Groundhog’s Day: One Hundred Percent Chance of Metaphor

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I am thinking should begin this blog with a little snippet of Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe." If you haven't seen the movie Groundhog Day, that's A. Not gonna be funny and B. Why haven't you seen that movie?

If you are a Groundhog Day movie newbie--go, watch, and come back. And then read this post by the only person on the planet we could rely on to manage this critical moment in time.

Okay, or not. You don't really need to watch it first. But it's pretty funny. Still: how can you resist the fabulous Lori Rader-Day? Go ahead, Read this first.

Groundhog’s Day: One Hundred Percent Chance of Metaphor

By Lori Rader-Day

When I was invited to write today’s post for the Jungle Reds, Hank asked me if I could take on Groundhog’s Day. The unspoken question there, I suppose, was… Can we trust you with the sacred duty, the nationally—nay, internationally—critical topic, of Groundhog’s Day?

But any writer could handle Groundhog’s Day as metaphor, couldn’t they? Writing is nothing BUT Groundhog’s Day.

I mean, of course, Groundhog’s Day the movie.

Groundhog’s Day the holiday is too much optimism for me. I live in Chicago; we are always going to have six more weeks of winter. Until June. Perhaps for that reason, I like my February 2^nd with a whole lot more Bill Murray than I’ve come to expect from the holiday itself.

Groundhog’s Day the movie is about the long, cold, never-ending days of a man whose life restarts from scratch with the prospect of the same occurrences, the same interactions, over and over and over—every morning when his alarm clock goes off.

How is that not about writing?

Writing is about chipping away at the work, day after day, week after week, with progress incremental if not non-existent. The finish line is far away, and then our focus stretches and, wait, is it even farther away than we thought? 

In the film, Bill Murray’s character attempts to fight his fate, then wallows and allows it to ruin him, then finally decides to use the structure he’s been forced to accept to learn and grow. It gets pretty optimistic, as a matter of fact, but only after he decides to accept the time he has as a gift, working on himself instead of reaching for some far-off goal that may never be achieved.

I don’t need to stomp on this point, do I? You see it.

In the writing world we often talk about discipline. You should get some, we say to people who’ve assembled to hear us drop pearls of wisdom. Yeah, you should get some, we think to ourselves, when we’ve been away from the desk too long. As though discipline was a thing we could go get at the gettin’ store.

But of course discipline isn’t a thing you get; it’s a thing you build. All it is, when you strip it down, is doing the same thing as often as you can, creating some kind of consistency. 

It’s putting all the same markers and tools in place to guide you toward another day of the Exact Same: the same first-thing walk with the dog, the same great cup of hot beverage, the same cozy chair or business-like desk, the same notebook and pen or laptop. Different place or time works, too, but then you might be guided by another kind of structure: one hour, 1,000 words, whatever guidelines you need to get the work done.

Why have you given yourself guidelines? Because guidelines suggest that you can get it done and get back to the other things you have to do today. So many things! Without guidelines, are you supposed to write until you fall over and lose hope that you’ll ever finish? No, you’re building something, and construction is a steady-as-you-go kind of job. Steady as you go, clock in/clock out, but then, boom, something huge.

 

When I turned in the manuscript for my new novel, The Lucky One, to my editor, she wrote me back and called me out about a certain passage, where an online sleuth who tries to solve cold-case missing persons talks to another volunteer, Alice Fine, who works construction in her day-job. They’re discussing another volunteer’s successful track record of two cases closed:

      “Two matches in fifteen years.” Juby shook her head. “I don’t think I have it in me. But that’s how Lil does it. That’s how Don and Jenn do it. The people who caught the Golden State Killer, the guy who matched that body in Kentucky thirty years after she was found. Tent Girl. Do you think Todd Matthews woke up one day thirty years in and just matched Tent Girl out of the blue? This is a marathon.”

      “This reminds me of a story my dad tells about construction,” Alice said. “You know, how the little daily projects that don’t seem like much still add up to the cathedral. You’re putting down the stones or you’re building a cathedral, it’s all in your perspective. The skyscraper—or the six-story parking structure, I suppose. Either way, you have to put down the foundation.”

      Juby looked at Alice over the rim of her glass, then crunched on an ice cube. “And if the foundation is rotten?”

      “Oh, you’re totally f*@!ed.”

Is that about writing? my editor wanted to know.

Of course it’s about writing! In my experience, when you’re trying to write a 100K-word novel every year, everything is about writing! (By the way, I don’t consider my writing foundation to be an outline, if you were wondering.)

If the story about cathedral-building versus putting down stones sounds familiar to you, that’s because it’s a parable. It’s been trotted out by corporate CEOs everywhere, to “raise sights” and “line stakeholders’ wallets.” 

But it’s no less true for people like us, for whom everything is about writing. For whom 200 words, 500 words, 1,000 words is a day’s work on the cathedral, no matter how out of reach the spire seems. For whom tomorrow’s work looks much the same, for whom every day is Groundhog’s Day the movie—until the book is drafted and it’s time to come out of our burrow and sniff the air.

Did I just Inception my way back to the rodent?

Punxsutawney Phil, the Official National Groundhog, almost always calls for six more weeks of winter. Why? Because it’s February.

But aren’t we lucky that writing is an indoor sport? Bad weather, good discipline, bad discipline—none of that makes a bit of difference. Just make sure the stones get set down. Writing isn’t metaphor, in the end. It’s something concrete, a creation you made with your own hands. You made it, and it couldn’t have existed without you. Maybe it’s no cathedral, but it’s a nice warm little spot to warm your hands for tomorrow’s work, when the alarm clock turns over again.

HANK: How much do we love Lori?  And her newest book THE LUCKY ONE comes out February 18! 

What're your plans for Groundhog Day, Reds and readers? Football? :-(  French poetry?  (A little movie reference). Reading? Playing?  Or building a cathedral? 

Lori Rader-Day

Edgar Award-nominated and Anthony and Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning author of The Black Hour, Little Pretty Things, The Day I Died, and Under a Dark Sky. Forthcoming February 2020: The Lucky One (Harper Collins William Morrow).

• National President, Sisters in Crime
• Co-chair, Murder and Mayhem in Chicago

www.LoriRaderDay.com

Twitter: @LoriRaderDay

THE LUCKY ONE

From the author of the Edgar Award®-nominated Under A Dark Sky comes an unforgettable, chilling novel about a young woman who recognizes the man who kidnapped her as a child, setting off a search for justice, and into danger.

Most people who go missing are never found. But Alice was the lucky one...

As a child, Alice was stolen from her backyard in a tiny Indiana community, but against the odds, her policeman father tracked her down within twenty-four hours and rescued her from harm. In the aftermath of the crime, her family decided to move to Chicago and close the door on that horrible day.

Yet Alice hasn’t forgotten. She devotes her spare time volunteering for a website called The Doe Pages scrolling through pages upon pages of unidentified people, searching for clues that could help reunite families with their missing loved ones. When a face appears on Alice’s screen that she recognizes, she’s stunned to realize it’s the same man who kidnapped her decades ago. The post is deleted as quickly as it appeared, leaving Alice with more questions than answers.

Embarking on a search for the truth, she enlists the help of friends from The Doe Pages to connect the dots and find her kidnapper before he hurts someone else. Then Alice crosses paths with Merrily Cruz, another woman who’s been hunting for answers of her own. Together, they begin to unravel a dark, painful web of lies that will change what they thought they knew—and could cost them everything.

Twisting and compulsively readable, The Lucky One explores the lies we tell ourselves to feel safe.