The Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tad Mosel (All the Way Home) died earlier this week at the age of 86. As a model for all of us, he suffered a stroke three years ago but nonetheless wrote every day until not long before his death. A story in theBoston Globereports that, as he was dying, he complained to his doctor that it was taking too long. “Dying is harder than writing a play,” his doctor reportedly told him. “Not necessarily,” Mosel replied.
Maybe because I’m male I find myself returning to sports analogies in this blog. . .but here is yet another one — and another one centered on the Olympics, which are occuring in Beijing as I write this.
With my coffee this morning, I was reading about an American gymnast, Jonathan Horton, who took the silver medal on the high bar. In her accountfor the Washington Post, Liz Clarke reports that “Horton. . .drew gasps and cheers from rivals. . .for his. . .routine.”
What struck me in her article is that she goes on to say that, before he performed, Horton was “fully aware that he wasn’t a medal contender.” If he performed the routine he intended flawlessly, he might finish fourth — out of the medals. His routine lacked the sort of difficulty that would earn him enough points to finish among the top three.
Not satisfied, Horton made the daring, last second decision to change his routine, adding skills that could gain him another crucial half a point — but he had never performed these skills in competition.
Clarke writes, “The gamble was huge. He would either fail miserably or almost certainly win a medal. But what better time to wing big, Horton figured, than an individual competition.”
As I started to revise the novel draft I finished a couple of weeks ago, an idea occurred to me about how I might make the book more complex, how it might gain a dimension that would give it more weight. Am I up to it, I wondered. Am I enough of a writer to pull it off, to succeed?
The answer is: I don’t know. But, like Horton, I have to try, have to add the degree of difficulty if the book is going to be more than just a mildly interesting story.
We are only the writer we are, just as Horton is only the gymnast he is. If he waited until he was certain he would be able to achieve his routine, he would not have a silver medal around his neck today. If I wait until I am certain I am enough of a writer to accomplish what I want to accomplish, the book will be little more than a very thick doorstop.
