Backpacker Fiction

The Fiction Element

Due to the impending due-date of my thesis, I've had to stop posting mediocre travel anecdotes to focus on wrapping up this novel. Being so close to the end summons whole new clans of self-doubt, boredom and regret. Time for a good-ole "writing a book as a journey" metaphor.

Phase 1: Piss and Vinegar. Faced with the blank page, you've got your idea revving 1000/mph just dying to come out. It's going to be the perfect book with the perfect beginning to capture publishers' attention. You stalk the book tables at Chapters and start planning a brilliantly designed book-cover. You guffaw politely at parties and give your pseudo-intellectual reasons for hating Oprah's book club: "I mean, it's great that people are reading again, but...."

Phase 2: You're on your way so it's time to lay back and get a little distance under your belt. You're eager to start accumulating pages so you print off your work at the end of the day and keep it in a nicely organized pile or in a fancy holder labeled "manuscript". It's self-delusion at this point, but the deluded can still put one foot in front of the other, so to speak. The book world needs something a little off-beat, a new mode of expression to capture all our modern-day neurosis and digitalized forms of communication.

Phase 3: The pages are piling up. The months have flown by. You've taken your characters to the ends of the earth and watched them grow and struggle as humans. You've happy with where you've been, but are now starting to look towards the distant horizon to catch a glimpse of where they might possibly end up. You've plotted the co-ordinates correctly, you're sure. But why can't you locate the hostel where you're supposed to spend the night? Flickers of doubt. Uh oh.

Phase 4: You make a big mistake by flipping back to the front of the manuscript. It was originally just to fact-check a minor character detail (did he say he had one cow or two?) but you end up reading a dozen pages and render yourself horrified at how confusing your prose reads, how stilted the dialogue. You think, "Am I even on the same continent?" Your Odyssean journey might actually have been an insidious waste of time. Thoughts of handing a virtuoso first-draft to an ecstatic publisher vanish. You'll be lucky if your grandma even reads it. A massive storm brews on the horizon. It might just be time to cut your losses and run for cover: "No, you must be mistaken. I never said I was writing a book...I was thinking about it though. No, no. There's really no book. No book at all...."

Phase 5: No, you decide, it's too late to turn back. Even if your feet are blistered, your clothes smelling like a hamper of hockey equipment, your tongue dried and you've developed profound irritation with the characters you've spent so long with, you're so close to wrapping things up, you have to redeem the hundreds of hours spent by at least completing the task. You may not have broken first through the ribbon at the finish line, but at least you crawled over it twelve hours later of your own accord.

Repeat phases 4 and 5 endlessly during the revision process. Insert a phase 4.5 for extreme moments of panic, such as meeting a thesis deadline or coming across a brutal contradiction in the plot. Phase 4.7 happens when you have to call a friend to talk you down from your balcony railing. Keep a roster of phone numbers nearby in case the first ones don't answer.

There might be ten phases, there might be twenty. But so far I'm crawling around phases 4 and 5 like a hornet I saw once in Russia who was high on kerosene fumes and staggered across my table for two hours. Later that week, I saw an ant carrying the hornet's body in a straight line back to its queen.

Posted by Matthew R. Loney at 7:20 AM