Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 7.1: Rewards and Bribes
This is kind of an interstitial post, emerging from a conversation I had with Carl Zimmer a few weeks ago.
Carl had come up from his undisclosed secure location near New Haven (secure because no one wants to go to New Haven? snarks this denizen of 02139) to speak to my students in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. We were driving to class in my cheaper-than-therapy convertible.
[The resemblance of my actual car to a Bugatti, replica or not, is wholly fictional. At least the color is close.]
It was trashed as usual — books, magazines, my kid’s booster seat, napkins, McDonald’s french fry sleeves, old coffee thermal rings, the lot.
By way of apologizing for ferrying my distinguished guest in a rolling tip, I told him that my reward to myself to celebrate the actual publication date of Newton and the Counterfeiter would be to get Levenson-mobile a full-on, day-at-the-spa professional detailing.
Carl gave his assent, noting that it was important to calibrate the reward system that, apparently, I am not alone in employing.
Writing anything, as noted by at least a few, can have its tough moments. Writing a book carries with it the problem of the empty horizon. The project is almost always too big to hold in one’s head at any time. Even the final copy edit can twist out from under your control as you try to remember whether or not the tell-tale phrase that you love, but would stand out if repeated, seems over-used because you’ve read it here in the last twelve or fifteen passes — or because in fact you’ve been pounding that image with a nine-pound sledge and it’s time to kill one of your babies.*
It just goes on. I remember nearly collapsing into a fetal position when Larry Cooper, copy-editor to the stars** insisted that I review the index, something no one in his position had previously demanded. What? There can’t be more.
There can.
So, of course, when sheer love of words and sentences and ideas can’t carry you through, what can you fall back on?
Bribery.
Rewards. Self-corruption. The trick, as Carl was pointing out that morning in the car, is to be careful about inflation. He was rightly disdainful fo those who go all Cartier on you after finishing a chapter or some such nonesense.
So here is the Tom Levenson manifesto for a well regulated system of internalized payola:
The one axiom holds that rewards should reflect the significance of the milestone being sought. Not for any Calvinist reasons, but because it is just such a long slog that there has to be a good reason to keep going, and one of the things you do — at least that I do — when I give myself a big treat is to stop what I’m doing for a while and play with whatever it is. I’m shallow, materialistic, a magpie easily distracted by shiny toys, and I have found it valuable to know that about myself and plan accordingly.
In that vein Carl (who is not, so far as I know, shallow nor bears any connection to the family Corvidae) and I agreed that it’s a bad idea to treat finishing a chapter, for example, as the occasion for much notice. Maybe plan on actually going out for pizza, instead of hauling the cardboard box home, but that’s about it.
I’m not joking here. This is a fundamental lesson I’ve learned the hard way about my own process.
I never want to stop dead at a moment between sections. I try to end each writing day having written through the next transition, whether it be into a new paragraph, chapter, or whole section. It doesn’t matter whether I actually keep what I draft — just that I’ve begun the new, rather than come to a complete halt at the end of the old.
But rewards do help a lot with the sheer fact of a book’s scale. Even the small, intermediate ones suggest progress towards an ultimate end, and the realization of a dictum that is always true at least once during the project: Done Is Good.
Here are my more or less typical milestones.
After finishing a chapter — the afternoon off, having written at least a stab at the start of the next passage, complete with an outline for what is to come in the new chapter.
Finishing a major section — a fine dinner at the next available weekend night.***
Finishing the first draft to the point where one is willing to send it off to the editor? Now this is the big one. This for me is the moment at which a bppl tips over from being potential to real. This, not publication, is the point I celebrate with all guns blazing.
Previous rewards have been a new pair of skiis, a bicycle, and after the 7 year struggle that was Einstein in Berlin, a Miata. That one beat me up. Truly. It’s a damn fine book, and I’m very proud of it, but let’s put it this way. When I started it, I was 6’4″. Now I’m 5’9″ (by courtesy). It took some heavy lifting to get from there to here.
For Newton and the Counterfeiter I was a bit more modest, purchasing this camera in June 2008. This was a good one: it gives me pleasure everytime I use the machine; it creates artifacts that I value; and everytime I hold it I remember, damn, I finished another one.
That’s the point of course. There is only one point in a book’s life that is not simply part of a continuum from conception to it being read by the public. That’s the moment when for the first time you can type (or think), “the end.” That calls for celebration — and more important, it is a natural point at which to take the break that is implied in a reward large enough to make you pay attention.
Returning the revised mss. to your publisher is another good moment, and if all has gone well, there is the pleasure of seeing a good book get the snap that an intelligent and commited reader can force on your prose. I tend just to take a short time out after this one, a weekend through which I spend both days at the beach perhaps, a champagne cocktail or even two.
And after that, much of the work is just slog. Checking notes and gathering the bibliography. FACT CHECKING (the terror and the woe). Copy editing (a trauma for different reasons, to be discussed below)….All the stuff that you have to do to make the book as good as possible but that just isn’t as much fun, or as creatively demanding, as writing.
For these, a carrot dangling from a stick just out reach of this donkey’s nose is handy. But again — I’m a man easily amused, so I can sometimes trick myself into doing the tasks I try to duck — like checking an index — by taking myself to Starbucks and allowing myself as many of their chocolate old-fashioned donuts as I want.
As I say — it helps to be both easy and cheap if you want to last as a writer.
*”Kill your babies” is a grotesque and hideous command when you actually think about it, but it is, (or was when I began, inputting my musings to clay tablets with a device that a more far seeing marketeer might have named the iStylus) a term of art in the writing/editing trade. The meaning is, I think, obvious: it is dangerously easy to develop irrational affection for some element in one’s writing. Small examples include the irresistability of the perfect epithet. If you are Homer, then you get to call Oddysseus wily as often as you like. The rest of us need to examine our modifiers. Bigger babies can extend to anecdotes, lovely but irrelevant, or even whole arguments. Sometimes, if they don’t work; if you go to the well to often; if they work on their own terms but derail something else, more important to the work — then, with tears, averting your eyes from the screen, it’s time to select and delete.
**Larry is, inter alia, Philip Roth’s personal copy-editor, the one for whom Roth will accept no substitute. It is said at Houghton Mifflin that if ever he gets the call from Stockholm, Roth will bring not any romantic partner to witness the Nobel presentation — Larry will get the nod.
***assuming that the advance hasn’t already gone the way of the giant American ground sloth.
Image: “Volkswagen Bugatti Replika“
