“Troop 117, Verdugo Hills Council, Southern California: We were a uniforms untucked, let’s-see-what-else-we-can-burn bunch. And so we had a lot of trouble on multi-day hikes. Someone would start breakfast, someone would kick it over,
a tent would collapse, and then it was 10:00 AM with the day’s worst heat rising, and we had made no progress. So we developed a new system: up early, strike camp, no breakfast until an hour up the trail. The important thing—more important than being entirely ready or even sure of your destination—is to get underway. I relearned this, years later, as a writer. Early on, I realized my first novel, The Cloud Atlas (Delacorte Press, 2004), would require a lot of research. But the more I did, the fewer pages I wrote, and I thought: I need to get underway. (I also thought about burning what I had, but that’s a less helpful scouting lesson.) So I wrote as much as I could, then stopped, researched, and wrote more, stopping again whenever I ran out of fuel. It’s not a foolproof method for scouts or writers: You forget things when you’re moving fast; you occasionally stumble. But it can work, and for me, it’s necessary. I need to see the pages pile up behind me, whether it’s a novel, or most recently, stories. Unlike my scouting days, I know I can go back later and fix what went wrong. Also unlike my scouting days, and necessary: coffee.”
—Liam Callanan, author of Listen & Other Stories (Four Way Books, 2015)