Writers on writing

Another one found in my files, from New York Times.


November 20, 2000
To See Your Story Clearly, Start by Pulling the Wool Over Your Own Eyes

The habits and methods of writers are sometimes peculiar enough to be interesting.

John Cheever wrote some of his early stories in his underwear. Hemingway is said to have written some of his fiction while standing up. Thomas Wolfe reportedly wrote parts of his voluminous novels while leaning over the top of a refrigerator. Flannery O'Connor sat for two hours every day at a typewriter facing the back of a clothes dresser, so that in those last painful years, when she was dying of lupus, she'd have as close to nothing as possible to look at while she wrote her stories about sin.

Eudora Welty has said that she straight- pinned pieces of her stories together on the dining room table, as though she were pinning together parts of a dress. Maya Angelou secreted herself in a hotel room for days and weeks of concentrated isolation while she worked on her autobiographical tales. Richard Russo wrote his first novels in the secluded corners of cafes.

As for me, I prefer a coal room in the basement of our house in southern Illinois, and I write my first drafts blind on an old manual typewriter.

When we bought the house six years ago, my wife and I swept out the coal room, put in a table and shelves and laid down a piece of carpet. The room is about 6 feet by 9 and has a single ground-level window through which coal once was shoveled. Hanging from a nail above my desk is the skull of a Hereford bull, complete with horns and dark gaping eye sockets. The skull came from Cherry County, Nebraska, which is beautiful big grassy sandhill country; and if you shake the skull, you can still produce a sprinkling of sand from its calcified insides. I keep this skull hanging over my desk both for itself and because I want to think it prevents me from writing baloney.

I have a plat on the wall of the county in northeastern Colorado that is the prototype for the invented Holt County that I write about and where all of my invented people live and die and commit their acts of sudden kindness and unexpected cruelty. I have brown wrapping paper taped up on the wall, on which I make notes about whatever novel I'm working on, and I have several pictures on the wall drawn by my youngest daughter, who's an artist, and also four photographs of western landscape paintings by Keith Jacobshagen and Ben Darling, and — not least — I have on the wall a black-and-white photograph of a High Plains barbed wire fence choked with tumbleweeds.

On my desk I keep a sapling chewed by a beaver. I also keep on my desk a bird's nest, a piece of black turf from Northern Ireland, a plastic bag of red sand from the stage at the new Globe Theater (taken after the production of Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale"), a piece of brick and some paddock dirt from Faulkner's home at Rowan Oaks, an old-fashioned hand warmer in a velvet sack, a blue bandana, a jackknife that once belonged to my maternal grandfather, Roy Shaver, who was a sheep rancher in South Dakota, and an obsidian arrowhead my father found in the North Dakota Badlands, where he was born almost 100 years ago.

I do not pay much attention to these things, but having them there makes a difference. I suppose it is in some way totemic. The things on my desk and on the walls above it connect me emotionally to memories, ways of living, people and geographical areas that are important to me. It's an emotional attachment to all these things that connects me up with the impulse to write. I don't feel sentimental about these things in any sloppy way, but I do feel a strong emotion remembering things, remembering people, remembering places and sights. Every time I go down to work, I feel as if I'm descending into a sacred place.

As for the work, once I get to my office, it's done in a ritualistic, habitual way. First of all, I admit that I have a special attachment to the old pulpy yellow paper that was once used by newspaper reporters. You can't buy it anymore. Or at least I can't. But I was very lucky about seven years ago when the secretary at the university where I'd been teaching discovered six reams of it while cleaning out old cabinets, and she gave them to me. It was a great gift to me, like manna, like a propitious omen.

I'm very frugal with this old yellow paper: I type on both sides. I believe I have enough to last me the rest of my writing career. I use it only for first drafts of the scenes in novels. And then I use a manual typewriter, a Royal, with a wide carriage, and write the first draft of a scene on this yellow paper and, as I say, I write the first draft blindly.

This is not new with me. It's the old notion of blinding yourself so you can see. So you can see differently, I mean. I remove my glasses, pull a stocking cap down over my eyes, and type the first draft single-spaced on the yellow paper in the actual and metaphorical darkness behind my closed eyes, trying to avoid being distracted by syntax or diction or punctuation or grammar or spelling or word choice or anything else that would block the immediate delivery of the story.

I write an entire scene or section on one side of one page, in a very concentrated and incomplete way. I'm trying to avoid allowing the analytical part of my mind into the process too soon. Instead, I'm trying to stay in touch with subliminal, subconscious impulses and to get the story down in some spontaneous way.

I haven't always written in this peculiar manner. Formerly, like anyone else would, I wrote on a manual typewriter on yellow paper (which was still available 25 years ago) with my eyes wide open. I wrote my first novel, "The Tie That Binds," in this way. Then computers became affordable, and I wrote my second novel, "Where You Once Belonged," on a computer, but I never did like the way that felt.

I missed the tactile sensation of working with paper, the visceral rightness of it and the familiar clacking of typewriter keys. Also, it was too easy to rewrite each sentence on a computer, and I tend to rewrite endlessly, anyway. Furthermore, unless you print out constantly, you lose parts of drafts, certain phrases and sentences, that you may wish later you had saved.

So when I began to write "Plainsong," my third novel, I knew I wanted to go back to using a typewriter, at least for the first draft, and I knew I had to find a way to curb my tendency to rewrite each sentence so often that no sentence ever sounded good enough. That's when the notion of writing blind occurred to me.

It helps that I'm a decent typist. (I took a full year of typing in high school; I was the only male student in the second semester, a circumstance that was not altogether unpleasant.) Only once have I typed past the bottom of the page onto the platen, and I took that mistake as a healthy reminder to be concise. And there was only one time in my blindness that I got off the home row of my typewriter and wrote nonsense. That served as a healthy corrective, too. It's not hard to write nonsense, not much harder than it is to write slack prose.

After finishing the first draft, I work for as long as it takes (for two or three weeks, most often) to rework that first draft on a computer. Usually that involves expansion: filling in and adding to, but trying not to lose the spontaneous, direct sound. I use that first draft as a touchstone to make sure everything else in that section has the same sound, the same tone and impression of spontaneity. I revise until I feel I'm done, and then I am done with that section or scene. I don't often go back and change much after that. So when I finish the last chapter, having redrafted the last page sufficiently, I'm done with the book.

But it's important to me to maintain this impression of spontaneity. By spontaneity I mean a sense of freshness and vividness. Perhaps at times even a suggestion of awkwardness. Otherwise, to me prose sounds stilted and too polished, as if the life of it were perfected out of it. It's very difficult to arrive at this sense of freshness and spontaneity in prose — in my experience, it takes a great deal of effort and practice and years of concentrated apprenticeship — but I believe it is one of the most important attributes to achieve. That, and simplicity. And clarity. Those would be the holy trinity in the art of fiction writing.

Still, I have to say, writing is all messier and more a matter of dead ends and fits and starts than a recitation like this one makes it out to be. And perhaps because writing fiction — this weird practice of telling artful lies, this peculiar habit of inventing imaginary people who talk and move and sleep and dream and wake up and kick and kiss one another — is so bizarre in itself is the reason why writers have to find bizarre ways to make it possible even to consider doing it.

So of course they have to write in their underwear and face the backs of dressers. Of course they have to pull stocking caps down over their faces. Otherwise they might as well do something practical and ordinary, become doctors and lawyers and ditch diggers like everyone else.

another Writers on Writing

One more from my files, another Writers on Writing.

August 26, 2002

WRITERS ON WRITING; Why Not Put Off Till Tomorrow the Novel You Could Begin Today?
By Ann Patchett

My life is a series of ranked priorities. At the top of the list is the thing I do not wish to do the very most, and beneath that is everything else. There is vague order to the everything else, but it scarcely matters. The thing I really don't want to do is start my fifth novel, and the rest of my life is little more than a series of stalling techniques to help me achieve my goal.

This essay, for example, which I asked to write because all of the other essays I have thought of are now finished, will easily kill a day. I have already restored my oven to the level of showroom-floor cleanliness, written a small hill of thank-you notes (some of them completely indiscriminate: ''Thank you for sending me the list of typographical errors you found in my last novel''), walked the dog to the point of the dog's collapse. I've read most of the books I've been meaning to read since high school.

The sad part is, when there is something I very much don't want to do, I become incredibly fast about shooting through everything else. This week I have cleaned out my sister's closets. And then my mother's.

For a long time before I start to write a novel, anywhere from one year to two, I make it up. This is the happiest time I have with my books. The novel in my imagination travels with me like a small lavender moth making loopy circles around my head. It is a truly gorgeous thing, its unpredictable flight patterns, the amethyst light on its wings. I think of my characters as I wander through the grocery store. I write out their names like a teenage girl dreaming of marriage.

In these early pre-text days my story has more promise, more beauty, than I have ever seen in any novel ever written, because, sadly, this novel is not written. Then the time comes when I have to begin to translate ideas into words, a process akin to reaching into the air, grabbing my little friend (crushing its wings slightly in my thick hand), holding it down on a cork board and running it though with a pin. It is there that the lovely thing in my head dies.

I take some comfort that I've done this before, that eventually, perhaps even today, I will write the opening pages. Somewhere around Page 80 I will accept that I am neither smart enough nor talented enough to put all the light and movement and beauty I had hoped for onto paper, and so I will have to settle for what I am capable of pulling off. But the question then becomes: On what day do you do format a new file on the computer and type that first sentence? I don't actually sell the book until I've finished writing it, so I don't have a deadline to compel me. And if I'm careful with the money I've got, it could last me for a while.

Suddenly, five novels seems ungainly. The thought of it convinces me how boring I've become, and I start to wonder why I never went to medical school. I imagine Elizabeth Taylor choosing a dress in which to marry Richard Burton. Did she believe that this time everything would be different? That this time she would be true until death did them part? I marvel at such hopefulness.

Starting a novel isn't so different from starting a marriage. The dreams you pin on these people are enormous. You are diving into the lives of your characters, knowing that you will fall in love with all of them, knowing (as surely Elizabeth Taylor knew) that in the end the love will finish and turn you out on the street alone.

From the vantage point of a novelist trying to get inside the novel, it makes the most sense to me to shoot for something along the lines of ''A Man Without Qualities'' or ''Remembrance of Things Past,'' a genuine tome that will keep me busy for the next 30 years or so. But that doesn't work either, because as soon as I'm comfortably inside my book I inevitably long to get out. The farther into the story I get, the harder and faster I write. In short, I become a malcontent dog, either scratching to get in or scratching to get out.

It should be noted that there are two blissful things about writing novels: making them up and seeing them finished. The days I spend in either of these two states are so sweet, they easily make the rest of the process bearable. The novel in my head is all mapped out and ready to go, but in these final minutes before departure I feel the rocking waves of doubt.

In trying to start a novel, I dream about the novels I wish I had written, the ideas I should have had. A book about a boy in a boat with a Bengal tiger? Surely I would have come up with that one had Yann Martel not written ''Life of Pi.'' Surely with a little more time I would have come up with something as important and beautiful as Carol Shields's ''Unless.'' And yet, the books I most long to plagiarize are my own.

Every time I start a new novel, I think what a comfort it would be to crawl back into the broken-in softness of the old one. Would it be completely unreasonable to write another book about opera and South America? Would reviewers say I was in a rut? Honestly, how often do reviewers actually read the preceding novels? Of course when I was starting ''Bel Canto,'' I was longing for just one more book about a gay magician, and so on, backward.

Despite the hand wringing, housekeeping and the overdrive of unnecessary productivity, there will come a point very soon when I will begin, if for no other reason than the stress of not beginning will finally overwhelm me. That, and I'll want to see how the whole thing ends. Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

Writers on Writing

Articles in this series are presenting writers' exploration of literary themes. Previous contributions are online: nytimes.com/books/columns

Recognizing The Book

June 17, 2002
WRITERS ON WRITING; Recognizing The Book That Needs To Be Written
By DOROTHY GALLAGHER

Years ago, I picked up a copy of Sarah Orne Jewett's collection of stories ''The Country of the Pointed Firs.'' These are wonderful stories. But what struck me at the time, and what has stayed with me, is a letter from Jewett to Willa Cather that Cather quotes in her preface to the book:

''The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.''

The thing that teases the mind. . . . A writer is always preoccupied with identifying the material that is essential to her work, the book that needs to be written. If there is such a core of material, bits and pieces of it will find their way into everything she writes, even into an editor's assignment. And she waits for that moment of synthesis when the subject finds the vehicle for its expression.

For me, that moment first came in the late 1970's. I learned then about an obscure Italian-American anarchist named Carlo Tresca. By that time Tresca had been dead for more than 30 years, murdered in 1943. I had never heard of him, but I recognized him at once. He was the embodiment of my subject. In writing his life, I would at last be dealing with the material that was necessary to me.

And to say what that is, I will turn to another writer, Robert Warshow, who died young, in the 1950's, still in his 30's, but who produced in his short life a number of brilliant essays on American cultural life that are collected as ''The Immediate Experience.'' In one essay Warshow wrote about the crucial effect of the American Communist movement on the intellectual life of the country in the 1930's.

There was a time, Warshow wrote, when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist Party. ''If you were not somewhere within the party's wide orbit'' -- and he was referring to the days of the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Fascism: the time of the party's greatest influence in America and in Europe -- ''then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition. In either case, it was the Communist Party that determined what you were to think about and in what terms.''

The world has moved on, and very quickly, too. Fanatical ideologies have taken different forms, and even as we watch at this moment, we see the categories of political and social thought that defined the world through the 1980's dissolve and re-form in strange and terrifying ways. But it was the idiom of the Communist Party that I took in with my mother's milk: it was my introduction to intellectual experience and to the dense web of loyalties and enmities that ideology so dangerously generates; and it continues to engage me as nothing else does.

And, really, why wouldn't it? Unquestioning belief in an abstract idea is a peculiar feature of our species that transcends the ages. The historian Martin Malia called Communism ''the great political religion of the modern age . . . promising egalitarian redemption at the end of history.'' Worse, almost, than the horrific acts committed in its name, Communist ideology appropriated the language of the best hopes and ideals of humanity. And every horror was called by the name of its opposite, as George Orwell noticed.

Many immigrant Jews, as my own family did, lived in fairly isolated enclaves, among people who had come from the same part of the world -- Eastern Europe, Russia -- and who largely shared their views. It was possible for that immigrant generation to live an entire life in America with little connection to the people and country of their emigration.

If my grandfather kept the God of the shtetl, my mother's generation found life's meaning in the Bolshevik revolution. It was left to their children, who were the first generation born in America, to connect with the new world. And for many years that was my business: finding a foothold on this ground. When I felt firmly grounded, the past asserted itself, and I eventually found Carlo Tresca, an anarchist, whose political viewpoint had led him very early to see the dangers of Bolshevism. He became my vehicle and guide to what had always been waiting at the back of my mind.

Writing is problem solving; whether in fiction, biography or memoir, certain basic questions have to be resolved. In biography, at least, a writer leans heavily on materials gathered in research. Working with a trove of documents is constraining, but also in some ways liberating, as working a puzzle is liberating. The clues are in your files, and if you've done your job as a researcher, you have the tools to solve the puzzle. But when I turned to memoir -- the shamelessly naked core of a writer's necessary material -- I found myself traveling as light as any writer of fiction.

I have never written fiction, and this memoir may be as close as I ever get to it. No more than a biography or a novel is memoir true to life. Because, truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story. There really is no choice. A reporter of fact is in service to the facts, a eulogist to the family of the dead, but a writer serves the story without apology to competing claims.

This is an attitude that some have characterized as ruthless: that cold detachment, that remove, that allows writers to make a commodity of the lives of others. But a writer who cannot separate herself from her characters and see them within the full spectrum of their human qualities loses everything in a haze of nostalgia and sentimentality. Bathos would do no honor to my subjects nor, most important, bring them to literary life, which is the only way they could live in the world again.

At first I intended to write only one piece, the story of the agonizing last years of my parents' lives, a five-year period during which I had made some notes. The original version of the story I wrote was about 150 pages long. Everything was in it, but it didn't work. I hadn't solved any of the problems that the story demanded. But I was lucky, and eventually a solution came to me.

The right voice in which to tell the story came to me, and when it did, many other things fell into place. And I wound up with a story that is 10 or 12 pages long and yet contains everything I wanted to say. After that first piece, I went on to make a book of stories about my family that I called ''How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories,'' without notes this time, with only treacherous memory and a few letters to guide me.

Now you may ask: Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth?

It is as close as it can be.

The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life -- that one damn thing after another -- is lost. No matter how ambiguous you try to make a story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, it's a package made to travel.

Everything that happened is not in my stories; how could it be? Memory is selective, storytelling insists on itself. But there is nothing in my stories that did not happen. In their essence they are true.

Or a shade of true. There is a piece in my memoir that I call ''Cousin Meyer's Autobiography.'' I did not really write this story. My cousin, whose real name was Oscar, left a self-printed memoir of some hundred pages. The first liberty I took with it was to change his name to Meyer in order to avoid confusion with my uncle whose name was Oscar.

Cousin Meyer's memoir was a treasure; it told of some extraordinary events in his life that dovetailed with the central material of my book. I took his hundred pages, reduced them in the way you would reduce a sauce, I turned them a little, say fron north to northeast. The result may not be the story he wanted people to read. I took his story over, I insisted on my interpretation, I even added some lines that he did not write.

Did I have a right to do that? Some would say not, and really I would have no defense. Nevertheless, if cousin Meyer, so incensed by my interference, returned from the dead to object, I would answer him: But, cousin, for more than 20 years your story languished in a drawer; you were dead in fact, your life lingered in hardly anyone's memory. And now, because I have used you, more people have read your story than you ever could have dreamed. Cousin, you live, even if you dance to my tune.

Writers on Writing

Articles in this series are presenting writers' exploration of literary themes. Previous contributions: nytimes.com/books/columns

wonder inspired a novel

May 20, 2002
WRITERS ON WRITING
WRITERS ON WRITING; When Inspiration Stared Stoically From an Old Photograph
By KATHRYN HARRISON

Thirty-five years ago, in suburban Los Angeles, my grandfather showed me a photograph he had taken in Alaska in 1915. It was a picture of a native woman smoking a pipe. He said her name was Six-Mile Mary, and she stood alone in a bleak landscape, somewhere outside the new town of Anchorage. There was no house behind her, no man or child beside her, no dog, no horse, no campsite, no tree.

Her black hair was parted from forehead to crown with a line so exact it struck me as cartographic, necessary and absolute as a division of longitude. Looking at the photograph, I knew that Six-Mile Mary had neither ancestors nor kin but had invented herself, too powerful to consider beauty, and so her beauty surpassed any I had encountered before. Lingerie, lipsticks, bottles of perfume, curlers and talcum powder and Dippity-do: under her gaze the alchemy of my mother's dressing room would collapse into ash.

''Why did she smoke a pipe?'' I asked my grandfather, whose rules for women prohibited the comparatively mild sins of whistling and drinking beer.

''She just did,'' he said.

''How did you know her?''

''I knew her, that's all.''

''What were the six miles?''

He shrugged.

''She was your friend?''

''No, not a friend.''

Of course not. Friendship is a human measure; Six-Mile Mary was, I already suspected, an immortal. Years away from the work that would one day consume me -- decades away from a novel I titled ''The Seal Wife'' -- I had seen a muse.

During the time that intervened, Six-Mile Mary appeared, often in disguise, but I recognized her. On a bench in a La Jolla, Calif., park, a blond woman sat smoking a pipe. Twelve years old, I sat next to her. When she got up, I stood, too, and followed her along the path that overlooked the beach, through the picnic area and into the dank public restroom. ''Do I know you?'' she demanded, and I fled.

In my life as a writer I often remind myself -- comfort myself -- with what William Faulkner said about ''The Sound and The Fury.'' The whole novel, he claimed, hung on one image, the glimpse of a little girl's muddy underpants seen from the ground as she climbed a tree. How can an entire world spin off so small and incidental a hub? Can it be possible that Faulkner conceived his masterpiece from this tiny, grubby moment?

I imagine most writers of novels begin with such a fragment, a shard of experience so compelling, so troubling and unavoidable -- always there, on the periphery of consciousness -- that around it he or she must construct an elaborate world. This world, the novel, is not merely a container or a means of filing the image away but an attempt to make it comprehensible, and to guard its power.

Afflicted with wanderlust, my grandfather, who was born in London in 1890, drifted west and north across the Atlantic, across Canada, until the land gave out and he reached the coast of Alaska. The stories he told me of living on the frozen frontier helped me to assemble, stick by stick, a town in which to put Six-Mile Mary, whose face I can no longer see. The photographs my grandfather took in the north were lost in a move.

When I consider what survived the journey from one to another neighborhood in Los Angeles: chipped china, worn rugs, mismatched sheets -- all of these unpacked and then discarded in the critical light of freshly painted rooms -- it seems impossible, and inevitable, that the album was mislaid.

Bound in creased, dry leather that left crumbs on my hands, its luminous content was hidden by a shabby disguise and remained, like the magic of fairy tales, outside mortal agendas. Even when I was a child and the image of Six-Mile Mary was in front of me, she eluded perception, an apparition caught by my grandfather's camera, one among others: The silver mirror of an arctic lake, reflecting both moon and sun. My grandfather as a young man with a full head of blond hair, jodhpurs and shotgun. A white cloud stitched to a black sky with needles of ice.

The pictures I remembered, so fragile and so necessary, fragments of a life I could not stand to lose, demanded that I imbed them in a narrative that would ensure their survival. All the corollary and not inconsiderable work of creating characters and plot, as well as a plausible place and time in which to put them, I undertook as the only means I had of preserving my connection to my grandfather. So it is all the more paradoxical, if not exactly surprising, that Six-Mile Mary still seems to me self-created, without human attachment: without the vulnerability, the need for connection, that enslaves me to writing novels.

Bigelow, the main character of ''The Seal Wife,'' the narrative trap I set for Six-Mile Mary, is a scientist. Sent by the weather bureau to establish a meteorological observatory in the frontier town of Anchorage in 1915, he's obsessed with finding a formula that will let him understand and predict the weather. What Bigelow wants is not just to penetrate the heavens but the mind of God, or whatever force it is that throws us together in families and tears us apart.

Seduced by an Aleut woman who refuses to speak to him, seduced because she won't speak to him, whenever Bigelow is with the Aleut he searches her face for emotion. She is the only woman who has allowed him to watch her as intently, as much and as long as he wants, and the reason for this comes to him one night. She is self-possessed. There is nothing he can take from her by looking.

At the thought, he gets up from the bed and goes to the window; he rests his forehead on its cold pane. She possesses herself. How much more this makes him want her.

He is myself, of course, with the photograph of Six-Mile Mary in my hands. I made him a scientist, but like a writer he loves a woman who is more muse than mortal, so grand and self-sufficient, so complete unto herself that she would never labor over words and commas, tenses and metaphors. Six-Mile Mary's silence, and her solitude, her body that casts no shadow onto the ground: the gods take human form, but something always gives them away.

Writers on Writing

Articles in this series are presenting writers' exploration of literary themes. Previous contributions: nytimes.com/books/columns

Photo: Kathryn Harrison says that as a child she wondered about a mystery woman. That wonder inspired a novel. (John Patrick Naughton for The New York Times)(pg. E2)