Do any of you know the delightful children’s rhyming book The Piggy In the Puddle? For the last couple of days, as I sat at desk or table, staring at my computer screen and messing around with the pieces of what I hope will eventually be an essay on Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, lines from it kept running through my head:

See the piggy in the middle

Of the muddy little puddle.

See her dawdle, see her diddle,

In the muddy, muddy middle.

If you don’t know the book, the gist of it is that the piggy (silly piggy!) is having great fun in the mud while her distraught family tries to persuade her to come out and clean herself up with “lots of soap.” But the piggy is resolute (“NOPE!”) and so in the end they jump in with her, right into “the very merry middle.” Hooray!

In my case, I wasn’t feeling particularly merry — just a bit muddled and very much in the middle, and that was (is) stressing me out. Even though I understand the concept of the “shitty first draft,” I still find the phase of writing in between the taking-notes-and-doing-pre-writing stage and the producing-a-reasonably-decent-draft stage psychologically taxing. At that point I usually have all kinds of material to work with, and often lots of ideas about what to say about it — in this case, in fact, I have too many ideas about what I’d like to include, considering that I’ve only got 1500 words to talk about 3000 pages — but they are all in a kind of virtual heap and I can’t yet see what order to put them in, or how to choose among them, or how to say properly (clearly, eloquently) what in the rough material can be loose or incoherent or inarticulate. At first it all just has to be down somewhere in some form, but eventually it has to be honed and shaped. In between, there’s just so much uncertainty!

I’m learning to trust my own process more: I know from experience that this muddy middle is a phase of its own, one that — because lately I’ve been working on fairly short pieces — doesn’t even really last very long. It’s taking longer this time partly because the task is quite open-ended: a review has a pretty formulaic overall shape, but an essay has to find its own intrinsic purpose and logic. I’m also paradoxically inhibited by caring much more about this piece than about almost any of the other things I’ve written recently: precisely because I cherish and admire Dunnett’s series so much, I really (really) want to do it, and my feelings about it, justice. The stakes feel absurdly high, even though I know this essay only really (really) matters to me, not to anyone else. (I mean, I’m sure the editor who agreed to it will be happy if it’s good, but otherwise I don’t expect he cares much about it.)

Eventually, though, I know I will get out of the mess. Today I actually started to think I had cleaned up some parts of my shitty first draft: I did a bit of new writing, but more important, I cut and compressed what I’d done already so that I have room to keep going with the other topics I want to get to. I can almost see now, too, how the parts will fit and flow together–almost! I didn’t make enough progress to make me “very, very merry,” but today’s work did help me believe in the process again and feel more confident that the next phase will come. I know there are some writers who claim there’s nothing hard about it at all (OK, I know only one such writer, and if I weren’t so fond of him, I’d really hate him for this!). But for mere mortals like me, while writing is certainly sometimes exhilarating and, somewhat more often, is interesting and satisfying, there are times when it is both difficult and profoundly discouraging. I think I might make the piggy in the puddle a kind of mascot for those times. Who could stay scared and cranky in such cheerful company? And really, what’s so bad about the muddy middle?