Meat on the Bone Monday

I like this little ole blog, but sometimes I think there isn't enough meat on the bone. There's fun stuff, and interesting turns of phrase, and some clever lines, and some news every once and again, but there's no long thoughtful pieces. So, today I'm starting to write some posts with a bit more meat.

I wrote a piece called Targeting Your Perfect Job a while ago for a blog called Hullabalog. To read the whole thing you can still find it here, but I will give you the high points as a part of this post. Basically I said that when going after a job you should attack it like we attacked objectives in the military. First we pounded it with artillery, then we raced in with Bradley's full of Rangers, we had Rangers fast roping onto roof tops of the target buildings, we had Rangers coming in from the wood line and finally we had air support the whole time. We hit every target like that, with a thought out plan that attacked the objective from multiple angles. I wrote about attacking job hunting the same way.

At first I thought about a post about writing novels with this same philosophy, but I realized that it didn't really fit the mold. Writing novels I find is not like what I described above. Selling and publishing is, but that may be a post for a different day, in terms of just writing a novel, it's more like a thirty-mile road march.

In the Battalion we had to complete a thirty-mile road march twice a year. Once a week was a ten-miler. Once a quarter was a twenty-miler. Once a half year was a thirty-miler. Road marching is rough. When I first joined the military I knew that this would be something I would have to do so I trained. I didn't train enough. The first road march was heavy and grueling and I think we only walked three miles with thirty pound ALICE packs.

By the time I got to Battalion a ten-miler with a sixty pound pack was nothing. My hardest challenge in this regard was in Best Ranger when we had a twenty-five mile march with an eighty-five pound pack. Missed it by "that" much.

What's all this have to do with novel writing. Just as road marching is grueling and monotonous, writing a novel is the same. There's no glamor in the writing part. There's no fast roping in. Or sitting on the edge of a Little Bird and jumping onto a roof. There's no parachuting, or Bradley's or motorcycles on the airfield. It's the hard slog, and grueling foot steps, and the tightness in the upper back and pinched neves in the shoulders from the shoulder straps. Writing a novel is an exercise in monotony and a mental and physical challenge as much as anything else, just in a slightly different way.

But also like a long road march, when you finish the since of accomplishment is unlike any other. We completed one thirty-miler in Oregon and it became a march to the sea. The deuce-and-a-half drove us thirty miles from the coast and dropped us off. When we made it to the ocean we dropped in place and rested, but we also felt pride in accomplishment. That's finishing a novel.