In "Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," Lori Gottlieb's controversial polemic on what the hell love has to do with marriage (not a lot, she says), Gottlieb opines: "Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business." Maybe she's right. Maybe she isn't. I don't know. But I will say that the same could be said of writing. My paraphrase: "Writing isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a series of very small, mundane, and often boring acts undertaken in service of a business that rarely turns a profit." Maybe writing is like a marriage, one in which you can never quite make out what your spouse looks like. Or maybe writing is like a religion, one in which the true believer waits for a god who shows himself only through inscrutable signs. Yesterday, I had a fit over my novel-in-progress, Happy. I suppose this was inevitable. I am nothing if not an undoer. Luckily, the Harpoonist, a writer and book doctor, was there to help. Like an expert surgeon, she grabbed a scalpel and began slashing at the book on the operating table before her. Happy thanks her for the intervention that brought it back from the dead. If you are a writer whose book needs doctoring, I recommend the Harpoonist highly.
