By By JOHN EBY Dowagiac Daily News
Sarah Vowell's favorite part of being a writer is rewriting and editing – honing and "spit polishing" an idea until her words are shiny, spare and say exactly what she wants and no more.
"I really hate the first draft," the New York City resident told Union High School students Wednesday evening before her lecture at Dowagiac Middle School Performing Arts Center. "The first draft is like vomiting. 'Oh, here's everything I know!' What I really love is the 14th draft. I can say that when I was your age I never experienced that," writing school papers at the last minute and handing in her first draft.
Writing is not getting easier, Vowell said. "It gets harder."
Two projects she abandoned altogether. One extended her master's degree thesis tracing the history of musical instrument smashing.
Another short-lived book idea chronicled "bleeding Kansas" in the pre-Civil War 1850s, though John Brown "is always a hoot."
Vowell said the highlight of her career is getting a publisher to buy the first book she wrote at 25, a radio diary she kept for a year that was on the verge of making her crazy.
She was broke, a graduate student in Chicago, teaching and living in a ghetto so squalid "it didn't have a name."
"I was overwhelmed" and down to her last $40 when she headed for New York. No publisher was interested except "the guy who published Johnny Rotten (front man of the seminal punk band The Sex Pistols) and Leni Riefenstahl (the Nazi filmmaker).
Though the poorly-edited "Radio On: A Listener's Diary" induces "cringes" today, "I learned so much from publishing that book, and that moment of getting that call was a pretty big deal. After listening to the radio all day long for a year, from violent talk shows to horrible music and boring public radio, I was a little bit insane. New Year's Day, when I stopped the diary, was the happiest day of my life. It was like being released from prison. Good things happening is more routine now. Writing books is like when you finish your finals, that school's-out feeling. It happens to me three times a decade, if I'm lucky. Glamorous things happen, but I don't like to romanticize writing. Really, being a writer isn't romantic at all. It's like sitting at a desk. It's about discipline and it's a job."
Of all the historical places she's visited to write books such as "Assassination Vacation, Vowell said she prefers architecture in a city such as Chicago for its "sheer happiness" without baggage.
"In America, most historical sites commemorate something horrible – death, injustice, unfairness," she said. "My favorite battlefield is Little Big Horn because I'm from Montana. We like the narrative because they have the headstones where the soldiers supposedly actually fell. You look across the ravine and there's one headstone and you think, 'Oh, that guy almost got away.' "
Vowell described a wide range of musical preferences, from the Gothic Archies and Beck to Bach and other classics. She even admitted to downloading Justin Timberlake's new single.
Dream travel destinations have mostly joined Dowagiac as "geographic notches."
In Montana, where she brushed aside her gunsmith father's weapons on the breakfast table to eat Rice Krispies, she learned geography by gazing longingly at the maps plastering her room because "all I wanted was to leave when I was your age."
Vowell, who has a twin sister, Amy, headed for Europe at 19 to study abroad. She rode a train to Stockholm, Sweden, to see a "sculpture of a mental patient in a bunk bed." Her interest in art also called her to Spain for Moorish architecture, Oslo, Italy, Scotland and Ireland.
Vowell said she's less "wild-eyed" about travel now because it's part of her job and can become "a grind," though she still desires to see Japan, China, Egypt and Mexico City in the spring.
Though she lives in New York, she visited Paris three times before she ever made it to the Big Apple.
She belongs to the Museum of Modern Art and has been known to swipe her card to see one Van Gogh and leave again, marveling at the decadence.
Studying abroad made her end her "addiction" to her boyfriend and to learn self-sufficiency, though when she was finally really on her "terrifying" own. She remembers shedding tears of sadness initially, but it "turned me into the person I am."
She remains single and seems to prefer a quiet life to having children.
"I used to think I wanted kids," she said, "and then my nephew was born. I love that kid more than anything, but I had never been around a baby for like eight days straight. If you're ever considering having a baby, I suggest holing up with one for eight days. I didn't realize how important quiet was to me."
"I've gone to all the places I want to go," she said. "I'm here, right?"
With the DUHS Humanities Club planning a four-day trip to New York in the spring, Vowell suggested comfortable shoes "because walking around is the best thing about it," the Met, Central Park and, a bit farther off the beaten path, a loft in SoHo filled for 30 years with dirt. "It would cost $14 million to live there," the humorist who prefers non-fiction said, "but it's quiet, contemplative, with a loamy smell. And it's free."
She limits watching "The Godfather" on New Year's Day because "it took over my life."