In between the drafts

[Matt Rees]

Rock musicians like to note that, had they not discovered their talents for destroying ear-drums, they’d have been criminals. It adds some edge to their pampered personae. Here’s my claim to edge: had I not been a writer, I’d have been locked up long ago, but not in a jail. At best I’d have been sedated.

I know this for sure, because when I’m between drafts of a novel I feel the old madnesses creeping up on me. The dark resentments whose origins I can’t quite nail down. The tension around the center of my chest and the heavy breathing and the tight jaw and the voice in my head telling me this isn’t fair, whatever it is. The flickering fantasies penetrating my mind when it lacks the focus that otherwise keeps it calm.

My wife sees all this before I do, at least consciously. “Maybe you ought to work on something else while you’re waiting to start a new draft,” she says, gentle and delicate, as if she were waiting for me to respond with an angry “I’m all right, dammit.”

I have to take a break, you see, because writing a novel requires for me at least 10 drafts. Read a book 10 times straight and see if you don’t get bored with it. Or really pissed off.

So when I get through a draft, I take a week or so before I get back into it. As the end of the draft approaches, I start to fret about that week. I can’t take an actual vacation, because I always tell myself that I don’t know precisely when I’ll reach the end of the draft and therefore I can’t book a trip in advance. I try to line up some reading related to the subject of the book, but sometimes the books turn out to be duds or I’m done with them in a day and a half.

This time, as I take a break between drafts of my novel about the seventeenth century Italian maestro Caravaggio, I find myself sweating it out in the desert heat of Jerusalem. Enervating, indeed. I’m already a little fevered in any case, because I’ve been deep in the psyche of Caravaggio, who was both a brilliant artist and a duelist with an explosive temper.

In fact, when he wasn’t working, Caravaggio was liable to get into tavern brawls and raging arguments with everyone around him. That suggests I’m not alone in my frenetic between-drafts mental state. It’s a good job I can’t carry a rapier around Jerusalem.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.