In the 1850s the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey produced sketches of the California coastline for the purpose of siting lighthouses. Among the artists they hired to produce copperplate engravings was a young man who routinely doodled small portraits into the margins of his work. These were small studies, showing the effects of lighting people’s faces from different angles. They’re charming, but when they started to appear in official elevations meant to document the Santa Barbara coastline, they got him fired.
The man was James McNeill Whistler, and he went on to bigger things. But today those little figure studies show how a creative mind constantly works.
You never know when you’ll encounter the remarkable idea, image, remark. The other day I was walking past a construction site where several bricklayers were working on scaffolding while a hod carrier hurried to supply them all with fresh mortar. It looked like a terrible job, running buckets of wet mortar up and down ladders. To show his appreciation, one mason shouted, “Dude, I love the way you keep the mud alive!”
Okay, that wasn’t just the other day, it was eleven years ago. But that’s how a wonderful sentence can stick in a writer’s mind. It’s poetry, the way the vowels and consonants repeat with such symmetry. Especially the v’s that occur at each end. It’s standard practice for writers to keep an “everyday book” in which to jot down ideas or useful trivia, but the best stuff sticks in your brain until you find a place to showcase it.
“Dude, I love the way you keep the mud alive.” Now it’s found a home.
At an event for National Public Radio in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the funny, charming producer told me about dinner with the stoic family of a WASP friend. She silently mimed using a knife and fork to demonstrate how they ate the whole meal without speaking. In summation, she dubbed them, “New Englanders, God’s frozen people.”
How could I forget that? How could I not use it? Whenever I suffer through a silent, stultifying meal, I elbow a friend and say, “God’s frozen people.” Now that wonderful quip, too, has found a home.
For years I wrote back and forth with the writer Ira Levin. He endorsed my book Diary, and I was stunned to be in contact with the author of Rosemary’s Baby and every other great book, plus the play Deathtrap. When I asked about his writing methods he wrote back, telling me a parable about a man with a very long beard. Once someone asked the man if he slept with his beard on top of or beneath the blankets, and he couldn’t say. He’d never given it any thought. That night he tried sleeping with his beard under the covers but couldn’t. Then he tried with his beard above the blankets, but couldn’t. And after that the man never fell asleep ever again.
Ira Levin’s point being: don’t overthink your creative process.
But if you were my student, and you asked, here’s what I’d tell you. First, I work best in boring places with little stimulation but with other people present. These places include airports. Car dealerships. Hospital emergency room waiting areas. While I still worked at Freightliner Trucks my earliest ideas were scribbled inside notebooks, sandwiched between the torque specifications, fastener sizes, and part numbers of whatever mechanical project I was assigned. Just as Whistler’s sketches appeared on maps during his daytime job.
I think of myself as a conduit. I am the disposable thing trying to identify the eternal thing. Experience enters and product exits.
I acknowledge my mechanistic leaning. Years on the Freightliner truck assembly line color my process. Subassemblies are completed and feed into the main assembly line. These might be short stories that depict the major plot points. Each is an experiment to develop the book’s voice. It’s akin to collage.
An aside: Years ago I was taught that book tours were intended to drum up local media in large markets. Those were the bygone days of daily newspapers and local daytime television. Such media is all but gone. Today’s writers will more likely be asked to produce a series of short essays that websites or magazines can use as content. In the United Kingdom that’s long been the case. Instead of sleeping, a writer on tour in London will find herself spending the night in the hotel’s business center, hammering out a dozen last-minute pieces about her favorite horror story, historical figure, and cure for writer’s block. To avoid this pitfall, build your novel with a number of scenes or chapters that can stand alone as short stories. Magazines and websites can excerpt these, and they make a much better advertisement for your book. Plan for the fact that every medium wants free content.
Back to process…To begin a book or story, I collect the necessary parts by brain-mapping notes longhand in a notebook. I carry the book everywhere and jot any ideas or images or wordings that seem ideal for the scene or story. Once I have several pages I keyboard these notes into a file, cutting and pasting them to see how they work juxtaposed in different ways.
At this stage I print the full draft of the incomplete mess. I bind the pages and carry them everywhere, reading and editing them whenever I get a quiet moment. When next at my computer I key the changes into the file and print a new draft to bind and carry and continue editing.
A painter once told me that any artist must manage her life to create large blocks of time for creative work. By making ongoing notes throughout my day, when I finally do sit down to “write” I have a pile of ideas. I’m not wasting any of my valuable creative time by starting from zero.
I’ll be continually bouncing ideas off friends and fellow writers in workshop. To see how readily people engage with the topic, and if people suggest new avenues or recognize patterns that hadn’t occurred
