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.