The Ghosts of Books Past, Present, and Future

First, a favorite carol, sung by a beautiful voice

I am on break from school, and it is whole different ball game. I can sit and think and write until my brain signals tiredness, which it does by producing the sensation of thinking—rather than listening. This happens after about two hours, and I have learned to stop at that point. During the semester I have to stop artificially, when I’m still raring to go, and that always feels like being hit by a landslide. This is better! Writing freely, daily, grounds my soul like nothing else.

This week I noticed that the easy flow of daily work conjured the spirits of other writings than my present project. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I have tried many entryways into the book I’m working on now and have finally settled on a tone, a point of view, a structure—all the stuff! So I am in it. But. Ideas for two other books arrived fully formed. I mean—I saw the entire books, beginning to end, scene after scene after scene. One was a book I had thought of before (the Ghost of Books Past) but a few years in the storage room not only preserved it, but it was as if alterations had been done, and it had become sleeker, leaner, more elegant. I decided to test it out and wrote a few pages. Yes! It was ready to go. Suddenly I was/am working on two projects?

The Ghost of the Present Book haunts me when I am working on the past book. So…should I put the past book back in storage?

As for the future book…well, I have plans for a long novel, 1500 pages minimum, but that will happen after I retire. In the meantime there came that other new idea. So clear. So alluring. So much more compelling than the present book, which has demands and issues! I fantasized telling my agent and editor I wanted to work on that instead. I rifled through my notebooks looking for the perfect container for all my preliminary notes. Then—

I reminded myself of what a teacher had once told me when I described a meditation session full of lights and colors and celestial music. I thought I’d really hit on something, but no. Those sensations were just distractions. Return to the breath.

Tomorrow is Monday, and I’ll return to the present book. The ghosts delivered me back to the dailiness of work. That is the Christmas miracle…we are reborn in every moment, with every inhalation. That’s both all the creative energy of the universe and also a plain and simple thing. I may dabble in the past idea, but not until after I give the present book its due. That is truly the only way it happens.

See you next year.