Eating the watermelon again

To tackle the Big Thing, remember the Big Things you've already done

Photo by Mockup Graphics on Unsplash

The Mississippi comedian Jerry Clower used to tell a joke about how one day, he and his friend Marcel Ledbetter were sitting outside the general store in their little town when a man from the city pulled up in a big black car.

The city slicker got out, looked the boys up and down, and said “Hey, country boys! I got a 60-pound watermelon in the trunk of my car, and I’ll bet either one of you five dollars that you can’t eat it.”

Marcel said, “I believe I can eat that watermelon. But I need to run to the house for a minute first.”

So he went down the road and came back not long after. And when he got back, he proceeded to eat every bit of that watermelon. Scraped the rind and drank the juice and held out his hand for the money.

The city fellow said, “Well, I guess I owe it to you. But I have to ask: Why’d you need to go home first?”

Marcel said, “My daddy had a watermelon that big under his bed. And I figured, if I could eat that one, I could eat this one.”*

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I’ve had to remind myself of that story a bunch of times as I cut into this big old watermelon that is my new book. (In case you’re new to the newsletter, I’m writing about the Westminster Dog Show, and the bond between dogs and their people.)

I’ve done a load of research, read a stack of books, talked to a ton of people, and have put words on the page. But some days, actually getting to the end—finishing the book—feels overwhelming.

That’s when I have to take a deep breath and remember that I’ve done this before.

Sometimes it helps to actually take the thing down from the bookshelf and hold it in my hands—yep, that’s mine, all 245 pages of it.

I had the same overwhelmed feeling a thousand times when I was writing THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. It’s normal when you tackle any big project, creative or otherwise.

The only difference is, when I was working on ELEPHANT, I hadn’t done a book before. So I had to find other things to lean on.

I hadn’t written a 75,000-word book. But I had done lots of 5,000-word magazine and newspaper stories. There’s a story I remember hearing about Alex Haley, the author of ROOTS. It was his first novel and he didn’t know if he could do it. A fellow author asked him if he’d ever written a short story. “Sure,” Haley said. “OK,” the other author said. “Write a short story, and that’s Chapter 1.”

It doesn’t work exactly like that—at least not for me. I had to build a structure for the book first. But once I started to figure that out, I knew I could write a few thousand words. That became the prologue. And the next few thousand became Chapter 1. And so on.

This idea works at smaller scales, too. If you haven’t written anything 50 pages long, maybe you’ve written something five pages long. So try five pages and see how that feels. Then add another five. The work accumulates.

This is, to me, the only way to get your head around doing a project as big as a book. If I sit down in the morning and think “I’m working on The Book today,” my brain goes all swirly. It’s a lot easier to think about working on a single chapter, or a single section, or even a single paragraph. Whatever piece is small enough to capture in your mind. In other words, bird by bird.

None of this is original advice. I’ve known it for as long as I’ve written for a living. But the stress of a big project can make you forget your own name, much less all the things you learned about starting small and setting expectations. That watermelon can look enormous.

But if you take it one bite at a time, it’s delicious. And it feels so damn good when you’re finished.

*Why in the hell is a guy from the city riding around out in the country with a giant watermelon in his trunk, looking for someone to take his bet? I suspect Jerry Clower would say, “It’s a joke, son. Don’t overthink it.”