The Home Stretch

You might think I’m racing to finish my latest book because there’s a publication date looming or a publicity campaign to manage.

Wrong.

I’m racing because I’m seventy-three.

At this stage of my life, the home stretch has less to do with deadlines than with not wasting time. The irony, of course, is that I’m putting myself through all this to finish a book I fully intend to give away for free.

Apparently, my version of the home stretch involves a back and neck in what feels like permanent spasm, a hot water bottle practically welded to my spine, and — after another sleepless night — enough fatigue to make me wonder whether coherent thought is still available to me before noon.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m typing with one hand. I discovered, far too late, that Hoka running shoes require a completely different approach to walking. Nobody thought to mention that before I took our grand-dog Brewster out for a Sunday morning stroll and promptly tripped over my own newly shod feet, badly spraining my hand.

So yes, I’m in the home stretch. Just not the one I imagined.

But it got me thinking about writing practice. Not writing. Writing practice. They’re not the same thing.

Over the past forty-five years, I’ve probably spent almost as much time figuring out how I write as I have improving what I write. That may sound a little obsessive, but it is also the story of a life. 

I learned that my mornings are for first drafts and late afternoons for revisions. In between, I try to read, meet a friend for lunch, and get out of my head.

I’ve come to understand that some ideas need the hush of my home office, while others need the plain anonymity of the library. I learned that a log cabin in the Interior of British Columbia can be the right place to untangle a stubborn chapter, and that a noisy café can sometimes shake me loose when I’ve become too attached to my own thinking.

Coffee helps.

Reading great fiction helps.

Quiet helps.

Everything else can usually be negotiated.

That may be why I’ve written in such odd places over the years: a mahjong room at an expat health club in Beijing, a walk-in dressing room in our staff quarters in Seoul where I squeezed in a tiny desk, cabina balconies in Costa Rica, anonymous cubicles at my local library, and most recently, a lovingly restored log cabin in the B.C. Interior.

The place has never mattered nearly as much as whether I could think.

What I did not expect was that, in my seventies, my body would decide it wanted a vote too.

So now my writing practice includes things I never would have thought of as creative tools like a good chair that won’t make my back worse and my trusty hot water bottle.

And oddly enough, these new physical challenges have not made me want to write less. If anything, they have made me more devoted to the hours when everything comes together—when the coffee is hot, the room is quiet, the body is temporarily cooperative, and the words begin to appear.

Those moments are too precious now to waste.

Maybe that’s what the home stretch really means.

It’s not racing because a publisher is waiting. It’s racing because you’ve finally figured out which work matters enough to finish.

For most of my career, I thought a writing practice was about producing books. Lately I’ve begun to wonder if it’s the other way around. Maybe the books simply give us a reason to keep showing up.

Years ago, I read that the Canadian writer Mordecai Richler wondered what on earth he would do until four o’clock every afternoon if he wasn’t writing. I laughed when I read it. These days, I understand exactly what he meant.

People occasionally ask me when I’m planning to retire. Retire from what?

Writing isn’t just what I do. It’s how I organize my days. It’s how I make sense of the world. It’s where I put my curiosity. Without it, I’d be left wondering what to do until four o’clock every afternoon too.

Years ago, in The Carry-On Imperative, I noted that writers don’t retire. They die. At the time, I meant it as a joke.

Now I’m not so sure it was.

Which may be precisely why, at seventy-three, I’m prepared to put up with hot water bottles, Hoka shoes, sleepless nights and the occasional mutiny from my own body to finish it.

Because I honestly believe Dead Is the New Old is the best work I’ve ever done.