November 28, 2007
Wednesday

I wrote ten thousand words today! I wrote ten thousand words today!
       — exclamation attributed to American novelist Thomas Wolfe, 1900-1938

I’ve known this story about Thomas Wolfe since my undergraduate days. It was recounted by his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in an introduction to Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe was observed by friend and fellow novelist Nancy Hale striding up the street in New York City one night, chanting exultantly about his day’s production.

Wolfe died before he was forty, yet he wrote four novels that run more than 500 pages each plus dozens of stories, poems, plays, and other writings. Originally attracted by the poignance of the title You Can’t Go Home Again, I spent the summer of 1967 reading toward that, believing I had to read the whole tetralogy in order. It was a summer filled with Wolfe’s lush language, a summer when I carried the books back and forth to my job as an aide in a nursing home, reading at break time, reading after work before I fell asleep, reading again when I woke at 9:00 and waited for my boyfriend who worked second shift at the steel mill to get off.

Ten thousand words, I thought. Ten thousand words in a day. Very likely with a manual typewriter or a pencil and paper. I had some idea forty years ago that I wanted to write fiction, and I did enroll in a creative writing class that fall. There I met the teacher who would give me “The Silken Tent” as an image of myself, but who also undermined my confidence as a fiction writer with his merciless critiques so much that I did not even think about writing fiction again until I was two years older than Wolfe was when he died. I don’t think I’ve written ten thousand words of fiction in all these twenty years.

But I did write a thousand words today. This morning, my thirteenth day in Wyoming, I found myself unusually relaxed. I have thirteen days left here until Monday, December 10 (Emily Dickinson’s birthday), the day I’ve decided to stop working and start packing up to get going three days later. I made a chart of things to do — stop worrying about my quality of production and just write what comes, read like crazy in these unbroken, quiet hours, and really take the time to write a squashy, messy, Shitty First Draft with everything poured in, all the backstory and the meandering subplots and the myriad named characters, some of whom will have to be eliminated. Don’t edit, don’t try six different turns of phrase looking for the best one, don’t worry that the dialogue is wooden or a cultural reference too obscure for the average reader. Just do it, I said.

In the early afternoon all of us piled into Bev’s Mazda wagon and headed for Ucross, Wyoming’s other artist residency facility just ten miles away. We toured the gallery where we saw an exhibit of Wyoming landscapes by three local artists. And we spent some time in the library with the collection of books by people who have spent time there, artists who, like me, were given time to work without interruption. Of course I looked first for the work of G.C. Waldrep, the Amish poet now teaching at Bucknell University whom I met at Bread Loaf and who encouraged me to apply to Jentel, and to Ucross, and to any other place I think I might find support and inspiration for my work. But I found other writers I’ve known in Vermont, writers who have helped me, encouraged me, who enchanted me when they read and who told me I had it in me to do the same.

When I came back I took a short nap and then got out a manuscript that had been giving me fits in the weeks before I left. It was a fragment of backstory from the novel that two writers at Bread Loaf told me could be a standalone story. It was a fine scene-setting introduction, but it didn’t go anywhere, and I had five pages of crap (I thought) in my notebook from early November trying to make it get started.

I took a deep breath, thought of the shelf of books by residents at Ucross and at Jentel, people just like me, and started in. By 9:00 I had another thousand words.

Can you hear me, Mr. Wolfe? I wrote a thousand words today!

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