R2E Excerpt #47*: The Rabbit Hole of Writing

It's so much easier to imagine writing great stuff than actually, um, writing it. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

JUST AFTER MY ARRIVAL IN PARIS, I received a letter from my thesis-novel advisor, who suggested that I take what I’d learned from that first novel and roll it over into my next. Over the course of a few days in early September, I conjured a main character—a librarian from Ohio—who takes a job at the New York Public Library and becomes obsessed with the sad, mad people who fill the Rose Reading Room with stink and imprecations against God. My main character was going to track them down and murder them all. 

ApocalypticVisions ”R” Us.

I filled pages with scenes and chapter outlines and rapturous effusions along these lines: “A thought that called me from my drunken sleep: I choose to write. If each word means as much to me as the first and the last; then I will be able to live by my writing. Si vous êtes écrivain, ecrivez!”

If you’re a writer, write! 

And so I did, page after page, about writing. About what I would write, one day. About how great it would be …