Am about halfway through writing the latest book—and it’s friggin’ h-a-r-d. What I’m struggling with right now are the details. Not attaining them, but deciding what’s important and what’s not. You spend so much time reporting a person, everything takes on an air of importance. The contract holdout. The game against St. Louis. The death of an uncle. The TV commercial. The time he drank a beer. So on and so on. You write it all, because—from this vantage point—it’s all so big. You live and breath and dream about the subject, and you want to be incredibly thorough.
But, here’s the catch: Incredibly thorough is dull. A lot of life isn’t interesting, even if it seems so to the writer. So you write, then go back and slice and dice half your material. It hurts. But it is what it is.
Babbling.
