My face lifts from the shallow, dark water, more out of instinct than command, but what drips from me is more blood than water.

I’ve re-written the above sentence close to a thousand times over the past three years.That’s not hyperbole. I’ve changed it three times today. Today. I first wrote that sentence three years ago and I still do not know what to do with it. One lousy sentence, I’ll probably write it another hundred times.  

As I move along writing my first novel (to give you an idea of my pace, slugs pass me as I write and honk for me to move over), I’ve learned more about myself than writing. There’s the obvious rules of writing, which are harder to follow than you would think, but there are no rules about hating your words, or worse yourself. David Rakoff once said “Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). I have taken that feeling and turned it onto myself when I work on the novel. I am shit.

By comparison after I finish a blog post I raise my hands over my head in victory and feel a little smugness. This blog post is work of exquisite art and you are a better person for reading it (except the first sentence….so awful). They are both acts of putting words in an order to tell a story, however if a blog post is an ice cream sundae, my novel is brussel sprouts and no matter what anybody says, you can’t make brussel sprouts taste good, you can only make them edible.

Understanding the difficulty in writing a novel wasn’t the problem. Underestimating my ability to be satisfied with my written words was definitely the problem. I’ve played sports most of my life and writing is completely the opposite of competing in a sport. There’s no editing in sports. If you blow a lay-up, you suck it up and play defense on the other end. If you chunk a shot, you forget about it and move on. You can’t go back. In writing not only can you get a do-over; you can get another, and another, and more until you’re not writing anymore, you’re sticking a fork into your eye and thinking there’s a chance that eventually one poke will make you feel better. That’s the absurdity, or my absurdity, of writing this novel.

Why is the first sentence different? I’ve written thousands of sentences for the book and I’ve tinkered with plenty of them. Hell, I’ve been happy with a few of them, but I cannot let go of the first sentence. As I read it right now I think “Ok, I’m cool with it,” and over coffee tomorrow morning that will change to “Dripping? That’s a horrible word,” and the process repeats. I can’t start over, a jackhammer couldn’t remove them from the mental concrete in my head. I’m stuck with them. So are you.

My face lifts from the….aaaaarrrrggghhhh. 

Writer’s note: As I went to push publish I changed it again. Oy vey.