Keep Going

There is a moment every writer knows. The manuscript has been going for months, or years. What it costs to keep working is no longer clear. What it is worth is no longer clear. The beginning is too far back to remember with any confidence. The end is too far ahead to see. The middle, where you are now, is enormous and uncertain and not yet what it is going to be.

At some point during those years, J.R.R. Tolkien was in the middle.

He had been working on a sequel to The Hobbit since 1937. The book had grown into something he had not planned and could not entirely see. It was taking years. He had a job. He had a family. He had other obligations pressing against the writing. The manuscript was enormous and uncertain and not yet what it was going to be.

What kept him going was not discipline. It was not craft. It was a man named C.S. Lewis, who showed up every Thursday evening at a pub in Oxford called the Eagle and Child.

The group they were part of called itself the Inklings. They met to read their work aloud. Lewis listened to Tolkien’s chapters as they came, one by one, through the years. When Tolkien read, Lewis paid attention. When Lewis paid attention, Tolkien understood the work was real.

In 1953, just before The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher: “I am sure if I had not had C.S. Lewis to read it to, I should have given up the whole thing long ago.”

He dedicated the book “To the Inklings.” Lewis had not written a word of it. He had listened. He had shown up. He had allowed Tolkien to feel, one Thursday at a time, what becomes possible when someone takes your work seriously enough to pay attention to it.

 

This month, a centennial anthology called Welcome to the Mountain was published by Four Way Books — one hundred years of the best lectures and readings from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ripton, Vermont. On August 12, the 100th session of the conference will begin.

Bread Loaf was founded in 1926. The New Yorker has called it the oldest and most prestigious writers’ conference in the country. Ten days every August in the Green Mountains. Writers come from across the country to do workshops, attend readings, hear lectures — and to be around other people who understand what writing costs and what it might be worth.

Robert Frost lived a few miles from the campus. He attended twenty-nine sessions.

Not to be taught. Not to teach. He came because the mountain was where the writers were. He knew what Tolkien knew: the work can be done alone. What cannot be done alone is believing in the work through the years it is uncertain.

Over a hundred years, the mountain has drawn Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, John Irving, and thousands more. Many arrived deep in something unfinished. Many left after hearing from another writer the sentence every manuscript needs at least once: “This is worth finishing.” Keep going.

You may be in the middle of something right now.

Not the beginning, where the idea is alive, and the energy is high. Not the end, where the shape is clear, and the finish line is visible. The middle. Where the manuscript is enormous and uncertain, and not yet what it is going to be. Where the cost of continuing is no longer self-evident.

The Power of Authors teaches: writing from genuine purpose is not the same as writing in isolation. Purpose is not a private conviction. Purpose is tested against a reader — the specific person the writing is for. And before the reader the writing is meant to reach, every author needs at least one other reader: someone who will take the work seriously enough to tell them the truth.

Lewis did not tell Tolkien the chapters were good when they were not. He listened honestly. He took the work seriously on its own terms. He showed up on Thursday evenings for years, through all the chapters of an enormous unfinished book, until the book was done.

Frost went back to the mountain twenty-nine times. Not for the lectures. For the writers.

Who is reading your manuscript right now? Not reading to be polite. Reading to tell you the truth. Reading to say, when the work earns it: keep going.

If no one is, find them. Your work may need it more than it needs anything else you could give it.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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