SCENE: A QUIET STAGE. JACKIE STROLLS ON WEARING COWBOY OUTFIT AND 11-GALLON HAT (INFLATION). SHE TAKES A SEAT ON A CONVENIENTLY PLACED HAY BALE, SETS AN ELBOW ON ONE KNEE, AND SPEAKS TO THE CAMERA
The other day someone hit me with the dreaded question: “Are you almost done yet?” As if they were asking for me to pass the ketchup.
I am not.
And before you ask the next question: Four years in, Hoss, as of last week.
But I am almost almost done, practically tiptoeing through the tulips of nearly-donesville.
Last weekend I took my 11-year-old daughter clothes shopping, hoping we’d get a jump on back-to-school prep. (Back-to-school season now starts somewhere in June, if everything I see is any indication.) Our mission took us through multiple stores, like hapless Goldilockses in search of the elusive Just Right.
I’ve found a human writing trampoline who, for the extraordinary price of frustratingly average lunches, lets me bounce ideas off him. He listens and asks questions as I talk through plot points, characters, themes, and other various stumble-grumbles quick to launch themselves over baskets of fries. It is a purely artistic process, one unconcerned with anything other than ideas and the golden threads that hold them together.
Over a recent mediocre salad, I bemoaned to him, “I’ve got everything else. I don’t know how the book ends.” In other words, I’m wandering around this process without a clear destination. Great for Passover and Hobbits, not so great otherwise. (*Raises a glass of wine or four to the Hobbitses among us as they groom their feet for the day’s travel.*)
Ultimately this is why, an obscenely long time after a first draft has been written, dismantled, and reworked into multiple drafts, I’m not done.
There are only so many times you can fiddle with the dials until you have to land the plane. (Although you can write unlimited mediocre analogies involving travel.)
Jackie Pick 