The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [260]
Still, no matter what strategies you adopt, Real Life tends to intrude. When it does, the only thing you can do is to shuffle the writing to the back of your mind—but keep thinking about it.
As example and encouragement, following is a letter to friends, written in late 1995, while I was struggling to complete Drums of Autumn, and illustrating How a Writer Deals with Real Life. (Bear in mind that I did eventually finish the book. The moral is: Don’t Give Up!)
Research & Craft
15-Dec-95 12:01:46
Sb: #Making Time to Write
Fm: Diana Gabaldon/SL8 76530,523
To: Alex Keegan 100555,1651 (X)
Dear Alex—
Oh, yes—about being first thing a writer and having it always going in your head. Gets you past the days when Life interferes.
Yesterday was One of THOSE Days, beginning with angst and trauma in the morning, when the little one couldn’t find her violin and the middle one was so conked, his father couldn’t rouse him and had to call for assistance (I have a secret method; I toss back the covers and get him by the feet, then play This Little Piggy on his toes. This aggravates him enough to get him upright and snarling, at which point he can be levered out of bed and into his closet), and the big one wasn’t happy with the way her hair looked.
Having gone down at 3 A.M. the night before, getting up at 7:15 left me a hair short, even on my usual rations of sleep. I also ached in every limb, having fallen off the staircase the day before (don’t ask; it had to do with the fax machine and the fact that I’d been writing. I was still writing in my mind when I came down to retrieve an incoming fax, and—apparently—reached for it while still on the stairs, not aware that I couldn’t levitate. Actually, I apparently did levitate for a short distance, as I ended up on knee and elbow some six feet from the foot of the staircase).
I rallied round, though—found the violin (by the simple expedient—which drives everyone in my family completely mad—of asking “Where did you see it last?”), combed the big one’s hair into a ponytail (had to make her sit down on the edge of the bath to do it; she’s four inches taller than I am), tied the middle one’s shoes, and ran upstairs to write notes to two of his teachers (he had the flu, on and off, and missed six days of school, with consequent assignments. Problem is, he’s too shy to go up and ask any of his teachers for a list of what’s missing).
The boys from next-door-but-one came and knocked—they’d missed their bus, could I take them to school? Loaded up everybody, picked up my purse to get in the car, when the housekeeper beetled out and said we’re out of X, Y, Z, especially washing powder.
Dropped the kids—adjuring Sam sternly to be sure to deliver notes to his teachers—went to the drugstore, where I got all the cleaning supplies and checked for the homeopathic flu cure JLM recommended (felt a sore throat coming on). While driving to and fro, kept thinking of snow (no good reason, it’s about 85 degrees here). Went home, delivered the window cleaner, washing powder, et al, came upstairs and spent my usual hour having breakfast (diet Coke and Milky Way Dark) and reading/answering messages and e-mail, seeing in the back of my mind footprints dark on the snow, and heaped wet leaves, crusted with ice, the dark furrow in the leaves where someone had been lying, under the shelter of a log.
Set in to work as usual at 10, stoked to the gills with Vitamin C and occilococcinum. Read through a half-done scene in progress, added a couple of paragraphs, then was overcome by a new, vivid image—I was following the footprints in the snow, and there was a dead hare, caught in a snare, furred with ice crystals, stiff across the path. Switched screens and started the new scene, to get it under way. Fell into the state of mind in which I walked off the staircase, feeling the worry of the woman following the footprints. Why didn’t he stop for the hare? Where is he?
Settled nicely into the first paragraph, when comes the dreaded summons from the foot of my stairs, “Es un hombre a la puerta!”
Hombres at the