It feels amazing to be on top of a mountain.
I can’t even begin to explain the feeling. The trailhead is so far gone behind you that you can’t even hear it anymore. Even the trail is gone, leaving nothing but gorgeous peaks for you to scramble for and explore. You are tired, but you don’t care. The rush is intoxicating.
You think: “I want to do this. Again and again and again and again.”
It’s a very different feeling from the bottom of a trail.
I’ve been hiking for several years now, and without fail, it always feels like doom and gloom and pain. What was I thinking? I have to climb all the way to that? It’s raining/hot/wet/cold and I’m tired/sleepy/angry at the dogs and we’ve already done ten minutes and I want to die already. The idea that what little pain I’ve already experienced is going to continue for another 8 km becomes excruciating. Often, I find myself stopping and reaching for water, and there’s even been times where we’ve called for a complete rest (a kilometer into the trail) so that we could have lunch or at least try to stuff our faces with cakes and chocolate bars until we find the energy to go on again.
I mean, I hike a lot, but there’s a reason I don’t do very hard trails more than once or twice each year. The mental battle can become excruciating.
I’ve found the feeling of writing almost exactly the same. Planning a novel–just like planning a hike–is fun. You get to think of what it feels like to have a completed book and you get giddy all over. But then you start the first chapter. Maybe you’re excited enough that the first chapter is over really fast–just like the first kilometer of a hike or so. But then it hits you that you have about 95,000 words or so left to finish, and it suddenly becomes painful.
You want to get to the finish line so bad that every five hundred words you write suddenly seems like the most painful thing on Earth.
Unfortunately, there’s no way around it. You have to put in the mileage to get somewhere. There are no shortcuts to the top of a mountain, and there are no shortcuts to the end of a manuscript. Trying to blaze through the process will only get you hurt. I’ve read a lot of novels where it’s clear that the writer just wants to get to the end, so it reads like a car ride–one thing after another, with no rhyme or reason, no cohesive structure that naturally progresses to a climax. I’m reading the last page and wondering what the heck happened in-between.
I know this because I used to write like that, too.
Having the hiking to fall back on, to remind me what working to get to the top feels like, has been helpful in my writing in more ways than I can explain. Instead of trying to get a novel finished, I’ve instead focused on getting to milestones, building up a novel around small progressions. “These chapters,” I’ll say, “will work towards getting these characters to that point in the plot.” It makes the writing feel a little easier, a bit less like a trudge and more like a dance.
Read The Agartes Epilogues, where, by virtue of being epic fantasy, characters walk a lot. A whole lot. You’ll sometimes wonder why their legs just don’t fall off.
