4. To start again, I needed audience, collaborators and a muse.

I realized just how a project writing Hiram Falls was going to be so I had to line up help, purpose and a routine.

(Part 4 of a monthly series about writing my first novel, Hiram Falls. To see the other parts, go here.)

Writing the story Willie for stage presentation — and the reaction it received — got me going again. The story gave me a new character and backstories, and helped me establish place — the little town of Hiram Falls. I found it easy to bring in characters from the first two performed stories to connect with these new neighbors.

The failed first draft had led me to develop a plan (holy mackerel, Geoff, an actual plan?) and a timeline.

I was now ready to embark again on writing the novel now entitled Hiram Falls. Or was I?

Actually, no. I wasn’t.

Self-doubt was in overdrive. It’s always been there, a gnawing in my belly, an insecurity about my writing that sometimes is so severe I wonder if I have any talent at all. Perhaps I see my flaws too clearly; perhaps I’m just an overly critical beast. Whatever. But my first failed attempt at the novel just added oxygen to the fire of doubt. I needed to put a few things in place to help me combat it.

Audience

The first issue was audience. For a writer, audience is everything; it gives us purpose and with purpose it gives us motivation.

But … Who’s going to read this? And how am I going to get it to them? And, honestly, what publisher is going to buy a first novel about rural life written by a balding white guy in Vermont in his late 60s? (er, now, 73.)

I decided I should publish it myself. I spoke with several author friends. One had a wildly popular YA book but couldn’t sell his third book and said it was an example of how the book publishing world has changed — consolidation has diminished opportunities and has brought a penchant for ‘blockbusters.’ His choice was to go with a ‘hybrid’ where you pay a fee for the publisher to edit, create the cover, arrange for printing (you pay for the actual printing), distribute and market (limited).

Another friend publishes entirely on her own. She’s had great success in part because she writes in three popular genres: romance, mystery and, combining the two, ‘cozy mysteries.’ My book wouldn’t exactly fit.

Nonetheless, DIY made sense to me — on as many platforms as possible: a Web serial, audiobook, podcast, e-book and paperback. But how? Where? Who could I get to help?

Writers love to procrastinate. So, armed with a small grant from the Vermont Arts Council, I tested possible Web platforms. The finalists: Medium.com (can’t handle audio; bots galore); ghost.org (excellent, but again audio a problem and a lot of site upkeep); Substack.com, perfect.

Vermont being a small state, I reached out for help. A stage director agreed to cast and direct the audiobook in exchange for my help her with the play she was writing. A public media access nonprofit agreed to give me a studio and engineering of the audio for free, but only if I agreed to let them run it as a serial on their statewide network of radio stations. If I didn’t, they’d charge me. Gee, that’s a toughie. And a printer I’ve worked with for years said he’d print the book on demand (250 copies at a time) at a deep discount since I was giving a share of any proceeds to three non-profits.

So there it was. I would have an audience. I had purpose. And I was running out of ways to put off writing the dang thing. (An aside: I’ve put the self-publish on hold; I have an agent who has begun to try to sell it. More on that later.)

Collaboration

All my working life I’ve collaborated with others. No one puts out a newspaper alone. No one starts and runs a nonprofit alone. I am used to working with others. Who could I collaborate with? Who would be crazy enough to get involved in this project?

I reached out to a five writerly people I knew who couldn’t be more different in age, background, geography, culture. Would you be willing to help me write a novel?

To my amazement, and eternal appreciation, they all said yes.

One had mentored me while I ran Young Writers Project (YWP), constantly pushing me to try new ideas and to always strive for excellence. Another was a teacher who’d helped me start YWP and who constantly railed about my bad comma habits. Another was a young poet I first met in sixth grade who had gone on to get a masters in poetry who helped with flow and voice. The fourth was a member of one of my writing groups — a fabulous writer who has few filters and would tell me straight out what she thought. And finally a gentle writer from Michigan who I learned later has a phD in art therapy in working with people with damaged brains, which came in handy as two of the characters I was to create have damaged brains.

How lucky am I?

Focus

But there was one final rub: How do you pick up where you left off the day before? That is, how can you maintain consistency both in habit and in thought over a 100,000 word piece that, as it turned out, took years to create?

The first part of it was routine. Since writing at the end of the day hadn’t worked out, I decided to flip my day: I’d get up around 4 a.m., make coffee and sit down to write by 4:30. Give or take. Every day.

Returning to the same headspace as the day before was trickier and yet so necessary to maintain a consistent tone and rhythm to the writing. Another author friend told me he does it by starting each writing session by reading what he wrote the day before. But for me, that wasn’t enough.

So I began thinking about music. My daughter-in-law told me about binaural beats — recordings made with separate microphones each recording tones and melodies that are slightly different frequencies. The theory is that your brain will be triggered to higher energy and focus — or to calm down and get to sleep — depending on the frequency of the sounds and the frequency difference between the two.

I tried it. It worked splendidly. Put me right to sleep.

So I started listening to music, instrumentals only. I listened to classical, smooth jazz, new age (shouldn’t it be old age by now?), some cloying ‘mellow’ music that made me feel like I was in a dentist’s waiting room.

Then, by chance, I heard a track from a cellist that was part of a seasonal playlist created by Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast. The piece was written and played by cellist Julia Kent, and it rocked my writing soul. So I made a playlist of her entire repertoire on Spotify:

I began my routine: get up, coffee, put on headphones, click the playlist, write.

I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote some more until my first milestone — a new 25,000-word draft that I was not too too embarrassed to send off to my Gang of Five.

And so it went. After a year of it, I decided to write Julia to tell her what I was up to. (I did feel slightly stalkerish, but what the heck.) Here’s what I said:

“I have been using your music as my muse. I am writing a long, complex novel and have been looping your albums on my headphones as I write. It has helped me with my concentration, with my emotional focus. It moves me along… It has been exactly what I needed. It sets me on a contemplative, steady, emotional plane. I am just finishing up my first draft and have to get it to the editors by Friday…”

The next day she wrote back:

Dear Geoffrey,

Thanks so much for your lovely message! I’m always happy to accompany the creative work of others; it’s such a beautiful communion. For me, music is communication, and I do feel sometimes that it’s like throwing a bottle into the sea, so it’s wonderful to get something back and hear that it connected somehow….

We writers can identify with that. One of the thrills of writing for live performances has been getting visceral response from people who have heard it. Musicians understand it, except with their recordings. And I agreed with her that music and writing are closely aligned: we strive for musicality in our words; we alter rhythm to fit moods or characters; we want dialog to “sing” as it were and to reflect the pattern of speech of the character.

We have kept in loose touch. At one point, I wrote to tell her I was well aware that Spotify pays musicians squadoosh and would she like me to make a donation to the Julia Kent Living Fund? She declined, said she was doing fine thank you, and suggested I donate what I would have given her to one of the nonprofits I was supporting. I did. In her name.

For nearly five years now, I have been listening to Julia Kent — but only when I wrote. As soon as I put the music on, I slid right into Hiram Falls, into the emotion of Hiram Falls. I could immediately feel my mind shift back into where it had been the day before — my mood, what I was thinking, intending. If nothing else, the rhythm and tone of the book was consistent in part because of Julia Kent’s music.

I highly recommend her for listening while writing. I also recommend her for simple listening. She’s a remarkable talent. And if there is ever a musical score for Hiram Falls, it will definitely be the music of Julia Kent.

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NEXT MONTH: The first critiques, the power of having a support team and the art of revision.