Methods to the Madness: How We Write

The Wall Street Journal had a great article by Alexandra Alter that interviewed authors about their writing processes. (A subscription is needed to view the article online.) The interviews reminded (and reassured) me that there’s no right way to write a novel and that authors do all kinds of creative and eccentric things to produce. Junot Díaz writes on the side of the bathtub. Dan Choat keeps color-coded note cards in his pocket. Russell Banks works in a converted sugar shack. John Wray rode trains all over New York City with his laptop while working on Lowboy. To portray a character who is a poetry professor, Nicholson Baker donned a floppy hat and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures.

I especially appreciated reading about Hilary Mantel’s strategy of tacking parts of dialogue, descriptions, and interesting phrases to a 7-foot-tall bulletin board in her kitchen. I, too, have a bulletin board and do something similar with sentences turning in my mind, overheard conversations, and images I want to capture. I also make “story boards,” which allow me to cut up typed pages and rearrange scenes and even sentences. The physical construction helps to see what I actually have written and how I want to proceed. Once, I papered over an entire wall in my bedroom with parts of a novel I was working on. I stayed up late into the night pinning up pages. When I woke the next morning, I’d forgotten about it and scared myself when I turned over and saw the page-covered wall.

Other strategies I’ve tried have involved note cards and a large, circular piece of wood my grandmother found in her garage. I’ve written on the back of typed drafts, jotted notes and ideas on staff-meeting agendas, scrawled on scraps of paper late at night, written e-mails to myself—all as a trick to feel like I’m not doing actual “work.” Other times, the tricks are ways to get at the material developing in my mind. I’ve made myself sit on a rock by the river until I could see an entire story in my head and then gone back to the dorm-room computer lab with a bag of M&Ms and written until 3 a.m. Though now that I have a 9-to-5 job and healthier habits, I have trouble allowing myself the extremes of writing late into the night with candy for fuel.

In September, I visited my father’s cousin in Florida. One evening, we had dinner with a friend of hers who is a painter. The painter told me how she and two of her friends used to set up their easels in her kitchen and paint on Saturday mornings. But to make those scheduled painting hours fruitful, she said, she needed “dreaming time.” I call it thinking time, but it’s true—art requires expanses of time where nothing concrete emerges but lots of thinking and dreaming is done about what will later materialize.

That’s the other thing I liked about the Journal article. It reminded me that no (well, very few) great novels are written over night. Sometimes it does take years. Sometimes you do throw out a hundred pages and start again. The article talks about how Kate Christensen “was two years and 150 pages into her first novel … before she discovered what the book was really about—so she dismantled the draft, threw out a bunch of pages and started over. The process repeated itself with her second, third and fourth novels.” It also described how Margaret Atwood has abandoned two books after a couple hundred pages, keeping a single sentence from one and working two short stories out of the other.

This past week I’ve been writing longhand in a yellow legal notepad, putting down bits of scenes and ideas that interest me for the fiction I’ve been working on. It’s premised on the characters in the story that I’ve been reworking, re-imagining, and finally thought I had tossed aside. And while the recent work is problematic in its lack of coherency, it feels like it is leading in the right direction. Sometimes this kind of mess is necessary to get to what I’m really going to write, even if the time it takes to make the mess can be anxiety-inducing. And with each new project, the process is different. Each new piece requires finding the rhythm and a way of working again. I often liken writing to running. It’s really painful getting started, getting back in shape, but once you pass the pain threshold, it’s easier to keep going back for another run, and once in a while, you have that really great run that feels like flying. The other days, though, you just have to keep showing up. And you break through.

For the moment, I've decided to stop worrying about hammering out a completely planned plot and just see what happens with the images in my head. So it helps to remember that other writers work from images, too, and that those images begin to tell their stories. The Journal article describes how Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient “started out as two images: one of a patient lying in bed talking to a nurse, and another of a thief stealing a photograph of himself.” Choan said his novel Await Your Reply began as “scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy's severed hand, resting on ice.”

Though maybe the best takeaway from the article is when Ondaatje (who apparently doesn’t understand writer’s block) says, "If I get stuck, I work on another scene.”

Then there’s Atwood who says, “Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot." The article continues: “When questioned about whether she's ever used that approach, she adds, ‘No, I don't have to.’"

--C.