The Book Thing

I am staying in a room filled with books. In my own bedroom, the books lining the shelves are ones that I have already read. It's comforting to wake up to them and see the familiar titles, remember the tales in each, feel safe in the knowledge that almost all of those books have been read. Here, though, are many books I have not read. It's a bit daunting. As I do in a bookstore or library lately, I stare at the titles unable to decide on one that feels right, that will get through to my psyche in a way that means something, is affecting. Not a dystopian tale, not one with an estranged husband or an already-dead character, not one about unrequited love or love gone sour with no redemption. Anything too peppy or too trite or too philosophical without enough in-scene narrative seems dull as well. Nothing feels right. I stare at the books and think about starting one. It isn't just that I've been lacking in reading time. There's some story I want to read, but I can't quite put my finger on it, can't quite articulate what I'm seeking.

Another case in point. R. and I went to The Book Thing—not a bookstore but a warehouse in Baltimore packed with books. Free books. Hundreds of volumes filled the concrete rooms, and I could not choose. Maybe it was because the building had no heat, and the temperature was in the 20s. The winter air derailed any slow, thoughtful opening of covers and flipping of pages. I could think only about getting warm, which led to frustration about losing the opportunity to take any and as many books as I wanted. (Base needs triumph over intellectual desires every time; the intellect cannot function when the body is too cold.) A sense of being overwhelmed by unlimited choices also plagued me; usually I select only what I really want, for lack of money, for not wanting to waste, to avoid the guilt of an unread stack of reading; too many unopened books waiting in a pile can be unnerving.

Shelves and shelves of books—something I love. It’s just that lately, none seems to get at the right thing. And I realize this: I'm waiting to write the story I want to read. It's hard when life gets in the way and so many other things need taking care of before I can sit down to write. The perfect writing time and writing space is elusive—I must once again learn to create in the in between spaces. This usually works when something is going well, when my mind is fluid and in shape and focused on a project. But now I must restart. It’s like I've been sick for a long time and my body has forgotten how to run with a sense of freedom and strength. It's back to short, flat runs that are slow and cumbersome. Again I must build and build before I will be able to re-cross the pain threshold and remember why I do this at all.

So maybe it’s not a dissatisfaction with the books I have yet to read but a dissatisfaction with the shape of the book I want to write. The stories of others are irritating because none tells it just like I want it to, as I would tell it or see it. Perhaps this awareness will help me to write. Perhaps it is just another quirk in the constantly changing process that is fiction writing, that is living and working and creating. Either way, I keep thinking of something Toni Morrison said: “If there is a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

—C.

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.