Reading Kirsten’s wonderful piece on the seductions of “how to write” books, I couldn’t help wondering how many of us follow the advice offered in these manuals: Write first-thing in the morning. Write every day. Write for no less than an hour and a half. Sacrifice small animals to whatever angry god possesses Stephen King or Jhumpa Lahiri (according to taste). So here’s the question for our readers. How do you write? Is it a regular routine, like breaking rocks in a quarry, or a flash of inspiration, where you cry out “fire in the hole!” and everyone you know runs to get clear? Do you write every day? Is it a steady-on-its-feet middle-years marriage, or a passionate affair?
I suspect the answers will differ by genre. Poets, in my experience, write differently from novelists, who write differently from short story writers. Poets are like escape artists, locking themselves into torturous boxes for our delight. But that miraculous revelation in the final stanza conceals long hours of careful pick work to master the secrets of the Yale Series. Short story writers are like masters of the short con: the craft demands both long years of practice and sudden moments of charisma. By contrast, I’ve always felt that novelists are like those gray, invisible men who run political campaigns or intelligence operations: it requires a stubborn persistence that borders on delusion to stick to your story even when it’s obviously crumbling around you.
Personally, I’m a monogamy guy: one project, every day, for at least a year, like pushing boulders up a hill so I can roll them down onto the heads of any editors unwise enough to wander past. I use daily page goals to keep myself going. If I get inspired and finish those pages quickly, I can spend the rest of the day at my ease or at the stove, making dinner. If it’s like pulling teeth, as it is most days, then I have to stay at the computer until I reach my goal. When I’m teaching, I get up early, early, early, and I try to get the pages done before my teaching day starts. If I fail, then I have to come back to it in the evening and stay at it until I get there. It’s exhausting, but the pages slowly pile up.
Metaphors, I’ve found, can help keep you going. For example, writing a novel is the opposite of a diet: you have to stay with it every day, discipline struggling with base desire, only it’s pages up instead of pounds down. Or try this one: writing a novel is like building a house, except that you’re trying to furnish and decorate each room as you go, even before you’ve laid in all the plumbing or are completely sure where that hallway leads. This one can be useful to remind yourself that a first draft is just a frame. Get the walls up and the roof on first, then you can worry about the d??cor.
But here’s my personal favorite: writing a novel is like driving across country. I like this one because it helps to make the process predictable; it gives me, as Kirsten says, “a road map of my inner process.” When you start out, it’s all excitement and promise. In my experience, that can carry you as far as Harrisburg. (Everybody I know has twenty pages of a novel.) If you keep going, you find yourself in the mountains with some hard climbing to do. The story that once seemed so clear to you now starts to sputter and stall. There are lots of breakdowns by the roadside here, so you have to take it slow and steady. Your reward comes when you get those early chapters behind you, and you can pick up speed again. For a moment, it seems like you can see the way that lies before you. Then you hit Ohio. The flat land stretches out in every direction, and it’s easy to lose your way or break down in some tiny town where life seems pointless but the real estate is cheap. Don’t stop! Steal a car if you have to, just keep going! Put the miles behind you, day after day, and those endless bleak plains of the middle chapters eventually give way to mountains again, another hard climb, as all that you’ve written suddenly seems to make no sense, leading your characters to no satisfactory conclusion. But that’s only because you’re getting close to the end, and now you can see all the dead ends you’ve wandered down. I usually find that I have to turn back here, going back as far as Iowa City to get myself onto the right road. But work your way carefully through those dangerous mountain passes, and you’ll catch a glimpse of bright water in the distance. Then it’s quickly down into the promised land, where you can feast on the fruit of self-congratulation, fresh from the tree, before you have to load up the car and head back over the same ground, more slowly this time, doing the painful work of revision.
The point of all these metaphors, I think, is that writing a novel is an act of madness. The only way to survive it is to find ways to trick yourself into persistence. Some novelists say “It’s just a job,” pointing out that even at its most agonizing, it’s better than sitting in a cubicle for nine hours entering columns of figures into a spreadsheet. If you expect to feel inspired every time you sit down to write, then you’re confusing the work of writing with the pleasure of reading. Yes, a great novel lifts our spirits, but only after crushing the spirit of the novelist, who had to endure the daily forced march through those long middle chapters to bring it into being. I’ve talked to other novelists who insist that every day was a pleasure. These people I want to kill. I’m tempted to write it off as sprezzatura, but I also wonder if such claims don’t reflect a kind of mental disorder ??? high-functioning autism, or a persistence of imagined worlds ??? that constitutes the genius I’m sadly lacking. For me, it’s work, but a kind of work that I’m privileged to be able to do. And I accept that there may be no payoff in the end. I’ve written books on a publisher’s advance, but it strikes me that every act of writing is, in the end, an act of faith. We can’t really know what will come of all our work, any more than a parent ??? even a wealthy one ??? can really know what will happen to a child. I do it not for the rewards, and not because it’s easy, but because it’s worth doing for itself. Writing poems, telling stories, these are acts that make us human. Publishers may not share our faith; often they seem to worship strange gods. (For more evidence of this all-too-familiar truth, see the opening sentences of this obituary in last week’s New York Times Magazine.) But like any good faith, writing is more than a system of punishments and rewards. It’s a discipline that can make our lives meaningful. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.