscape like James Lee Burke's Louisiana bayous, in such sensory detail I want to quit my diet and gorge on etouffe and beignets. Or aspire to write something so simple and classic and touching that it will stay in print forever, like Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, or Truman Capote's The Grass Harp, which by the way, made a pretty wonderful movie, too.

Maybe the problem is I can't stop reading. Right now, in my study, I count forty-two books that ought to be shelved, but there's no shelf space left. And I need each one of them at hand, for various writing projects. Bibliophile doesn't begin to describe my living quarters. I room in a four-dog house that is also filled with great reading material. And "to get away from it all," I drive into Anchorage and spend my gift certificates to Borders and bring home seven more hardcovers. Oh, the smell of a new book!

"Give yourself a break," people say. "After all, you just finished a book."

Tonight I painted my nails "Plymouth Lox," and I cleaned my office. I laid out my research materials for my next book, Along Came Mary. Read through Publishers Weekly and found several new books coming out soon that I won't be able to live without. Checked my e-mail, erased the junk, and saved the messages that cheered me. When I woke up this morning, the wind had moved all the newly fallen snow God-knows-where, probably Flagstaff, Arizona, which is supposed to get three feet tonight while here in the Valley the grass is showing. I meandered around the house, did the laundry, chatted with my writing buddy Judi Hendricks (watch for her great first novel, Bread Alone, from Morrow, this summer; I predict it will make THE LIST) and then I consoled myself the only way I know how: I got back to work.

Writing my next novel.

This time, I'm sure the story will be bigger than the others. Each sentence will sing, instead of clank like a rock thrown into a bucket. The story will arch up and touch the heavens, or more likely, it will reach a single, stubby digit skyward and hope.

But there will be great nail polish on the fingernail.

"He who would make serious use of his life must always act as though he had a long time to live and must schedule his time as though he were about to die."
Emile Littre, Dictionnaire de la langue Francaise, 1877

More later,
Jo-Ann

^Top