Clifford Garstang: On New Beginnings

I recently finished a novel. For the time being, that is. Until my agent tells me otherwise, it’s done. And so it’s time to begin work on something else. But how to start?

First, there are the distractions to deal with. There are your ordinary, daily distractions—the Internet, email. I’ve yet to find a satisfactory method of avoiding these sparkly gewgaws. Multitasking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, although it served me well in my twenty-year law practice. New resolve: Just Say No. Let yourself work for a couple of hours (I say to myself), and then check the email. Nothing is so urgent that it can’t wait two hours.

But there are also the extraordinary distractions. Last week, when I came home from AWP, I discovered that my dog was very ill. We spent a day at the local vet and then, because the situation was that dire, an evening at an emergency clinic 100 miles a way. That was followed by surgery, worry, and post-op care. He’s doing much better now, but it was hard to get much work done while with that going on. I didn’t even get the garden in, a distraction I had been planning on and have now postponed.

Second, there are the other obligations that have been accumulating while I made the push to finish the novel: the books I’d promised to review; the applications I’d resolved to submit; the lit journal backlog I’d hoped to make a dent in; the magazine submissions I need to make. Not distractions, exactly, but part of the job of being a writer.

Inevitably, though, I’ll turn to the next project, perhaps as early as…tomorrow. It’s not exactly a novel. But it’s not really stories either. I’ve written bits and pieces of it over the past couple of years—while letting the other novel-in-progress settle and ferment—but can’t quite yet see its shape. I’ll keep accumulating pieces and see how they fit together. Eventually, I’m confident, the picture will emerge. This is how it begins.

Read Los Angeles Review contributor Clifford Garstang’s story “Justice, Inc.” in Issue 7.