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| Photo by Yvo Waldmeir |
A newspaper column I was reading recently
said that parenthood is all about learning to manage your terror, but I think
that’s also true of book writing. The terror, specifically, is the little voice
which whispers that you’ll never finish it, and that it’s unfinishable. I
imagine this is a common gremlin…
In the case of Elusive Church, at these very early stages this is, at present
(happily), still a largely irrational worry. The writing is on schedule, the
schedule itself seems reasonably realistic, and there are a full 15 months to
go before the deadline, i.e. conclusion of the British Academy Danzig (Chapter 2)
for weeks and weeks, writing, following up new leads, rereading key documents
etc. There is a now a draft of Chapter 2, but it can’t take on a definitive or
final form until most of the other chapters are written, and the argument hammered
firmly into shape. It’s therefore done (it physically exists!) but also not
done.
To boost my morale, therefore, I’ve decided
not to press on to Chapter 3, which promises to be just as thorny and
overloaded with sources. Instead, I’ll skip ahead to tackle Chapter 5, which at this point I innocently think will
be relatively straightforward and blessedly short. These are the little tricks
I at least have to play on myself – if I can produce a set of coherent prose entitled
‘Chapter 5’ by the end of the month, and have it sitting neatly printed and
paperclipped on my desk, it will make it much easier to manage my book terror… at
least, say, for this summer.
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