Where I’m Writing From eli.cranor@gmail.com October 23, 2022 Eli Cranor is an Arkansas novelist whose debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, is available wherever books are sold. He can be reached using the “Contact” page at elicranor.com and found on Twitter @elicranor

I’m writing from my bed on a Saturday morning.

Two kids, an Australian Shepherd, and my wife are snuggled up beside me. Cartoons flicker across our flat-screen TV. It’s still dark outside, still cool. Steam rises from a cup of warm coffee on the nightstand.

In other words, this is my idea of a perfect Saturday morning, something I haven’t experienced once over the last four months, not until today.

Why?

I’ve been writing, which, I guess you could say I’m still doing now. But writing a column and writing a novel are two very different chores. I can write a column in bed with a yellow legal pad in my lap while the kids squirm and the dog snores.

Novels, on the other hand, require absolute focus.

When I’m drafting a manuscript, I write first thing in the morning. It’s not just the kids I’m escaping, it’s everything else too: texts, emails, social media, work. Which is precisely why I haven’t enjoyed a Saturday morning snuggle-fest since June.

If this sounds crazy, it’s because it is.

I don’t take days off, especially at the start of a new project. There’s this mystical kind of momentum I’m trying to achieve, and the only way to get the ball rolling is by showing up and writing every day. I don’t plot out any of my books, I don’t outline, but I do make sure my backside is planted in my desk chair when the clock strikes five every morning.

E. L. Doctorow said that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

That quote brings me back to the “momentum” I mentioned earlier. In the beginning, the impulse is simply to create. Something. Anything. Get words down. Flesh out your characters. Let them talk and walk around, or if you’re a crime novelist — see who survives.

At some point, though, the impulse changes from creating to finishing. As the words accumulate, the momentum builds. Think of it like a snowball. You start with a handful of ice, a five-hundred-word idea, and then after you’ve pushed it around a while, it gets so big you can’t stop it (there’s a childbirth analogy in there somewhere too, but I digress).

Regardless of the metaphor, that’s just what happened to me last weekend. My book baby skipped walking and started running, almost too fast for me to keep up.

Almost.

This shift in creative gears coincided with every member in my family, including me, testing positive for the flu.

It was perfect.

We didn’t have to haul the kids to and from school, or worry about dance classes. For one whole week, our schedule was wide open. Which meant I no longer had to rely on getting my work done in the wee hours of the morning; I could write my fingers off all day, every day, until the book was done.

Which is just what I did.

When I shift over into this mode, the real world fades away. I stare blankly at walls, trees, even children — my children — thinking only of how my book will end. This, of course, drives my wife crazy, but she’s come to recognize the glazed-over look and has even coined a term for it:

“Banana Mode.”

She got the name from a podcast John Grisham did a few years back called “Book Tour.” He had Harlan Coban on once, and Harlan said when he gets to the end of a manuscript his wife banishes him to his office and will “throw him a banana from time to time.”

My wife liked that. She recognized the feeling, understood what it’s like to lose your husband for a week straight and carry the weight of the family on her shoulders.

She also knows, however, that when I finally emerge from my office, bleary eyed and in need of a fresh shave (my head, not my beard, never the beard) that I will be hers again.

I’ll be back in the bed on Saturday morning, which is where I am now, wrestling with my son and running my fingers through my daughter’s hair as the day’s first light breaks the horizon.