Years ago, one of my writing acquaintances (we’ll call her B.) was working on her first novel when she received a suggestion from her instructor to be more specific about a particular detail. Let’s say this novel included a car that played a prominent role in the plot—the instructor wanted B. to give the car a name.
“So he wants me to name the car,” B. announced to a group of fellow writers. “Okay, fine. What should I name it? Go.”
Someone shouted out a name right away. For the sake of this blog post, we’ll say the name was “Sassafras.”
“Sounds good to me,” B said. “Sassafras it is—done.” And that was that. B. named the car Sassafras without another moment’s consideration.
I was a bit bewildered by this turn of events. Why didn’t B. try to come up with the name on her own? Didn’t she want to put more thought into this, and to ensure the name sprung out of her own creative well? Or, if it mattered so little to her that the car had a name, then why take the suggestion in the first place? Better to have no name than to accept one at random that didn’t even emerge from her own imagination.
Maybe I sound like a purist or an insufferable artiste type, but this is how I felt at the time—and I still do. Sure, writers often find inspiration, new ideas, and solutions by talking with their friends or cohort. And most of us are probably guilty of taking a shortcut or two in our work from time to time. But something about the blasé manner in which B. allowed someone else to produce a name, which she accepted immediately and without any additional critical thought, bothered me. While I considered B. a hard worker in general, and while I knew her novel mattered very much to her, her approach struck me as lazy.
“Writing is mostly thinking, and thinking is hard to do.” Rebecca Solnit said these words during a lecture she gave at Bowling Green State University in 2015, and the simplicity and honesty of this statement has remained with me since. In her 2016 LitHub essay, Solnit goes into a bit more detail about what writing is (and is not):
Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes.
Writing is thinking, and thinking is hard. I pondered this recently as I worked on my own novel revisions. So much of the revision process comes down to taking the time to think. Instead of writing the first description or phrase that pops into my mind—the same kind of description/phrase that will likely come to many minds, and thus won’t feel fresh or alive—I’d hit pause and think harder. I’d try to do better.
Most recently, I was contemplating a setting in my novel (located in the mountains, and atop one mountain in particular) after my agent suggested I describe this place more vividly. Maybe I could have accomplished this by hurriedly adding a few additional sentences about the setting, but instead, I made myself think. I went deeper. I started researching other, real-life locations that called to mind this fictional place. I considered the landscape, the elevation, and what this land might have been used for had it not become my character’s home. In the end, I spent well over an hour just thinking about this place and what it meant to the novel.
Through all this thinking, something shifted into focus. I recalled a real mountain I’d visited last year, and how it might mirror this fictional locale, and then I saw that one aspect of this setting mirrored a central metaphor in my novel. A tangle of loose threads came together, all at once. As a result, I’d landed on a solution to a problem I didn’t even fully know I had.
This wouldn’t have been possible if I’d simply stopped at the Sassafras level and called it a day. (Though “Sassafras” is, admittedly, a pretty great name.) If I’d been nonchalant about the setting or what it truly meant to the novel, I never would have reached this deeper level in the manuscript. I wouldn’t have understood my fictional world—and thus my characters, and thus the true heart of the book—as well as I could have.
Perhaps not every detail in a book-length manuscript can be groundbreaking. Even so, that’s no excuse to avoid the hard work of thinking. Don’t just take the first suggestion that comes your way, and don’t be content to settle on the first idea that arrives in your mind.
Pass on “Sassafras” and do the hard work on your own.