The Writing Process

As many of my friends and family know I’ve started the process of writing my second book—this one covering my travels aboard Avventura in the Pacific. For me the writing process has always been a long one. Unlike my dashed off blog updates (which I wrote in white heat and post them often before spellchecking them and certainly before reading them through) I’ve long viewed writing a book (or trying anyhow) to be a far more sacred craft that takes much more time and effort. My mentor, Bill Martin, has time and again preached the value of the “Rule of Seven,” and I’ve become a firm believer in its validity. The rule is simply this: before any piece of writing can be considered truly complete it must be rewritten a minimum of seven times. Gogol put it another way when he described how he would write something out eight times before it was finished (the first writing and seven subsequent re-writings). While the initial writing can glow in places and every now and again you can hit on a well-turned phrase or a few flowing paragraphs, the true art of writing comes from the re-writes where the language is fine-tuned. In my case this is ever-more the case as I still have little idea what direction I want the book to go in or how I will piece it together.
I made my first attempts at starting this book while anchored off the island of Huahine. I was surfing on an overcast August day (8/18/07) when an idea came to me of telling my tales through the lips of a narrator and thus weaving a separate story along with mine. The initial idea was to have a fictional old-timer, a ragged beachcomber tell the story through a series of encounters with strangers as he looked back on brighter days. I wrote out a few chapters in my remaining days in the Society Islands, but as I sailed away bound for points north I couldn’t summon the energy to keep working at a project I was quickly losing faith in. The stories felt insignificant, the old-timer a forced character without any soul, and the writing was bland. But here I am nearly two years later and I still haven’t hit upon a genius idea for how to string things together. I’d like to avoid churning out another straight-forward travelogue like Voyage of the Atair; but at the same time I knew I wanted to write up the stories, so at the moment I have my dreaded travelogue in progress. My plan is to hack out the first draft, writing up everything that was anything on the trip. This will at least give my family and myself a cohesive, exhaustive account of my two-plus years of travel, and will serve as my rough sketch that will be hacked away at and sculpted into a finished product. There’s still months of work ahead, and my writing pace has slackened despicably of late, but I’m determined to re-dedicate myself to the effort, and resuming this blog should help me keep my hand to the plow.
As of now I’ve written up the stretch from my San Diego departure to my arrival in the Marquesas, and my stay on Fatu Hiva. This leaves about a third of my travels, and perhaps as much as half the writing left ahead of me. What I plan to do is start posting my very, very, very rough drafts periodically till I’m caught up to where my writing is; and from there I’ll just keep right on going till the entire first draft is posted. I do so knowing there may only be a handful of people who ever read them, but I know my Aunt Momo will be one of them, and I hope you enjoy them while realizing they aren’t intended as anything but rough sketches at best.
I had one time hoped to have the entire book done by my birthday in July. Ha! Not going to happen. Now I’m going to aim at having the rough draft finished this summer, and a finished product for Christmas.