Potato Beetle Picking Quotes

“All the solitary hours a writer pours into a novel would avail little if not for the solitary hours poured into it by many unseen others. Anyway I assume those others also do their work in solitude; maybe they work in pairs or crews or tag teams, but I’d rather imagine them slaving over my words in a poorly lit and otherwise unoccupied room, just as I do. Maybe they will have a little music for company, but nothing too upbeat, something along the lines of Mozart’s Requiem, for example, because as everybody who has ever worked on a book knows, this work can be as grueling in its way as crawling on your knees through ten acres of ground-hugging plants to pick potato beetles off one at a time and flick them into a galvanized bucket filled with soapy water. But it can also be as transcendent as the Requiem—or as picking potato beetles when you are in the right frame of mind for it.

Knowing other people are engaged in the same underappreciated labor and squeezing a perverse kind of joy out of it is what keeps me writing, especially if it’s my field of potatoes they are picking over. Sometimes I like to picture each of my collaborators working their way down a row, their backs aching, hands filthy with beetle juice, fingernails broken, eyes going cross-eyed in the faltering light. It’s inspirational.

Thirty years ago, I would have written (and did) a dull-as-dirt acknowledgment to thank each of my collaborators. It would have had all the excitement of a divorce decree. Back then I had no idea how difficult and precarious a job it is to turn out a novel every couple of years. It gets more difficult and precarious every year. So does living. To me, they’re pretty much the same thing.”
― Randall Silvis, Two Days Gone