I'm back from Retreat Week where, once again, I made the snowshoe trek to the
Slayton Pasture Cabin. Though I am what I'd call an exercise hobbyist, perhaps dilettante, I always find this six-mile round trip trying. I actually worry about it for months and start training in October with some climbs on a small hill behind my house. While I was out on the snowshoe trail last Wednesday, my mind began to wander away from how much I was suffering to how much what I was doing was like writing. I could do a blog post about this, I thought. And then I thought, this sounds very familiar.
That was because I had already had the same idea while making the same trip in 2015 and had, indeed, done a blog post about it. So, people, for your enjoyment, here it is again.
Many people who have not written a book may wonder what it would be
like to just knock one off. I think if you took a journey up a mountain
on snowshoes, you'd get a pretty good idea of what it feels like to
write a book.
Okay, say you're going to head up a trail, and just to make this piece of writing specific, let's say it's the trail to the
Slayton Pasture Cabin
in Stowe, Vermont. You've been up to the cabin a few times before, and
you know it's one of the tougher outdoor activities you take part in.
You feel some anxiety about this whole thing. But then you figure, What
the Hell?
I've done this before.
So you start out and things are pretty easy at first, and you're thinking, What was I worried about? Yes. I
have done this before. I've done it
successfully. People have liked what I've done in the past.
Of course, I can do this.
Then
you hit that Hellacious, straight up climb, the part of the job you'd
really feared. It is horrendous. You think it will never end. You'll
never get through it. You think, I cannot do this again. This has got to
be the last time. Is that my heart I feel thumping away in my chest?
Have I ever felt that before? Is it going to explode? Is there any
cellphone service here?
Then you take that turn and
things get better. Since you've done this before, you know some
landmarks. You know that nothing will be as bad as that part of the job
you just did. You know that the snowshoe trail crosses a ski trail at
the X minute point, so you can think of this job as a series of short
tasks instead of
Oh my God I'm, going to be on this trail for two hours. And that's just one way!
You
actually experience one of those break through the wall things that
you've heard about with marathoners. You might actually be okay.
And, then...And then, you see the cabin. A chorus of angels begins to sing
Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. They all sound just like
K.D. Lang. You're going to make it!
Except...you
still have to get through the pasture. Sure, this part is easy. But
you're exhausted. You still have a ways to go. There's a fire in the
cabin. There's food. Can you do it? "Maybe there is a God," as Lenny
Cohen says, because
you can!!! You stagger up onto the cabin porch.
And that is what it's like to write a book.
But
what about when you're in the cabin? Well, once you're in the cabin,
you find that all the other writers, I mean, showshoers aren't wearing
old thermal undershirts that are kind of too big for the shirt they're
wearing over them. Nor do they wear hats their sons refused to wear. And
they're talking about all the great places they've snowshoed and how
long it took them to get to the cabin and how awesome it was, and it's
always less time than it took you, and it's always far, far more
awesome.
And that is what it's like to have
published a book.
You come down off the mountain and feel pretty damn fine because it's always way better to
have snowshoed than it is
to snowshoe.
Just as it is always better to
have written a book than it is
to write it.
