About six years back I figured I’d stumbled across the great secret to writing fiction, in particular to writing a novel. I remember I was sitting at a cafe on the north side of Chicago with my friend Bill, another struggling writer-type. He’d just read a draft of a novel I’d completed and had some kind words and solid critiques, and he asked me how I’d managed to finish it. “What was the key?” he asked.

Flushed with the victory of actually having completed something somewhat coherent after 140,000 words, I arrived upon an answer to his question: “The key,” I said, “is learning how to write bad stuff. Anyone can write the good stuff…the shit that flies across the screen when you’re accosted by the muse of literary pretension. But writing the bad stuff is hard. That’s the stuff you have to cut later, or rewrite. Or maybe you even get lucky and it turns out to be not as bad as you thought even though it was painful as hell to get down.”

Writers, even unsuccessful ones, are famous for aphorisms.

But I still think that’s largely true. Though I’m also now convinced that I don’t have the first clue about how to write fiction or a novel. I’ve got a couple that I’ve finished and like well enough, but the fact that they still exist solely as doublespaced, Times New Roman manuscripts gives me a clue to what the marketplace thinks of my literary greatness.

But to finish a novel, you do have to learn to write the bad stuff. Or at least write through the bad stuff. Take tonight, for example. Two hours ago I decided I’d sit down and write 600 words on this new project I’m trying to get through. It started as a short story, turned into a screenplay and now seems to want to be a novel. So I’ve given myself a goal of 600 words per day, good or bad, so that I’ll have a draft to look at in July to see if the first stab is good, bad or ugly.

But then I started writing and became completely dejected. The whole project fell into question. I reread some other passages, which seemed uninspired and vapid. I was certain that I’d never be able to get 600 words…even 600 bad ones.

But I started typing. The first two sentences took me 15 minutes.  But then I found and followed an image of a woman pulling radishes from a garden bed made from old tractor tires. And the below passage is the result. I can’t say if it’s good or not, or if it will even wind up in the finished piece. But it’s 1,200 words long and it doesn’t make me cringe.

I don’t know any secrets to writing. But I’m pretty convinced that finishing anything of length requires you to sit down and beat your head against the wall and write a whole lot of stuff you’re convinced is absolutely lousy. If you have the discipline to do that, you won’t have a problem hanging on long enough to type “The End.”

WERE WE EVER HAPPY? I hold a vague recollection, something so distant and faded that it might be a memory of a memory. Or maybe it was even something I’d created in a dream. But it’s there, a warm bright moment in the light of a spring afternoon. For an instant we were happy: my father, my mother and I.

I was four. It was our second year on the old Richter farm, which had stood for a long while as overgrown pasture and blackberry thickets. My old man had leased the two hundred acre property adjacent to my grandmother’s farm. It was his bid to make a go of it on his own, and he’d planted corn and beans and then sweet sorghum on the poorer ground for silage and with the intent of making molasses to sell at the farmers market in town. My grandma had been selling off acreage to pay the medical bills from the kidney failure that had consumed and killed my granddad the year before. My dad wanted to leave her free to do what she needed to with her land.

He liked having his own place even if everyone said nothing would come of it. The soil was poor I think we were happy enough there. My mother had wallpapered the kitchen and bedrooms with money she earned cutting hair. She had a stool on the old shade porch, and women would bring their boys from town to sit on it while Ma ran the clippers over their skulls. She charged two dollars less than the barber shop in town for pretty much the same result.

She had planted winter beds in old tractor tires, and they were already lush with spring greens, beats and even a few strawberries. I remember the day clearly. It was late morning and I was helping with the garden, more likely just pushing dirt around, when I noticed the absence of the sound of the tractor running in the back fields for the first time in weeks.

I spotted my dad by the well spigot near the barn, and he was washing the dirt off his forearms and splashing the back of his neck. Ma looked up from the bundle of vegetables collected on the lap of her garden dress. She smiled with surprise.

“Let’s fix a lunch and go to the creek,” he said. He wasn’t quite smiling. I couldn’t say that I’d ever seen him smile in earnest. But there was a light in his eyes. He took off his cap and wiped his brow.

Ma sliced radishes and cheese and rye bread. She poured some cream in an old jelly jar and then filled the balance of it with strawberries. She wrapped slices of deer sausage from a March doe in waxed paper and bundled all of it in a bandana.

Dad brought along a heavy wool Navy blanket and a couple of cane poles, and we walked a path he kept mowed short enough that we didn’t have to work about ticks. It took us all the way to the back of the farm where there was a gate that let out on a stone county road, more of a twin-track that was used by the local farmers. We climbed up past my grandmother’s place and then down into a draw near the base of Carson’s Ridge where Bonne Femme Creek still ran clear and swift, eddies coiling into long, deep, rocky pools.

We found a grassy spot on the bank of our favorite pool, and I can remember the chicory and blue-eyed grass giving a splash of color.  Ma found a warm, sunny spot near the rusted metal gates of an old family cemetery. I don’t know if anyone knew who those old headstones belonged to, maybe the very first family to farm this country after it had only been Osage land. The names were weathered off and weeds grew up inside the iron fence.

We ate the strawberries and cream first. Ma gave us each a spoon, but they left most of it for me. We ate sausage and sliced radishes on the rye bread and then dad laid back on the blanket and began to snore softly within moments. I stared at his brow and watched it twitch as a bee hovered close.

Ma and I took up the poles and dug for worms in the soft bank with driftwood. We cast bobbers into the pool and watched the sunfish expertly remove our worms, red and white floats dancing in the riffle and then gliding even once they’d removed their quarry. We didn’t catch anything. We didn’t speak. We just sat on the banks and smelled the turned earth and the rich, sweet green of adolescent spring leaves and the early wildflowers. It was nice because there were no hard words, no impatient questions from my old man or vacant responses from Ma. Even as a small child I could read there was little they cared for in one another.  But this day none of that showed.

We came back to the blanket and Dad was cutting on a walking stick, notching lines on one end for the handle, scraping off bark. I hoped that he was making it for me, but I suspected that he wasn’t. Maybe he was just filling time, and he’d leave it when we packed to go, in which case it would be mine to take. Greed exists in the most basic form in children.

Ma lay down on the thick, coarse wool and Dad laid down next to her on his side, his head propped by one elbow, his chin in his palm. They weren’t touching.

At first I thought he might be staring at her hair as it was stirred by the balmy spring breeze, but then I realized that he was staring at the old family grave plot. He looked for a long time, and then I remembered that he sat up suddenly and shaded his eyes, staring into the tall grass between the weathered old markers.

“What is it?” Ma asked, and he just shook his head and lay back down, glancing sideways into the cool, tall grass as he did so.

That’s when I heard a plop and I rushed to a bank to see a huge alligator snapping turtle scoot into the depths of the pool. I watched the trail he’d made dragging his thick tail across the mud of the bank. When I got back Ma and Dad were wordlessly packing up the picnic. Ma smiled and hummed to herself and dad glanced at his watch and then the sun to see how much time he had left for tractor work.

I remember hearing a crow caw as we left the creek bank.  “That was nice,” Ma said later as we crossed our property. She reached out absently and brushed the back of my neck. There was a gentleness underneath her calluses, and a strength in her fingers, and it was the kind of touch that makes a boy know that there is good things in the world.

That was the only time I figure all three of us were happy. Even my old man. The following spring the banks of Bonne Femme would flood the bottom ground well into planting season so that a few neighbors wouldn’t even get their corn in. By August, Ma would be dead. And a year after, my old man would walk past me into the kitchen to take down the twenty-gauge he kept on the ledge above the Frigidaire.

Update – 08-11-10 – ReadWriteWeb offered 5 reasons why paper books are better than eBooks. Kobo offers a host of free eBooks including every classic you’ll ever need to read.

It’s been at least ten years since I first started thinking seriously about eBooks and getting excited about the idea.  I had a Palm Pilot for work, and the display was poor and the Internet connection was horrible. But I loved the idea of carrying an entire library in my pocket. Still, I never even purchased the first book. The Palm Pilot is probably in some museum right now. Maybe the Gutenberg Museum we recently visited in Mainz, Germany.

Well, it’s taken me ten years to finally give it a try. What I needed was the right device and a strong reason to jump in. I bought an iPhone a couple years ago. But still, I didn’t download the Kindle app and a book until  my friend Daren Dean released his amazing novel, Far Beyond the Pale, on Amazon. I downloaded the app and fired up the book, and now I’m thoroughly enjoying both Daren’s excellent writing and the experience of reading a novel electronically.

Readwriteweb recently gave five reasons why eBooks are better than their paper ancestors.Though they highlight some amazing features of eBooks that aren’t available in the dead tree format, I wouldn’t go so far as saying this makes them superior. There’s still nothing quite like the smell of a fresh (or old and dusty) book, or the feel of pulp in your hands. There’s a sensory pleasure in reading a paper book that can’t be replicated digitally.

But the actual act reading, of experiencing words, even on the iPhone’s small screen, is just as engaging as reading on paper. You can make notes, highlight, save your spot. The iPhone allows you to flip pages with your thumb, adding a new level of touch to the experience that pressing a button can’t give you. The digital annotation tools are more efficient than the analog system of sticky notes, highlighters, bent corners and margin scrawls (albeit aesthetically less pleasing). The price is also fantastic. Daren is self-published, but I was able to buy his novel at a price on Kindle that allowed him a better profit margin (per copy) than if he’d connected with a traditional publisher.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of eBooks is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit.

There’s also something nice about the short page length on an iPhone…it gives you the feeling of headlong progress (through the 4,000+ pages that Daren’s novel reaches in this format). I thought I’d need time to adjust to thousands of micropages compared to the traditional200-400 page length of a novel, but it’s been no problem at all. In fact, I appreciate being able to flip a page or two between giving my kid a bath or waiting for her to brush her teeth. It seems easier to dip in and out of a novel than reading a fraction of a longer, standard-length page.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of viable eBook platforms is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit. eBooks may just be what saves the novel form in this digital age. The new platform introduces the novel experience to people who are used to consuming all of their information on a mobile device and wouldn’t otherwise think to read something of that length. It saves trees. It allows self-published authors to reach a global audience in minutes. It enhances the opportunity to deepen the novel experience with, say, video of the author reading or social highlighting and notes that give you an instant book discussion group. The future of the book-length manuscript would be far more precarious if they didn’t translate so smoothly to the Kindle, iPhone and iPad.

And it’s silly to think that paper books will die as a result of the growing popularity of eBooks. We all now have keyboards and mobile devices that shoot video and record audio. People write blogs and online diaries and send volumes of digitally composed email. But personal journals are as popular as ever. Moleskine notebooks are on sale everywhere. I see them in every coffee shop in Oregon, but I also recently returned from Germany and Italy, and they’re all over Europe as well. Every corner in Florence seemed to have a fine stationary shop, where Moleskines were the cheap option, and antique leather notebooks fetched ridiculous prices. There’s still a place for the handwritten word five hundred years after Gutenberg. People will always read paper books as well.

While we were in Germany, we stopped at  the Gutenberg Museum. My daughter joined her cousins in making prints in the museum’s hands-on print shop. She was thrilled by the tactile, mechanical experience of creating art in a method not unlike Gutenberg used when he printed his first Bible page a half millennium ago. This experience could never be replicated digitally. The art hanging on the walls of the print shop was innovative, and had a warm, comfortable feeling. Prints will be decorating walls for as long as I’m alive. Gutenberg’s invention brought the Bible and a host of other materials to the hands of people who didn’t have access to them before. He created a world of readers, expanding the simple practice of reading to the great unwashed. eBooks have the potential of bringing novels and book-length manuscripts forward, not only reaching people who already read them, but even introducing them to folks who never would have thought to pick up a manuscript on their own before.

So for writers and serious readers, there’s nothing to fear from eBooks. Bookstores will still exist. Some will flourish, and some will close. But books and novel manuscripts will persist. Writers like Daren Dean will be able to share their stories with friends on the other side of the country, and hopefully even reach a wider audience. Far Beyond the Pale is a compelling novel with an engaging voice. It’s a little raw, but it’s better than a lot of the pap that I’ve bought from traditional publishers in the past year. It also has a feeling of personal authenticity that other novels I’ve read recently. Maybe it’s because I know Daren, or maybe it’s because the digital age is allowing novelists to engage readers without the filter of big corporate publishers.

Daren is an amazing writer who surrounds his readers with voice-driven prose and rich, tactile imagery that comes through just as well on screen as it does on paper. And even traditional publishers and agents have been telling him for years that he’s an amazing writer, though, “the market is just too tough right now.” But today he’s now able to reach the audience he deserves.

Gutenberg would be pleased.