Let’s face it: being a writer is like having homework every day for the rest of your life, someone once said. Homework has gone from pencils and pens to typewriters to laptops, but a few things haven’t changed. One is the tyranny of the rectilinear blankness staring you in the face, whether it’s a sheet of paper or a computer screen.
Another is Procrastination, one the literary Four Horsemen, the others being Writer’s Block, Perfectionism and Fear of Rejection. Close cousins all.
The late E.B White, the New Yorker essayist and author of Charlotte’s Web and co-author of The Elements of Style, had a wonderful excuse for procrastination when he was living on a farm in Vermont. The story goes that a reporter came for an interview, found him out building a stone wall, and asked why he was doing that instead of writing. The response: “Because building a stone wall is easier than writing.”
Now, there’s a couple of things about the property my wife and I bought several years ago. The house lacked a cellar or garage, so no workshop in which to make stuff–a golden-oldie that enabled my procrastination for years elsewhere. And the back yard sloped down way too much, making it useless for, say, croquet, badminton and bocce. Of course, my wife and I could not care less about those particular activities. But still, what seemed needed was more…level. Sure, we had a deck extending from the back of the house, but it’s nice to be able to look out onto something, right?
We also had a redundant circular driveway in the front.
The solution was obvious, to me at least.
A wall.
Make that a wall for a terrace four feet high along the 50 foot length, with tapering 25 foot sides.
The base came from big flat chunks of the asphalt driveway I ripped up and hauled back. I helped a neighbor break up a concrete patio and he was more than willing to donate the remains to the cause. I busted up an unwanted concrete walkway and part of the concrete pad where a garage once was. Halfway through this, our next door neighbor, a contractor of some sort, was aghast that I was using a sledgehammer, pickaxe and shovel to do the job, and offered the use of his jackhammer. I tried it but his cure wasn’t so much better than my disease of preferring manual labor. “You must like to sweat,” he said.
I suppose I do. It’s easier than writing.
The enclosure of the terrace wall had to be filled in, of course–about forty yards of dirt, it turned out. Enter a succession of dump trucks–construction guys only too eager to get rid of fill dirt they’d have to pay to dump elsewhere. I sifted each freebie load, shovel-full by shovel-full, to get rid of stones large and small and took countless wheel-barrow loads out back. Another neighbor further afield wanted ten yards of front-yard dirt out of his life, so that helped. A pleasant fellow he was, even loaned me his pickup truck for the hauling. He had the radio dial tuned to Rush Limbaugh, and a copy of Tom Paine’s Common Sense on the front seat, so I figured I was doing my part for bipartisanship by transferring this Tea-bagger’s huge mound of dirt to my back yard. (After all, Rush, it doesn’t matter where the soil comes from; grass will grow but you gotta water it.)
And the grass is doing fine. My wife has planted a lovely border of colorful flowers on the inside perimeter, fill-up stations for hummingbirds. True, during the months of work I often found myself going in later for my afternoon writing sessions and surfacing a little earlier to make the most of the daylight, depending on the season, for The Wall took the better part of three to finish. The book (that would be Pass on the Cup of Dreams) got done, but yes, it might have gotten done a little quicker without The Wall. Still, there’s always a price to pay if you’re going to do it right—procrastination that is.
So, what’s next? I’m a little concerned because I’ve begun a new novel. More homework.
Whatever it is, no more dirt. I’m done with moving dirt.
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