The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [46]
On a third page he typed “(dedication).” He had not yet decided to whom the book would be dedicated so he left the page otherwise blank and added it to the stack.
There were now three sheets to the left of the typewriter, and none of them represented any work on his part, but he had discovered that he was uncomfortable working on a book unless he had already prepared the front matter. He might discard or change all of it laier on, but he could not write the first page of the noyel until he had these other pages written.
He lit a cigarette, set it in the ashtray. By the day’s end the ashtray would be overflowing with butts, yet he would have smoked relatively little. When his work engrossed him, he would let cigarettes burn up unnoticed in the ashtray.
He typed “1.” in the top left corner of a fresh page. Halfway down he typed “Chapter One” and skipped a dozen lines. Page one, chapter one. Now what?
He lit a cigarette, having already forgotten the one burning a few inches from his elbow. He took a few drags from the new one and set it alongside the other. His fingers positioned themselves on the keyboard. The opening scene was clear enough in his mind. It was just a matter of deciding which of several ways to structure it.
For fifteen minutes he did nothing but sit with his eyes on the blank paper before him. Then he began typing, and for the next twenty minutes the typewriter was never silent for more than five or ten seconds at a time. After twenty minutes he lit a cigarette. By that time he was at the top of page four, and when he left his desk at three fifteen that afternoon there were a dozen more finished pages to the left of the typewriter and a dozen fewer blank sheets to the right.
Sometimes at night he would stay in the large stone house, reading and listening to records. His reading consisted of magazine pieces and nonfiction. He had discovered that he could not read novels while he was himself writing one. He knew writers who consciously avoided fiction while they were at work, fearing that another author’s style would adversely influence their own. This had never bothered Hugh. Instead, he found that he simply could not concentrate on another man’s book when his own was in progress. He was too conscious of style and technique. Characters seemed to lack depth, dialogue had no flavor, plot lines were impossible to remember. Between books he read voraciously, swallowing novels in huge gulps, but he could not do this while he was at work.
Other nights he went out. He needed people around him at such times, yet was too locked into his work to be of much use in conversation. He would go to Sully’s or the Logan Inn or one of several other bars. He would never drink heavily, but always had enough scotch in him so that sleep came easily by the time he returned home.
On such nights there would almost always be questions about his work. When was his next book coming out? That was easily answered but led to questions about its title and theme, and he disliked discussing one book while involved with another. He even more disliked discussing current work and simply refused to do so, explaining that if he talked about it it would go stale for him. How was the new book coming, then?
It was coming along, he would say.
Which was as much of an answer as existed, because he could not have said whether the book was going well or poorly. All he knew for certain was that it was continuing to get written, that the pile to the typewriter’s left was increasing while the pile to the right grew smaller.
Some days were good ones, when the pages seemed to write themselves. On those days he would have to force himself to stop when he had written twenty pages, the maximum he allowed himself in a single day. On other days he would enter his study at nine in the morning and it would be dark before he had finished his minimum of five pages. Some days every page that went