Fallow Time

I suppose it was inevitable. After writing four book-length manuscripts last year, I’ve spent January in the Fallow time.

For those of you who are not farmers, when one grows crops it is usually a good idea to leave one of your fields untilled each year so that the ground can recover its nutrients. This is called leaving the field “fallow.”

It is not “where you lead I will fallow…”

It gets a bit scary, this fallow time. I was so used to rolling into the writing room at 8 every evening and spending quality time with the computer, creating scenes, hearing dialogue in my head, fallowing…uh, following the story where the characters led me. It was almost an obsession.

Spending nights away from the computer feels weird. Yet I know that I run on fumes after the production of last year. Nothing good will come from forcing the words to flow.

Instead I am using this time to do the important work of revising “Minerva James and the God of War.” Revision is hard work and it doesn’t seem very creative. But it’s necessary to bring the manuscript to a boil.

If you don’t revise, you leave all sorts of silly things, typos, poorly phrased sentences, and other monstrosities in the story. When an agent starts to read the book, he or she will NOT be impressed by such foolishness. And no, they don’t overlook such things if the story is good. In fact, they don’t get very far into the story if they keep running into things that should have been edited out.

The Fallow time is important for another reason. Like a farmer’s fields, if a writer tills the creative soil in his brain too often and too harshly, the creativity will lose its vibrancy. The stories stop coming. My imaginary friends stop talking to me. And, as I wrote in a prior blog, I am left to type, over and over: all work and not play makes Jack a dull boy.

Instead I am reading and thinking and watching a bit of TV. I just finished The Queen’s Gambit, the wonderful novel from which the Netflix series was derived. It made chess exciting. Imagine.

My fallow month is nearly over. Indeed, revising Minerva makes me want to tell more of her stories, as well as the 10 other projects in various stages of disrepair. I’m not kidding, I’ve got 10 other books I could be writing. And more occur to me every day.

Time to till the field again, my friends.