Read The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life (Kindle Single) for Free Online

by the Work Center. It was my intention for at least this seven-month chunk of my life to do my best work and see how good it was. I had an impetus now: desperation. The only thing waiting for me back at home was my job at Friday’s. If I wanted a better life for myself, I was going to have to write it.
    When I arrived at the Work Center, I lugged my computer—a mid-eighties behemoth whose parts were packed into many boxes—up the narrow staircase to my tiny apartment. I made my single bed, hung up my towels, and went to the grocery store. The last of the summer tourists were decamping, and I caught a glimpse of what a ghost town Provincetown would be in the winter. The next day I got up, made a cup of tea, and sat down at my desk. Even though I had spent the past year living with the novel in my head, I had not committed one word to paper. That was the moment I remembered that I had never written a novel and had no idea what I was doing.
    Now that I was sitting still in front of a blank screen, I was appalled by all the things I hadn’t considered. Sure, I had some characters, a setting, a sketchy plot, but until that minute I had never considered the actual narrative structure. Who was telling this story? I wanted to write the story in an omniscient third, a big Russian-style narrative in which the point of view moved seamlessly between characters because these were people who were not forthcoming with each other and a single first-person narrative couldn’t possibly tell the whole story. But I didn’t know how to construct an omniscient voice. (I would take a running jump at it in the next two novels I wrote as well, and each time I retreated. It wasn’t until my fourth novel, Bel Canto , that I finally figured out how to do it.)
    If I hadn’t put together a narrative structure, what in the hell had I been doing all that time? I panicked. From the moment I arrived in Provincetown, I felt the sand slipping through the hourglass. Seven months left no time to dither. I decided to give each of my three main characters a first-person point of view. The narratives would not go back and forth; everyone would have one shot to tell his or her story, and that was it. Like many decisions, this one was both arbitrary and born of necessity. Would it work? I doubted it, but I couldn’t identify any other options. From my window I saw the occasional writer or painter milling around in the parking lot. They would stop and talk to one another, head off into town. I was upstairs having the revelation that the gorgeous, all-encompassing novel that had been with me for the past year was junk. I had to come up with another idea, fast. I had to hit the delete key and get rid of every trace of the awful work I’d done so far. 
    I did wind up writing the book I came to write, and a great deal of the credit for that goes to my friend Diane Goodman, who was living in Pennsylvania at the time. Long-distance phone calls were ridiculously expensive in those days, and I was ridiculously broke; still, talking to Diane proved a wise investment. She told me that I was not allowed to throw out anything I’d written. “Calm down,” she said again and again. “Stick it out.” It was lifesaving counsel. Without it, I could have spent the next seven months writing the first chapters of eighteen different novels, all of which I would have ultimately hated as much as I hated this one. I was used to writing short stories. I was programmed for bright, impassioned binges of work that lasted a day or two or three, and I knew nothing about the long haul. Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. If I thought too much about how far I’d come or the distance I still had to cover, I’d sink. As it turns out, I have had this same crisis in every novel I have written since: I am sure my idea is horrible and that a new idea is my only hope. But what I’ve realized over