I’m writing from the start of another long, slow summer day.

	Eli Cranor

There was a chill in the air when my daughter and I slipped into the hot tub this morning. We read for half an hour then took a swim in the lake. We raced out to the floating dock, then back again. That water is still cool in the mornings. It’ll be hot by noon.

“Beat you!” my daughter cries as she slaps the rock wall that lines our bank. I tell myself I let her win, but I’m not sure. That’s how big she is, how fast she’s getting.

Her little brother is waiting for me on the back deck. He wants to know if we’re going fishing again tonight.

“Tonight,” I tell him, “we catch the big one!” even though we already caught the big one, or at least the biggest one I’ve ever caught: a twenty-pound blue catfish, back around the same time school let out. We snapped a picture, then let him go, but we were hooked.

I’ve fished more over the last month than I have in the last year. Having a rod in your hands is a good way to watch the sun go down. A few evenings ago, the whole sky — everything from Mount Nebo to the Nuclear One cooling tower, the blunderbuss-shaped structure my kids still call the “Cloud Maker” —lit up like an atom bomb.

It was eerie yet beautiful, the neon iridescence, unlike anything I’d ever seen. It made me stop. Made me think.

What else have I been missing?

This is the first summer in four years that I don’t have to worry about a book tour. There are no marketing calls, no publicity meetings, no last-minute copy edits to review.

The break in production scared me at first. I’d become addicted to the noise, the hustle, or, as we liked to call it back in my football days, “the grind.” But I’m slowly learning the difference between contact sports, between winning and losing, and creating real art.

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It’s taken four books, four full years into living the life of a novelist, to realize that writing shouldn’t be competitive. Don’t get me wrong; you can make it that way. You can compare book sales, literary awards, trips, and translations. But in the end, the only person you’re really competing with is yourself. And to create the best art, to write stories worth reading, rest is necessary.

An author should treat his mind the way a farmer treats his land. There is a time to plant, a time to harvest, and a time to let the field lie fallow.

The trick, at least for a production-obsessed guy like me, is to understand that rest isn’t just a vacation; it’s a critical part of the process. The old saying, “You are what you eat,” applies to writers, too. We are the books we read, the movies we watch, the places we visit.

I’ve read some fine novels this summer: Rides of the Midway and The Last Taxi Driver by Mississippi author (and former taxi driver) Lee Durkee; Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry; and The Beach by Alex Garland, writer and director of one of my favorite films, “Ex Machina.” I’ve seen some good movies this summer too: “The Nice Guys,” “Moon,” and “Project Hail Mary.”

Outside of our annual family vacation to the beach in July, there are no big trips on the horizon. There’s just a long line of slow days like this one, summer days spent swimming and fishing, reading and watching, stockpiling a mass of small, beautiful moments that will find their way back onto the page when my tank is finally full.

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