The Thousand Foot Climb

I’m rather proud of this article I posted on the groupblog genrebender, so I’m cross-posting it here.

What’s the hardest thing about writing? For me, it’s what I call the “Thousand Foot Climb.” It’s a parallel that can be applied to many things in life, including life itself. In its simplicity, it might sometimes be taken for granted, but it’s sometimes the biggest obstacle in accomplishing any goal that you might ever want to achieve. Including, of course, writing a book.

Coming in a close second in my list of writing difficulties is the finishing of a book, when you know how you want it to end but you just have to make everything work to get there. Sometimes it takes multiple rewrites just to get everything in tune so the ending will work at all. Even worse is when I’ve got the whole damn thing written but can’t figure out how the ending should play at all. I have books that are years-old and sitting, waiting for me to get back to them because I’ve never figured out how to end them. It’s hard sometimes to get the ending right. For me it is, anyway.

But while getting that perfect ending to work can be a chore, the Thousand Foot Climb is much more ferocious animal altogether. An entirely different breed of animal. 

During the years 1994-1996, I worked as what’s come to be known as a Tower Dog. And, for many reasons, I use that experience a lot to help me describe what writing is like. Because while climbing towers is a mostly physical occupation and writing is pretty much the exact opposite, there are parallels between the two which can go a long way to illustrate the difficulties as well as the pleasurable intricacies of the craft of writing and, for that matter, in life itself. For instance:

To work a tower you (literally) must climb first. 
Granted, I’ve never had a job, hobby or skill that this little nugget of wisdom wasn’t handed to me as an absolute necessity for gaining expertise, but it’s never been so perfectly suited to any activity than it is to tower climbing. In towers you must climb one rung at a time, and no matter how fast you go you must have touched each and every step along the way. There are no alternatives. There may be obstructions which you must climb around, but those only add to the parallel. 

Once you reach an obstruction, work your way around it.
Take care, be mindful of your handholds and your foot placement, and keep climbing. It may be a torque arm or a microwave dish, the obstruction can come in many varieties, just work your way past it and keep on climbing. 

Keep your eyes on the top.
Most people don’t want to look down anyway. Personally, it never bothered me. I always enjoyed looking around and down, to see what new perspective I’ve achieved. But for many people, being above about twenty feet means never look down. Either way it works, because, symbolically, the pinnacle is always your goal. In towers, as in everything else in life, you’re always shooting for the top. So even if you’re a person who doesn’t dread the drop, your goal is still above you, and so you must keep climbing. 

Once you reach the top, you’ve still got work to do.
In fact, your job is only just beginning. Now you’ve got to strap on, break out your tools and knuckle down to business. If there’s any one place to really impress someone, it’s with your work topside. Nobody really cares what you accomplish during your climb, but everyone’s eyes will be on you when you make the top and get busy. They’ll have binoculars, wanting to see how you handle your tools, how you manage the heights, how you compose yourself for the environment…they want to see how you shine when  you’ve got everything to lose and so very little to gain. (There’s no greater disparity between risk and reward than in working towers. Your risk is everything, life included, for the sake of a tiny stipend. In writing, of course, that margin between risk and reward is nonexistent but, depending on your approach, the parallel can still be drawn.) 

I could draw another dozen corny parallels, but that would just delay getting to the most important one of all. It was one of the biggest reasons I quit climbing towers for a living, and it’s one of the biggest writing obstacles there is: The Thousand Foot Climb. 

The hardest part of writing a book is, for many (including myself), getting started. Don’t mistake that with ‘the beginning,’ because getting started is much more difficult than ‘the beginning’ could ever be. There’s a point in the foundation of an idea that, for me, is near ecstasy. When I begin working the idea, plotting out the characters, planning the details…the sensation is exciting, enthralling…wonderful. It always begins as a simple spark of an idea, of course, but in the following days it unfolds, layer upon layer, increasing in complexity until there comes a time when I absolutely must get to writing or it will all be lost. Sometimes I take notes, just to forestall the inevitable moment, when I must first face that first thousand feet. 

It’s like this: in climbing towers, you are assigned a job. You take your assignment, which may be on a tower five hundred miles from where you are, and you begin to work it in your mind. You visualize the tower–is it over five hundred feet? Is it over a thousand? Does it have an elevator? Is the climbing apparatus obstructed? Is it painted or galvanized? Is it…ulp…rickedy? And then there are the details of the job itself: was it a lightning strike; is the tower smoked? Are there blown antennas, or are we just changing lightbulbs? You leave the shop with a destination, a contact, a brief set of instructions and little else. When you arrive at the site, you make your decisions: where will you rig? What tools will you need? How many people will you need on the tower? Do you have everything on hand that you require? Is the weather going to turn? Is it too windy to climb at all? (Sometimes you can be standing on the ground at the base of a tower in a light breeze, and if you tune your ear to the top you can hear a moaning wail of wind scorching through the guy wires. Sometimes you can have sixty MPH winds up top and nothing at the bottom. It’s best to know before you begin climbing if you’ll be able to make it to the top or not.)

But with all your preparations and your busy mind, there still remains the moment when you will walk to the base of the tower and look up and see, in all its immensity, twelve hundred feet of steel stretching straight up into the sky. Every day, you wake up knowing that–just to get started working–you’ve got to first climb to the top. Daunting? Yes. There’s nothing that can prepare you for the hours you spend, mindlessly step-step-stepping, rung by rung, stopping every sixty to eighty feet for a rest, until your each the top. Sometimes it’s only two hundred feet. Sometimes it’s two thousand. It averages a grand, and it’s daunting no matter how high it is, because in order to accomplish anything at all, you first must make the climb. 

And that’s what it’s like when a spark of an idea evolves into a complex organism, too complex to support itself within the confines of your mind, and you must begin to write. You look at the blank page, the empty .doc document without even a filename to differentiate itself, and you realize at that moment that there’s a thousand feet of steel between you and the point where you can even begin working. And the only way to get to that pinnacle–that point where you can begin–is to take a single step. One, followed by another, followed by another, until you’ve made it past every obstacle in your path and can sit back and breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that you’ve finally made it to the top. At that point it gets fun; you can start working, taking out what’s unneccesary, leaving what you need, molding what’s left to suit you, and finally drawing the whole thing to a close. Then you climb back down to the ground and write…

The End.