No More Lousy Poetry

Nicola Keegan wrote one horrid poem after another in her writing workshop. But she realized one thing: Water played a role in all of them. Soon after, the main character for her debut novel was born.

Writing a novel is like standing on the bottom of a steep mountain that shoots up to God knows where, with a bunch of matchsticks in your pocket, determined to build something interesting out of them as you prepare to climb cursing and sweating because you’re out of shape, not used to mountains, wearing the wrong shoes, completely unprepared. But I think one of the loveliest things in life is when a human being tries to navigate within the realm of the impossible, so I just figured if I grit my teeth and kept writing day after day as the months grew into years, then maybe I’d be able to make something that looked like the something I felt strongly in my mind.

Click Here to Read an Excerpt from Swimming

Patience and discipline and thoughtfulness wrestled with doubt and fatigue and fear. Most of the people around me were horrified; they thought that writers were born with a fully formed matchstick chateau complete with action figurines and a moat and that I was just going to get myself caught in a messy mudslide and be sad and dirty until the day that I died. They said: “Statistics prove that publishing a first novel is as likely as riding a whale over the moon and back again wearing a magic rainbow hat and an electric jumpsuit.”

Swimming. By Nicola Keegan. 320 pages. Knopf. $25.95. But I was psychologically prepared for adversity. When I was 13 I told my father that I wanted to become a psychiatrist because I felt I already was a sort of junior-level psychiatrist, and he said: “You’d take it to heart and end up dead,” and I honestly couldn’t think of anything else to be for the longest time, so for the next 20 years, I was an unofficial junior-level psychiatrist with a liberal arts degree who took things to heart but didn’t die, until I wandered into the brilliant Alice Notley’s writing workshop and discovered the goodness that is writing and glimpsed for the first time the big mountain that represents deep contemplation upon the human condition and the dedication of massive amounts of time.

I said something like “lo and behold; that’s a rather large mountain to have missed all this time.” But I had a couple of matchsticks in my pocket and the conviction that if the stupid things I’d done in my life hadn’t killed me by now, then bad writing wouldn’t, either, so onward I went.