WHAT'S ON YOUR DESK?

  STEVE HOCKENSMITH

“What’s on your desk?” is a good question to ask a writer. But I’ve got a better one, if said writer is me: “What isn’t on your desk?” The answer being, “An Edgar Award -- dammit! -- and not much else.”

A desk is for writing, yes. Researching, brainstorming, outlining, yeah yeah yeah. But my desk also happens to be where I do most of my accumulating. And I’m not talking about wealth and power.

(I’m a writer, remember? We’re in it for love, not money, right?)

(Although, then again, we wouldn’t actually say no to more cash, would we...?)

Alas, it’s not checks that are piling up on my desk -- unless you count the ones waiting to go in the mail to Visa and the phone company and the IRS and on and on and on. And piling up beside all that are books, contracts, royalty statements, fan letters (well, O.K. -- there’s one), pens, pencils, notebooks, CDs, DVDs, stuffed animals (I try to keep my kids away from the computer, but it just can’t be done) and a depressingly long To Do list from which nothing ever seems to Get Done.

In fact, if you were to visit my home office, you might not believe I have a desk at all. You’d just walk into the bedroom that’s been designated Daddy’s Place and assume you’d stumbled into one of those old houses where 90-year-old twin sisters with a hundred cats stockpile every issue of The Cleveland Plain Dealer dating back to 1949. Then you’d run out screaming before the stack of Life magazines -- or, in my case, the complete Time Life Old West collection -- can fall over and crush you.

Which isn’t to say my desk isn’t organized. It’s just organized in piles, heaps and mounds. (I like the heaps best because you don’t have to lift anything to search through them. You just stick a hand in and start sifting.)

But though I’m a slob, I do have my anal side. It’s just not things I care about organizing. It’s my work. And here’s how I do it.

Some writers motivate themselves with dreams of success. Some do it with the simple joy of creation. Me, I’m a guilt and fear man. Hence, the Big Board and the Calendar.

The Big Board is ... well, a big board. A big dry-erase board, to be a bit more precise. On it is a grid tracking word count and chapters completed week by week leading up to the deadline for my next book. Its purpose: allowing me to size up, at a glance, whether or not I’m on schedule.

And then have a nervous breakdown when I see I’m not. And then whip myself into a writing frenzy to get back on track. And then have another nervous breakdown when I see I’m still behind. Masochistic? You bet! But it works.

The Calendar is ... well, a calendar. (Do you sense a theme developing with the names I give to things?) It hangs next to my desk, and I turn to it at the end of every work day and write down the number of words I’ve managed to produce. Why? Because sometimes the Big Board doesn’t make me feel badly enough.

“Just 842 words today? But last Wednesday I wrote 849 words! I’m slipping! I shouldn’t have stayed up so late last night watching Doctor Who. I’m such a loser! Or maybe I’m developing Alzheimer’s ....” Obviously, I need panic the way other writers need coffee, and if I don’t get it I have to create it.

Oh, and I need coffee, too. Pot after pot of it. That’s why so many of my piles, heaps and mounds are stained brown.

In conclusion, I see by the Calendar that I only added 833 words to my new novel today, and the Big Board tells me I’m two weeks behind schedule, so what the heck am I doing working on something else? ARGH!!

Now where was that cup of coffee? I know it’s on this desk somewhere ....

Steve is the author of the Edgar-, Shamus-, Dilys- and Anthony-nominated (and nothing winning-) Holmes on the Range mystery series. He shares a blog with one of his fictional characters, which should tell you (if this essay didn’t) a little bit about his state of mind.
 

MY BRILLIANT CAREER
(1979)

Written by:
Eleanor Witcombe


Starring:
Judy Davis
Sam Neill


A young Australian woman
bucks 19th century societal conventions by choosing a
writing career over marriage.

 

SAY WHAT? Misused Words

Peak - to reach a maximum of development, value, or intensity.
     "My appetite seems to peak around bedtime."

Pique - to provoke, excite or arouse.
      "It was an inscription well calculated to pique curiosity."

A MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING

In 1970 a first grade teacher wrote a short story and submitted it to a national contest. She didn't win the contest, but she did receive a prize: a book about writing. She devoured it from cover to cover, hoping to learn the secrets to writing a novel. Although she'd been writing since the age of ten, she never finished anything. And she wanted to change that. But when she closed the book, she realized she already knew the writing tips it contained. There were no secrets. So why not just write the thing?

The wife and mother of three boys quit her teaching job to concentrate on finishing something. She wrote and wrote and soon the project grew to 200 pages. "I wrote it because I wanted to explore the anatomy of depression — how it works and why it happens to people; how you can go from being down but able to handle it to being so down that you don't even want to handle it, and then taking a radical step with your life — trying to commit suicide — and failing at that, coming back to the world and having to 'act normal' when, in fact, you have been forever changed."  

Three years later, she submitted the novel. The first two publishers quickly rejected it. The third one, Viking Press, sat on it for eight months and then decided to accept the unsolicited manuscript. Something they hadn't done in twenty-six years!

Since it hit the bookstores in 1976, Ordinary People has sold close to ninety thousand hardcover copies and over half a million paperback. It is now a standard selection on high school reading lists.

And Judith Guest no longer worries about finishing projects. 

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