Walk 500 Miles. Get Bored. Write a Novel.
Not a very efficient way to do things.
All photographs by Tristan DeBoer.

Some time in 2010, I decided to walk the Camino de Santiago. If you are not familiar, the Camino is an ancient pilgrimage trail, over 1,000 years old, running generally through northern Spain from the Pyrenees in the east to the city of Santiago de Compostela in the west. It is 500 miles (800 km) long (see a map).
Somehow I convinced my friend Tristan to walk the Camino with me. I think we decided to go for similar reasons: the challenge (Mallory’s famous reason for climbing Everest was “because it’s there”), the experience and, for us, friendship.
Many people walk the Camino solo (one is rarely truly alone on the Camino) because they feel the spiritual and/or emotional experience is heightened in solitude. But for Tristan and me, the prospect of walking together and sharing the experience was more than an added bonus. It was sort of the whole point.
So in 2011, we flew to France and started our journey from a traditional point, the French town St. John Pied-a-Port in the foothills of the Pyrenees. St. John is on the north side of the Pyrenees (which I now call “the wrong side”) so the very first day on the Camino is climbing up and over a mountain range. Whose bright idea was that?

We got about half-way, to the city of Leon, in 2011 and realized that we had misjudged just how long this walk was going to take. We decided to use our remaining time to just explore Spain (in a rental car). But we vowed to go back and finish what we had begun.
And we did. In 2013, we began just west of Leon and walked into the cathedral square in Santiago several weeks later. We had made it. I cried through the last couple of kilometers. Everyone cries.
I didn’t know it then, and I didn’t realize it until recently, but that journey was the beginning of a novel; a beginning but in a rather obscure, hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it, way.
Walking the Camino is hard; 500 miles afoot with a pack on your back. But what you don’t often hear from peregrinos is that a lot — nay, most — of the Camino is boring.
Walking is not an inherently boring activity but when walking fills your day, day after day for weeks and weeks…well, I was bored. What humans tend to do when we are bored is look for a way to entertain ourselves. We take a spin on Facebook. We turn on Netflix. Maybe we just read a book or turn on some music. We go out to lunch.
But on the Camino, few of those options are available. One must walk — up this mountain and down the other side, across the blistering and seemingly endless Meseta, through this town, where in spite of the abundant yellow arrows pointing the way, you know you are going to get lost.

I was bored and there was nowhere to turn for entertainment. At a loss, I began to just think. This is harder than it sounds, at least for me. I am prone to daydream but my mind was screaming at me to be entertained and all I could offer was “Well, think about something interesting.” Yes, this would be my mind speaking to itself, another common malady (or blessing, perhaps) of the Camino.
It took a long while but finally I stopped screaming at myself and began to just think; about myself and my life (not nearly interesting enough) and finally about stories; ideas for stories, thoughts about stories and novels I loved. Why did I like this novel and not that one? What is so damn special about Vonnegut, really? Why did I sort of hate Cheever’s short stories and yet couldn’t stop reading them, over and over through the years?
My novel did not arise directly from all this contemplation. What did happen was much more subtle and also more important: I was, without intending to, teaching my mind to settle down and think in broad, sweeping, dramatic terms. Of course, the broad, sweeping, dramatic landscape and the timelessness of northern Spain also helped a lot.
We completed the Camino (it’s never finished). We went home. We went back to work. I went back to school part time. In 2014 I took a class called “Beginning the Novel” and yes, I began a novel. At first it was just a class assignment but after class was over it seemed a shame to just drop it. I was rather enjoying the sassy, vivacious character, Frannie, that I had created. So I kept writing.

It didn’t take long to realize that this story and these characters were hanging around in my head all the time, every day, like friends that have been sleeping on your sofa for too long. I found the only way to deal with them was to write…and write and write.
But writing didn’t solve anything. More and more characters kept arriving. It felt like I was running a flophouse and no one was doing the dishes. One day, over a year into this process, a new character just walked in the door, asked for a cup of tea, flopped down on the sofa and started telling me her story. I didn’t know really who she was or where she had come from or why she was here. It took a long time to figure her out but inevitably her story became my story.
More than three years passed this way. I finally found an ending and wrapped up the story. That was this spring. I had only one, tiny problem: it was 355,000 words long; far, far too long for publication, I was told. Well, sure, I said, but what about Proust? What about Tolstoy? What about Vikram Seth? They all wrote really long novels, longer than mine.
But I knew I was not Proust or Tolstoy or Seth.
Split it up, my former wife said, make it more than one book. But I can’t, I said. The odd structure of the piece, the way I tell the story, precludes breaking it apart.
She said nothing but gave me a look that I am very familiar with. The look said “Bullshit.”
It was bullshit. It took a lot of thinking and cutting and moving this here and that over there to the point that I thought I was going to lose what little sanity I had left. But in the end, it worked as a trilogy. I may venture to say it worked better, much to my surprise.
And so another camino is done. The first book of the trilogy is published and ready for the world to love, hate or ignore entirely.
Anything useful, you may be asking, any advice to be taken from all of this? Just this: walk the Camino. It’s not as crazy an idea as it sounds. OK, maybe it is crazy but thousands of people do it every year and almost no one dies in the attempt.
You don’t have to walk all 500 miles. Pick a largish town somewhere west of Leon and go. I guarantee you will not regret it. How many guarantees like that does life give you?

If you can’t walk the Camino then seek out boredom. If you are like me, you must seek it out. True boredom will not find you because the next shiny object is always right there in the corner of your eye. You’ve got to work at it.
Go get bored, on the Camino or sitting on your sofa, and see what happens.
Oh, and get ready to manage a flophouse. Your characters are going to be messy and some are not going to be very good guests. They will not do the dishes no matter how much you complain.
Everything you may want to know about the books is at my website, lazymabel.com.
There you will also find a podcast. I am reading the entirety of Frannie, Book One in short segments appearing once a week. At 484 pages in the print edition, it’s going to take a very long time to get through just the first book. But recording and producing the podcast is a whole lot of fun and the beginning, perhaps, of another camino.
I remember a conversation with a very wise peregrina one day on the Camino. We were talking about how to deal with some particular situation or difficulty we had stumbled upon in our trek. I was questioning my own or (more likely) someone else’s decisions.
“But Captain Curt,” she said — I never quite understood why she called me that — “it’s your Camino, not anyone else’s. No one can tell you how to do it. You have to decide and whatever you decide will be correct.”
Fair enough, Amandine. And so we walk on.
My first novel is available now. Read a sample by clicking below.
