Yikes, sorry for the late post. I was editing this morning and the time got away from me…my editor, Samantha Storey, had sent this to me and it was all ready to go but the muse was distracting me, or vice versa, and I forgot to put it up at 1 pm PST, as usual…
Anyway, here’s our Office Hours question of the week:
Q.
George,
Here's my question, which may have been asked and answered: How do you, or can you, throw a tent around the writing impulse when you are working on something? When an enticing line comes to you in the middle of the night, perhaps accompanied by a full bladder, a sentence worming itself into a paragraph, a seductive hint leaning on the limbic in the moonlight, do you:
Wake up enough to write down the passage so, you don't forget it? (Or speak it into notes or use another app on your phone?)
Get up to develop the fragment further thinking if your muse is awake you should be too?
Are you more likely to do 1) or 2) if it is related to a story you are working on rather than an unrelated but potentially new story?
Do you turn over and go back to sleep, hoping, trusting, knowing that, if you need the line you can find it when you get back to writing in the morning?
Have you trained yourself to only accept story ideas during work hours?
Me? I feel like I have to roll over and get it into notes or it's gone forever. I'm not a professional writer, still it can be quite irritating being nudged by the muse, as if the story is stalking me, invading my life, my mind, at any moment. Sometimes that is thrilling, when it is going well. But I can imagine a dark turn where the writer is literally consumed by his story, sleep deprived.
I have to note that often the most productive time for me to write is when I wake around 3am and succumb to the flow. Still, I'm not sure that's a healthy, sustainable practice.
I assume you know what I am talking about. Having to juggle classes, story club, kids, and also writing deadlines have you come up with techniques? Will your muse stick to scheduled appointments?
A.
Yes, I do know what you’re talking about and I think the answer, like so many things about writing, has to do with the flavor of the idea – the feeling I have as the idea occurs to me.
One of my teachers at Syracuse, Doug Unger, once told us that if a writer could somehow learn to distinguish between “things he thinks he should write” and “things he actually should write,” he’d wind up saving himself fifteen years over the course of his career.
So, your question is in that category, I think: what ideas do we credit?
In the category of “good nighttime thoughts,” I’d put “Sparrow,” from Liberation Day. The voice came to me very clearly in a dream and kept coming after I woke up. I lay there a bit thinking, as I always do, “There’s no way I’ll forget this,” followed by the also-frequent, “Well, you might.” So, at one point, as the sentences kept coming, and I kept adding them to my ongoing memorized version, I finally hopped up and went into the kitchen and basically wrote a whole first draft.
In the category of “bad nighttime thoughts”…right after I got home from the tour for Lincoln in the Bardo, I was feeling some pressure about what to do next. I have this thing where I feel I’m only as good as my last book. (I’ve got some work to do on that front, I know – but sometimes it’s also useful.) But one night I had this incredibly vivid dream of what the next book would be, with strong feelings about voice and sections, and all of that, and I woke up, thinking I might want to get up and record it all. Then I thought (see above), “No way I’ll forget this,” and “Well, you might.” So, as a compromise, I wrote, on a Post-It note, a pile of which I happened to have on my bedside table, just the title of the book, feeling that this would be enough to remind me. It was a beautiful experience, to conceived of, and practically execute a book like that, all in one night.
But, ha ha, joke was on me. Next morning when I woke up, I found that this was the title I’d written:
“CUSTER IN THE BARDO.”
And so…back to the drawing board. (Although I still think I might be able to make that one work.)
But the serious, more general point in all of this, is that so much of our job as artists has to do with feelings; with the feelings one has cultivated and gotten better in touch with over the many years one has spent working.
There might be a baseball analogy here. You know: the difference between a good hitter and a so-so hitter takes place in that split-second of non-conceptual decision-making.
Likewise, here: the ability to tell an idea worth getting out of bed for from one we might just skip lies in the feeling that accompanies the idea, and (especially) one’s long history of engaging with such ideas, and such feelings.
Sometimes, in the face of a good question like today’s, I feel like the only honest answer is to just say: “Right, yes, good question. How is it for you?”
Regarding question 3: I tend to trust these suddenly-appearing ideas when they come in reference to a story I’m in the middle of. I think the subconscious (or whatever we want to call that magic-maker buried deep inside of us) is always working, and when we are actively working on a story, the subconscious is even that much more on the job.
But here, too, it’s a question of what feelings-package the new idea arrives in.
Some are too neat – these often arrive if I’m thinking too hard, trying too hard to reason through something or figure it out intellectually.
Others are just right – they don’t feel like thinking (there’s no effort involved). It’s almost more (as I think Mamet said somewhere) like fantasizing – these ideas come naturally out of my mind as my mind is lightly rifling through the story as it currently stands, say.
It’s as if I’m telling the story aloud and then that idea – that next beat or embellishment – just pops right out.
Those, I really trust.
I’ve also had the experience, as I’m sure many of you have, of having a sentence pop into my head, just perfect.
But then, when I go to put it into the story, it’s all wrong.
This leads me to another loosely held principle of mine: ideas had away from an experience of the text itself are to be held a little at bay.
Since that sentence will finally (and only) be read in the context of the surrounding sentences, it can only be good or bad in that context.
Likewise with bigger solutions or a -ha! moments that have to do with structure or theme or….well, anything, really – any idea one has had in the abstract (as opposed to having an idea as one is re-reading the text).
I sometimes hear this phrase in my head: “Let’s put it up on its feet,” which, in this context, just means: “Nice idea, but insert it into the story, and see how it reads.”
Finally, regarding question #4 (“Do you turn over and go back to sleep, hoping, trusting, knowing that, if you need the line you can find it when you get back to writing in the morning?”)…
Yes, this rings a bell with me, and is related to the idea above.
Sometimes I’ll have an idea, or see something out in the world, and think, “That goes into this or that story.”
I’ve learned, as described above, to be skeptical at this point. Usually, I’ll say, as you suggest above, “If I need it, it will come back, and in a better form.”
That’s one of those anxiety-reducing tools I’ve talked about here before – a way to worry less. If I assume that any good idea will come back, and will come back at a particular place in the story, as needed, then I don’t have to always be taking notes.
So, the notion would be to go around, living, filling one’s head with images and overheard sentences and new concepts and so on, and then, at a particular place in a particular story, one can just reach into that overstuffed attic and find just the right thing, which can then be modified to even-more-perfectly fit the needs of that place, in that story.
But again: the longer I do Story Club, the more emphatically I feel like saying this: the only value of one writer advising another is that moment when the advisee goes, “Oh, yeah, that’s how it is for me too,” and then goes off slightly upheld, and therefore does her work with more verve.
No right way, no wrong way, just your way, and your increased comfort with it, as you hone it over the many (long, happy, productive) years of your career.
Leaving the comments open for everybody today (to apologize for the lateness, maybe?).
Oh, one more thing: some news bonuses:
A few weeks ago I posted here about the removal of certain books from the Naval Academy library. Story Club favorite Rosanne Scott sent me this article, which tells about an effort being made by Old Fox Books in Annapolis to reduce and minimize this stroke of idiocy. Thanks, Rosanne, thanks Old Fox Books.
Also: in celebration of The New Yorker’s 100th anniversary, Writers Bloc is hosting this event in Los Angeles - there’ll be readings, by actors, from the 100th Anniversary Anthology, and I’ll join The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman onstage, to talk about the experience of being edited by, and appearing in, the magazine.
Hope to see some of you there.
If i have an idea (I mean a new idea--like a germ for a story), I have to use it right then. If I write it down for later, it's lost to me. Those notes I keep on my phone or in my notebook--they're fun to look back on, but generally useless (to me). Walter Mosley wrote about this, and his words sum up my experience exactly:
"You write down a few sentences in your journal and sigh. This exhalation is not exhaustion but anticipation at the prospect of a wonderful tale exposing a notion that you still only partly understand.
A day goes by. Another passes. At the end of the next week you find yourself in the same chair, at the same hour when you wrote about the homeless man previously. You open the journal to see what you’d written. You remember everything perfectly, but the life has somehow drained out of it. The words have no art to them; you no longer remember the smell. The idea seems weak, it has dissipated, like smoke.
This is the first important lesson that the writer must learn. Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It’s an excursion into the ether of ideas. There’s no time to waste. You must work with that idea as well as you can, jotting down notes and dialogue."
After forgetting several brilliant 3 am ideas that I was sure I would remember, I bought a pen with a small red light on it so I could write stuff down without getting out of bed or waking my husband. I clipped the pen-light to a small writing pad and left it on my night table within easy reach. Since then, night-time ideas have ceased.