On November 13th, a new novel, The Lawgiver, went on sale. I was scrolling through the New York Times Book Review and read that the same fellow who saw his book The Caine Mutiny win the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and Humphrey Bogart play the leading role in the film, had released his latest book. Yep, Herman Wouk, at 97, has a new novel out this holiday season, and is a good deal into writing his next one.

This was an absolute hoot to learn, and then I scrolled a bit further down the page. There I found another article which stated that Phillip Roth has declared that he is done writing at 80. Eighty? And throw away another two decades of productivity? I’ll bet you my lunch we’ll see another book from Roth. He won’t be able to help himself. I remember Kurt Vonnegut kept saying, with each of the last five or so books, that it was his last. Vonnegut did not write his last book. Death simply got him before he could write another one.

The fact is that writers don’t retire or stop writing before they die. We aren’t capable of it. Writing is how we come to see, and more importantly, process the world. When asked if he would be stopping, Wouk asked the interviewer what else he would do if he didn’t write. Indeed, a lifetime spent honing a skill and fashioning a lifestyle of writing does not end like a job at the bank or wind to conclusion like some corporate executive post.

I am just as impressed as you are that Mr. Wouk has given us another novel. My hat is off to him. But I am not surprised. The unexpected and the unexplainable would be if he hadn’t.

I am alone. I am here at my PC, on the shady patio around the back of the house, at the outdoor dining set, with the birds at the feeder and the tomatoes in their pots, but I am alone. I am learning how to be alone well. As I write each day, I learn a bit more about how to labor alone, few people having any idea that I am spending this time chiseling away at this block of marble, finding the rights words and putting them in the right order. It is a bizarre notion, to write a book. One spends countless hours working to get it right, aligning the hand-made cogs of an imagined machine, exposing what he’s doing once in a while, getting feedback – some supportive, some brutal – and going back to re-align or perhaps to build entirely new cogs.

Craftsmen frequently work alone. They will something to be and go to work making it so. Success comes to some of them, but it is the passion for the craft that fuels. Success is not the reward. If this were the case, there would be many one book-authors, one-term presidents, and one-healthy-patient doctors. Yes, I am learning to be alone, but the love I am developing for the craft keeps me company. The characters come and sit with me and tell me what they are thinking. I delight in time with my wife, my kids, my friends, but the alone time is time I am learning to delight in too.

Over the last three months I have been off taking a class, mostly writing Midrashim and other poetry instead of working on my book. It has been a good winter. But now, in anticipation of a summer of focus, I am coming back to the main project. Over the next couple of weeks I will re-familiarize myself with the files, hardcopy and soft, that contain the manuscript. It will take me a couple of weeks to do this, but I will figure out where I left off, my plans for draft four, and my new most recent opening chapters. I will look at the notes I left for my future self, decipher the breadcrumbs, and make a start again. It is not the first time I have done this, as other shorter work filters in and out, but it is not an easy or comfortable process.

I can only imagine it is like meeting up for lunch on a weekday afternoon with an old lover. You arrive early at the old café where you used to hang out and anxiously scan the thinly populated dining room. You look for the one who’s every detail you once knew so well and by which you mapped your course. Finally you see her, sitting alone. She appears new, at first unfamiliar in the faint light. You approach slowly, taken by beauty marks and scars you don’t remember.  As she looks up and you sit down, it is her, again. You say hello. She smiles, but it takes a great deal of faith that the conversation can be picked back up, that the common, well-trod paths can be trimmed back, re-established and reclaimed. It takes a deeply plumbed confidence that both parties will find the experience amiable, for both have changed much since the last meeting. You have hope, though. You know that the old spark, the dim glowing coal, must surely be there somewhere. You ask to see pictures of her kids… dm