A snowshoe metaphor.

10 minute read

Because everything in life can be compared to writing a book, and everything about writing a book can be compared to life... if you’re willing to look at it that way.

xo,

prologue

i wake up already absorbed by the snow
pristine white crystalline blanket
everything on the land
is covered in
glass glitter

when the morning sun rises over the fields out back,
the cold white turns gentle pink + peach 
and the crystals on the branches are miniature prisms, sparkling
rainbow light flares in my peripheral vision

i have the right gear: snow pants, snowshoes, my big 
sorel boots from 2004 (still 
going strong)

i lace up my boots and get 
ready
to make marks on that page

day one

powdery fluffiness
absolute stillness - not even squirrels or chickadees are out
the blizzards from the end of january made all of nature hibernate
there are no cars on the road, 
no jets in the sky, 
just a muffled blanketed 
quietness
the absence 
of sound

sunlight kisses my face radiantly and tells me YOU GOT THIS 

i tromp out. i love it. i’m not graceful. i drop deep into the snow with each step. I don’t know exactly where I’m headed - just going in the direction of “out back” 

Past the barbed wire fence and over it, the dip in the fence that the coyotes use, past there no one knows what happens - there’s just greenbush and swamp and 
sometimes in the spring the winnow of the wilson’s snipe, and most certainly 
in the summer there are ticks and brambles and spiders and snakes and wolves and all the wilderness
Also a creek, or a watershed of some kind

From our top floor window, I have seen an old ash tree, taller than all the scrubby Eastern cedar, and a patch of sumac, and way way out
that’s where I’ve heard the coyotes 
calling their panic dancey cries 
and from Google earth, this part of the land just looks like green broccoli tops
like, nothing is there. No paths, no roads, no trails, just the bush. 
This is my happy place. I grew up in the bush.

I tromp. And then I come back, exhausted. I use my own trail to come back, and I’m grateful for my first steps out. The way back is easier than the way in, because I’m going over what I’ve already done. It’s still a first draft, just a bit better. 

Fluffy first draft

Day Two

I wake up excited to get out on my trail. I leave the house before I even have coffee. The sun is shining pink and lemon yellow and the snow still doesn’t have any tracks on it. Not even a bird has ventured onto this fresh page of snow. 

I tromp over my steps from yesterday and I’m amazed by how quickly I get to the place I stopped yesterday. It wasn’t hard at all, and it only took me five minutes! So I continue my tromp. Now I know what to expect as far as heart rate and physical strain. I boldly keep tromping, going as far as I can go. 

I begin to orient myself to the sun and shadows, creating S-curves in my paths for nice views and interesting moves. I’m totally in the zone today, no idea what time it is, just listening to my breathing, the only sound in the crisp winter air. I’m proud of what I’m making. This is a beautiful trail! I don’t know where I’m going really, I just know that I want to make a satisfying loop. 

I make a wrong turn, a whole path in the snow that leads to a clearing with a cute tree in the middle, but no clear way through. It’s a dead end. A cute one, but not part of my loop. 

Now I need to make a decision. It’s either cut through the brambles and go south, or cut through the cedars and go west. 

The idea of this loop is everything. That’s what makes a good trail: a beginning, middle, and an end.

I’m too hungry to figure it out. I turn around.

In the zone.

Day Three

I learned from yesterday: I tuck a granola bar in my pocket. Today the snow is a little harder, a little more compacted.

I'm disappointed by how long this is taking me. Every day I come home exhausted after an hour of trail making, and then the next day I go back over the path I made in a fraction of the time, and see that my whole trail only takes minutes to walk so far. I want a satisfying loop, at least a mile long, not just a mini. 

I’m also bummed about my dead end. It ruins the pristine look of my beautiful S-curves, the paths that wind around the tree trunks perfectly. It was an error, and there is no erasing it. It's also confusing. Today I bend down and draw an arrow in the snow that points to the new, correct direction. Of course, I still don’t know if this is the correct direction or not! I don’t know if I am ever going to finish this loop trail.

Tromping and sweating, granola bar down and hunger still gnawing at me, I begin to tromp with more fervor. I’m in thick coyote territory now. I can’t see any tracks, but I feel them listening to me. I am, I admit, afraid that this is too hard, that I can’t figure out how to make this a full loop, that this was all for nothing. 

Branches in my eyes. I stumble on my own snowshoes and fall face-first in the snow. I see a clearing through the branches of buckthorn and I madly push my way through them. if this way works, i’ll bring clippers tomorrow. please let this way work. 

My mind plays tricks on me, and i hear the coyotes yelping at me - look out! we’re coming to get you!  it’s the aluminum of my snowshoes creaking against the straps that hold my boots tight. if a coyote wanted to take me down now, i’d have no chance. i’m way too tired to fight it off. i could never outrun it - the snow here must be a metre deep. i’m lost in the sharp branches between a clump of cedars and buckthorn and i’m sweating and scared and then I finally break through and on the other side I see it. my own footprints! I’d made the loop. I’d done it. 

I walk home the rest of the way using my own path from the previous days. Smooth, easy, satisfying. 

When I get home I check my GPS: My loop is .97mi long. Almost one perfect mile. 

Sharp branches

Day Four

I invite Ryan and Karen to try my satisfying loop. They press the trail down with their own snowshoes, polishing it up and making it more even. Nice. 

I show Ryan where to trim the branches so it can be a clear path, especially through the brambly buckthorn parts. Karen gives a second opinion on the cuts - she’s tall, so her perspective is excellent. With all the polishing and trimming, it makes it easier to admire the beauty. 

This is a fun stage. The snow is falling all day today. Big, heavy, clumping flakes cling to our parkas and collect on our eyelashes. It accumulates and covers our path, adding another few inches of crystal puff. 

By the time I go to sleep, the sky clears. The moonlight casts a sparkly glow over the land. My path is a crisp violet shadow cut through the iridescent fondant of the field.

Ryan makes cuts

Day Five

The animals were out last night, in the light of that big full moon. Bunny and squirrel jumps criss-cross the deep snow in the front yard. 

This morning, I follow fresh coyote tracks. Her paws move in a straight line over my snowshoe tracks, and she’s with me almost the entire length of my trail. She must have been here no longer than an hour before me. I can sense her pauses, places she scratched the ground, following the sniff. It must have saved her so much energy, to not have to jump through deep snow!

I’m honoured that she chose to walk my loop through her greenbush. Though I may never see her, I know this loop was worth making. She did not leave my path. 

Paws on the trail

Takeaways

Freshly fallen snow is SO DEEP.
Walking in it is SO HARD.
The first draft goes SO SLOW.

A first draft is like trying to make a satisfying loop trail in unmarked deep snow. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You have an idea of the length, maybe. You know want it to be interesting and satisfying. But oh, it takes so much longer than you think! One thousand words feels like infinity. You work for two hours and then you look back at what you’ve written and it’s only a paragraph. You’re exhausted. 

You transcribe what you’ve written and it feels a bit better to see it in black and white. You read the words you wrote yesterday and think: Okay, It’s something, at least! I can keep going from here. 

That gives you enough energy to go back to it again. 

You work at it and work at it and tell yourself, This is hard, but it will be worth it in the end. Pace yourself. You’re doing great. And it’s true - you are doing great. 

Hey, look, you’re already writing the start of Act Two, how did that happen? Now you bring yourself some healthy snacks to your desk because you know how many calories it burns to make creative decisions. You’re writing your first draft. This is great! 

But now that you know how to do this, shouldn’t it be easier to finish? And that’s when things get really gnarly. 

You didn’t know what you were doing in the first place. Who told you you should do this? You mess it up, and go the wrong way, and lose a whole day’s work. When you go back into it your heart hurts at the disappointment. This is not graceful, like the way they portray writers on TV: you think of Colin Firth in Love Actually just typing away all easy breezy in Portugal, in his linen shirt. That is not what this feels like. 

There are coyotes in this forest! This way forward is too branchy, that way is too prickly. You’ve written yourself into a corner. There’s no way out. This was a stupid idea - a whole book? You thought you could write a whole book? 

You consider giving up. You would give up, but there’s that stupid deadline, you said you’d hand something in by EOD today, so f*&it, you just type a few more paragraphs and finish this up so you can call this mess done and go make yourself a sandwich. 

And then… oh, hey. 
Come to find out, that kind of works. 
That’s actually a great ending. 
It all comes together! 

And, surprise surprise, you reached your page count! Like, almost exactly the number of pages you intended to write when you started. 

Also: most of the book is already transcribed now, so you just have to go back over it and trim some of the branches and clear up some of the scenes. 

You know, this might be ready to show to somebody! 

You invite your first reader to your loop trail. You tell them to bring a pencil and to let you know what works and what doesn’t. As soon as they’re reading it, you know exactly what parts you want cut. It’s like magic: Now that you know you aren’t alone on the path any more, the clarity just comes to you. You can also see clearly what’s good about your work.

This is a satisfying story. It has an interesting arc. There are surprises along the way. It’s fun. It’s got variety: there are some beautiful parts, and some challenging parts, some wide expansive parts and some tight, close parts. It’s a journey. You wrote a book. 

Finally, your book goes out into the wild. A reader reads it, and you don’t know who they are. They leave a review: they liked it.

The coyote approves.