In Praise of Slogging and Trudging

I'm now partway through writing the fourth book in my After-School Superstars series for Holiday House. This is the series set in an after-school program where every month is a different themed camp. So far I've written Nixie Ness, Cooking Star (cooking camp), Vera Vance, Comics Star (comic book camp), and Lucy Lopez, Coding Star (computer coding camp). Camp number four will star Boogie Bass, in sign language camp.

I was thrilled when the editorial team at Holiday House encouraged me to do a sign-language book. Ooh! And Boogie is probably my favorite character in the previous books: as his name suggests, so funny and dear. Yet so far I'm still in the slogging and trudging stage of the writing process. This is the stage where I don't quite know where the book is going (this despite having a decent outline, of sorts), the stage where the story still hasn't yet come fully alive for me, the stage where I simply write one sentence, and then another sentence, and then another. And then another.

I would feel worried about this book if I didn't know this has been my process for all my books. I always start out this way, with my hand moving across the page for an hour a day, in the hopes that sooner or later the magic will happen. Until that point, there is a certain amount of sheer drudgery, which brings to mind a comment made to me by a former Philosophy Department chair: he asked me to serve on some particularly dreary committee, and I replied, "It just sounds like so much drudgery." And he said, "But you're so good at drudgery!"

And I am.

But I'm starting to get itchy: what if this time the magic DOESN'T come? Oh, but it has to! It just has to!

One problem for me right now is that although I've done a fair amount of the requisite slogging and trudging, I can't say I've done it every day. Mine has been intermittent slogging and sporadic trudging. Faithful drudgery, I'm sad to say, yields much better results than drudgery every-once-in-a-while. I need to put my nose to that good ol' grindstone and keep it there!

Luckily, tomorrow I'm heading off to Tucson for a dear friend's wedding. The actual ceremony will take place on Saturday, but I decided to go a couple of days earlier to make this a little writing retreat and general escape-from-real-life. I will be slogging amidst the saguaro cacti! I will trudging in a charming cafe near the university! I will raise my eyes from the drudgery of the page and feast upon a desert landscape!

I feel the magic on its way to me right now, if I just slog and trudge a little bit longer...