When it is time to write, I go downstairs. Down the steep, narrow staircase into the cool, dark basement. It is quiet down there. Things are still. They have their places. And there are places enough where no things belong. I sit at my desk and fill those not belonging places with imagined things. Impossible, beautiful things. I populate the basement with people who do not exist doing things they ought not do. I spill ideas onto the carpet, heedless of the mess. Sometimes the ideas flood out of me like buckets of bleach, caustic and bitter. Sometimes the ideas spill out like an ocean of ink, tainting everything they touch, rendering a new kind of darkness.

And sometimes I just sit down here and admire the words, how they stack so neatly from floor to ceiling and I am careful to lay them out in neat rows so I do not trap myself in like those poor, sad souls you sometimes see on television who were crushed under reams of unread newspaper. And, in those times I think, how like a hoarder, afraid to release or let go for fear of losing something precious.

And in those times, I can turn out the lights or dim them to the point of near blindness and feel myself digesting inside the belly of the world.

For anyone watching this space, I just want you to know I’m still here. I am in one of those mad seasons of life where free moments are few and fleeting. I’ve been writing on other projects and having a pretty good time of it lately. I won’t say more than that just yet. I don’t want to jinx things.

I do want to say a word of thanks to my wife, Michelle, who is very many things to me. She recently put me back on a productive path by mentioning a simple fact I too often overlook: good stories are always about people.

I have a tendency in all things to get swept up by the ideas, the vivid impulse, the vibrant language,  the rich image. Good stories are about people, the conflicts between people and the conflicts inside them. We cannot hope to write satisfying stories unless we take the time to know the people who live inside our stories. We cannot hope to understand the stories we are trying to tell until we understand not only what each person wants but why they believe they want it.

I’m still here, stacking up words and enjoying the peculiar shapes the mind invents when it is free to play.

There is a lot of joy in this kind of life. A lot of drudgery and a lot of frustration but mostly a lot of joy.

I’m still here. Still feeling grateful.

A few words tonight just to prime the pump and remember how the engine feels when it is running. How easy it is to step aside and let days go by without writing. And yet, there is always a part of me somewhere inside that continues writing, like a man locked in a basement with only one window and a broken staircase. There is no help for him. There is no rescue. Keep throwing him food. Open the window when you can to let fresh air in. Let him continue his work undisturbed. Open the door. Give him light. Remind him there are many rooms in this house.

He will continue his writing, but maybe he will not feel so frantic when he knows that someone up there has remembered him and knows what he is doing. This makes it easier for him to believe there is a point to it. That he isn’t just a thing caught in a room that does not touch the world. Let him send his words up from time to time. Admire them. Let him know they matter. It makes no difference. He will continue writing all the same, but when the frantic verve has gone out, the words take on a better shape. He is doing the only thing he is able to do. And then, the words have a point. They connect to things.

I wrote a piece of flash fiction tonight. I expected to post it here just for fun, but I’m going to keep it safe for a while. There is a glint of something inside it I want to play with.

The man in the basement. Even when I’m not writing, he is writing. I need to protect him from despair.

I just wrote 365 words that I want very much to show you. They are the first 365 words of the second draft of a short piece I finished a few weeks ago. I’m not going to post them.

I finished that first piece, set it aside for a week and then returned to it, eager to mark and strike, chop and blend. I had planned to highlight all the good bits green, all the broken bits red and all the stuff that felt out of place or did not grab my throat yellow. I did this and expected then to simply replace the red bits with better words, move the yellow parts where they belonged and keep the green bits in place as buttress for the entire thing. That’s called editing.

I struggled. There were plenty of green bits and a great deal of yellow. Not as much red in the thing as I had feared. Try as I might, I could not wrestle those words into a coherent draft. There was the dim shape of story in it but the shape was broken by gulfs of narrative silence I had not at first seen.

When I was writing that first draft, the story felt like a line pulling me through. Sometimes the line hitched. Sometimes it dragged. But the writing felt like a line.

When I read that first draft, I noticed only the disunity. Why did he do that? Where did those people in the other paragraph come from? Is this guy wearing any clothes? The questions were maddening, and I had no answers.

I stopped. I let it sit another week.

And now, I am drawn back to that story. This time I am writing again from scratch without rereading the previous draft. I am working from my memory of what happens and building the situation with brand new words.

The second draft is starting over with a bigger germ. The idea is there but is unhindered by the scaffolding I built around the first draft.

All of this is to say, that writing is iterative. I forget this sometimes.When we read published works, we see ideas beautifully laced with all seams closed tight. We relish the exuberance of polished phrase and well-made paragraphs stacked neatly, methodically with a mason’s grace.

When we write, it is very different. It is messy. It is fractured. It is incomplete. We write anyway. We turn again to the germ of our original thought and find that it has grown better and stronger from the accretion of all those earlier words. We sweep all of those earlier words away and start again with a better sense of the line that drew us through the first time.

Writing, like painting, is iterative. You lay down an idea. You layer an idea over that. You layer another idea over that and another and another and another.

No one will ever see the brilliant words that went before these. They will disappear into the sediment of thought. But the loam of each layer gets richer.

Only after I have done this several times will I dare to make comparison. Only then will I dissect, marking the green, red and yellow bits. And then, I will write one more draft, pulling together the best pieces of each in the best possible order.

I want to show you these new 365 words, but I’m not going to show them now. You can’t fall in love too quickly. You never know which of your precious darlings you are going to need to kill and bury in the loam. Keep those words to yourself until they are ready.

Don’t share your early drafts until you fully own them. No peaking.

Another 1300 words this morning on a 3800 word story, which I still don’t really understand. The story has taken a strange shape. There is a kind of allegorical logic emerging. Now there are two men walking. And now they are talking about things they can’t remember.

Sometimes we write because there is a story that doesn’t yet exist which we desperately need to read.

I finally understand. The most beautiful, brilliant stories are not made from words. They are made from hours and hours of someone sitting in a chair, not yielding to the hundred different distractions that come along. These stories are a choice made over and over and over again. Sit in the chair. Put words together. Fasten them with hours and hours of patient attention.

Do this every day. Every chance you get. When you consider that you might not do this today, do it anyway.

I get it. I finally understand. I’ve been giving the words. I haven’t been giving the hours.