Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals by Dinty W. Moore

Author:Dinty W. Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781607748106
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2015-08-18T06:00:00+00:00

Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy,

Is there anything you won’t write about? Anything too private?

(Would you admit it if there were?)

Dinah Lenney

Los Angeles, California

Dear Dinah,

May I tell you a story?

Ten years ago I attempted what I thought would be my third book of nonfiction, an autobiographical account of my relationship with my smart, independent, moody preteen daughter, and an attempt to wrestle with the issues raised by Mary Pipher in her important Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, a book that examines what Pipher calls our “girl-poisoning culture.”

When I would tell people about this book, or read excerpts, I received universally positive reactions. “That’s important, Dinty. Write it,” folks would say at conferences. Even now, ten years later, people will still occasionally ask me, “Whatever happened to that book?”

Well, despite a nifty advance, the interest of two publishers, and the support of two excellent editors, the book eluded me, kept ringing false, wouldn’t resolve itself in any satisfying way. I estimate that I wrote upward of 1,200 pages of material to complete the first “finished” draft of that book. I’m a constant reviser, so when I say “finished” draft, I’m talking twenty to thirty drafts, at a minimum, of each chapter. And yet it wasn’t working, refused to take successful shape. The first publisher eventually lost interest.

Stubborn to the end, I embarked on a second attempt, a radical rethinking and reshaping of the book, and produced heaven only knows how many fresh pages, while entirely retooling what I recycled from the first iteration. A second publisher came on board. Briefly. Then lost interest too.

All in all, this project consumed five years.

***

One July afternoon, I sat in my literary agent’s office, having driven into Manhattan just for the day, so we could discuss the next step with my stalled project. “Why don’t you set it aside?” Carol suggested after some mutual hand-wringing. “Give the book a rest, and who knows, maybe you will come back to it in a few years. Let’s see what else you have to work on.”

I wanted to throttle Carol right then and there, and might have if I were not a believer in nonviolence (or if the receptionist had not been in such close hearing range). After all of this work, sweat, agony, she wanted me to set it aside, just like that?

I sputtered; she patted me down with consoling words; I sputtered some more and left her office in a state of suppressed rage, shock, despondency, and confusion.

Thirty minutes later, though, as I headed home across the George Washington Bridge, I felt as if the proverbial load had been lifted from my shoulders. Carol was exactly right. Despite the hard work, the soundness of my initial idea, the moments in the book that worked quite well (but not well enough to make the book complete or coherent), the project was making me unhappy, was likely to remain stalled for years to come, and my stubbornness to “finish what I had started” was sucking the life from my writing practice.

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