Hot Flashes of Obsession and How to Deal With Them

I was reading John Irving's novel The Fourth Hand last week, and there's a little addendum at the end, bundled into a section called "A Reader's Guide." There's a piece written by Irving called "Why I Wrote The Fourth Hand When I Wrote It." Aside from explaining nearly everything about the book and its creation, Irving offers an interesting and useful insight
into the creative process. He describes how he interrupted the writing of A Prayer for Owen Meany to work on the screenplay for a previous novel, The Cider House Rules. In the essay (found on page 319 of the Ballantine paperback edition of 2002) Irving says, "It sounds strange, but my novels have benefited from my interrupting them...(during the novelist's absence, a novel that's off to a good start only stands to get better, but a struggling novel will become more difficult.)"

At first, this sounded intuitive to me. But I wondered how others felt about it. Getting caught up in the writing of a novel can be like the early days of a relationship. The temptation is to turn the burners up all the way and sweat it out. But novel-writing, like a relationship (and like most things organic), follows a naturally prescribed arc that spikes in the beginning, but levels off. Writing a novel demands stamina, and Irving touches on that need to self-regulate when he explains how he's found a way to deal with it. While many of us don't have the luxury of writing an Academy Award winning screenplay in the middle of writing our next novel, the exercise remains the same.

I'm in the middle of one of those hot flashes right how with The Innkeeper's Husband. Everything's flowing, the narrative is coming together, and I'm at a point in the writing where I can not only see what the completed work will look like, but why it will look like that. Like Mr. Irving, I also have a built in mechanism for interrupting my creative flow when it's pouring blood in all the right places. It's called My Life. Many mornings I wake up feverish and needing to write. Too bad. At 0500, I have to go to work. When I get back around noon, the inn invades my creative space. And then there's teaching, and family, and baseball, and The Food Network. I get to write on Saturdays and Sundays, and I have to concur with what Irving said: When I return to the work, I always discover new possibilities in the storytelling.