Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

Keeping a newly completed manuscript in a drawer to rest for a while before editing it once you regain objectivity is not trivial advice. It’s true that after so much confinement and the solitude that writing entails, one wants to get up from the desk and celebrate the good news. However, with today’s immediacy, where one can send an original manuscript with a simple click, the rest in the drawer becomes more mandatory than ever.

Over the years and without even trying, these dilemmas of the art of writing no longer cause me anxiety as before. Maybe it has to do with hormones, which have changed my priorities and how the brain works, in the way of any woman who suddenly accesses the superpowers of motherhood for the first time.

I have learned that good manuscripts are like fine wines, which become great with time of rest, because they are detached from fashions and trends, from the moronic "it is no longer in style" with which an editor discard them.

I am at the zenith of the thrilling life of a fiction writer; when one is still young to wait for benefits from the future that looms on the horizon and not so old to condemn oneself to the sad idea that any past time was better. Every day counts, and I’m determined to squeeze every moment out of them, just like lemons.

I was watching a documentary about the portentous artists of the Renaissance, which made me blush, cringing for their absolute dedication and inordinate courage. It just so happened that it began with Filippo Brunelleschi, the Italian genius who devised the vanishing point in the laborious construction of the dome of the cathedral of Florence, with the patronage of the Medici’s fabulous saga.

Writing my second novel, using the blueprint of a Flemish triptych, Brunelleschi was a big help. Each narrative voice gave way to the next with a whiplash, instead of the required cliffhanger. As if I'm saying to the reader, with a swaggering attitude, “Stop reading me if I don’t have your full attention.”

The first voice was the most difficult, because the first relay in turn was to accept a defeat, with so much to tell. But knowing how to say goodbye is an art like no other, and to do it in the grand manner, to know the depth of desire is paramount.

Brunelleschi was my inspiration because I needed a vanishing point in the horizon of time, perspective—or what in Latin is for seeing through. I was thirty years old then, and in a biographical foreshortening about my eighteenth, I wrote what I would never have written then. That’s why this literary genre is known as auto-fiction, because every seven years, your thinking shifts at a ninety-degree angle, creating an entirely new perspective.

Still, I wasn't as assertive as any author should be. I wanted to publish so badly, given that I was in dire straits after quitting my day job and my savings would run out in a year, so I relied on a mentor who certainly was a generous reader but also my shrewd bookseller. After eagerly reading my original, he claimed that if I changed the Brunelleschi-style whiplash for a naughty bit, in less than a year Gold Plated would be in his bookstore’s display window.

It took me a while to see that situation as a simple role-play. I’m amazed that I couldn’t see it at the time. A middle-aged bookseller wanted to play the young and ambitious writer he would never be, given his lack of dedication or talent. Otherwise, he would be too occupied with writing his own manuscript instead of dramatically altering mine. I began to write in order to please him and tossed my whiplash for his cheap-soft-porno scene.

Lucky me, I’ve always kept the originals safe, so no harm done. But the bookseller’s role-play did not end there once he gained traction. He asked me as well to fire my lovely agent, who over the years made a brilliant career, bringing many authors out of anonymity. And currently, after she decided to change sides, she’s a fiction editor at the largest publishing house of Barcelona.

In all honesty, I consider such a dislocating experience as a privilege, instead of an epic failure. It’s true that I felt used and discarded like a broken toy. But I was born to be a writer. Quitting was never an option for me, not even in the darkest days. I learned a lot; in hindsight, it took me to cross the threshold on a fast-paced adventure in which I realized that, due to readings that had shaped me along the years and the many American authors I admired, I didn’t belong to the literary tradition that initially corresponded to me by my mother tongue, the Spanish Castilian. Consequently, I transitioned into the ranks of transnational authors in an organic way.

Thinking outside the box, I realized that after the Digital Revolution there’s no longer any reason why I should limit myself to printed books. Please, don’t get me wrong, I always love them. But print runs are dwindling annually, readers’ attention spans are being shortened by smartphones’ bells and whistles, and bookstores are closing due to exorbitant commercial rents. It’s a brave new world.

So, I bought myself a professional home studio with priceless analog hardware and equipment, where I can craftily record all my books, podcasts, and even commercials to support myself. It’s enough to know how to take care of the pipes, work out daily, eat like a pauper and healthier, and quit smoking and drinking—the pastimes of ancient literary lions who only managed to fry their brains and ruin their frail health at ages that nowadays would seem premature.

Back to Brunelleschi and his vanishing point, as I edit and translate my coming-of-age novel, Gold Plated, I experience a delightful sense of three-dimensional vertigo. From the emancipated eighteen-year-old lad I was attempting to portray in my thirties, I still maintain the same unwavering determination in my late 50s. And I have finally shed each and every one of his insecurities and self-doubt that crippled my good judgment and literary talent. Seeing is believing.