Process Schmoses
Process Schmosess.
I don’t think I’ve ever been at a book reading where writers weren’t asked to describe their “process”. I think most of these questioners are aspiring writers who nurse the hope that a rubric exists, somewhere, that guides the hundreds or thousands of hours spent sitting in a chair and tapping at a keyboard and brings them, at last, to a completed (and brilliant) novel.
No such strategy really exists. The idea that it does is the unicorn of the business. Everybody talks about it. Nobody’s actually come home with a trophy horn to put on the wall.
I’ve read interviews with writers who describe specific working methods (only beginning after three months of journaling in the characters’ voices; only beginning on the same day of the year for each new book and only in rooms full of flowers. . .). When I have actually met some of these writers at artists’ colonies or informal gatherings, I’ve discovered the hopeful yet unhelpful truth: They often lie. They try to keep things completely under control, but there they are chasing after a memory of a woman seen from a train window, and she isn’t fitting into the structure they originally hacked out and she will not go away.
Sometimes questions about process are actually requests for a daily work formula that results in real pages. Here the questioners are going to get actual strategies, but the strategies are generally not transferable from one life to another. William Gass has said that his only unbreakable rule is to stop at some point where he had an idea of what to do first thing the next day. Output? A paragraph a day was perfectly fine with him. Some people delete almost nothing of their work (Patrick O’Brien, for example); some people begin each day deleting 2/3 of what they produced the day before (me, for example). A best-selling writer I know has an elaborate reward system for himself based on four specific word count goalposts per day. When he hits the first number, he lets himself have coffee; the second, lunch. If by 3:00 p.m. he hasn’t reached goalpost four, he allows himself a cookie and then it’s back to the keyboard. If by 3:00 he’s surged through and hit his final number, it’s a beer and a little dance music. John MacPhee went through a patch of restlessness so intractable that he experimented with chaining himself to his chair, but gave it up when he found it made accepting FedEx deliveries difficult.
Perhaps the biggest difference in approaches is the “I only start out on well-marked trails and a map in my hand,” as opposed to the “I bushwhack and hope for the best.” I’ve done both. I hope, every time, never to have to bushwhack my way out of a scene again, but so far I have consistently found myself knee-deep in some narrative bog or other. The truth is, most “I plan every step” people expect to fall off their paths at some point.
I think every writer, in her heart of hearts, wants to know where she’s going and I think novels run off and refuse to be put on a leash or snapped to a gps. In the end, generally there’s a messy wrestling match between the writer and the book’s inclinations. Some confrontations end in an embrace, others in splints and bandages. And there’s no way to know, going in, what will happen. You just have to keep going.
That’s the process. .
I don’t think I’ve ever been at a book reading where writers weren’t asked to describe their “process”. I think most of these questioners are aspiring writers who nurse the hope that a rubric exists, somewhere, that guides the hundreds or thousands of hours spent sitting in a chair and tapping at a keyboard and brings them, at last, to a completed (and brilliant) novel.
No such strategy really exists. The idea that it does is the unicorn of the business. Everybody talks about it. Nobody’s actually come home with a trophy horn to put on the wall.
I’ve read interviews with writers who describe specific working methods (only beginning after three months of journaling in the characters’ voices; only beginning on the same day of the year for each new book and only in rooms full of flowers. . .). When I have actually met some of these writers at artists’ colonies or informal gatherings, I’ve discovered the hopeful yet unhelpful truth: They often lie. They try to keep things completely under control, but there they are chasing after a memory of a woman seen from a train window, and she isn’t fitting into the structure they originally hacked out and she will not go away.
Sometimes questions about process are actually requests for a daily work formula that results in real pages. Here the questioners are going to get actual strategies, but the strategies are generally not transferable from one life to another. William Gass has said that his only unbreakable rule is to stop at some point where he had an idea of what to do first thing the next day. Output? A paragraph a day was perfectly fine with him. Some people delete almost nothing of their work (Patrick O’Brien, for example); some people begin each day deleting 2/3 of what they produced the day before (me, for example). A best-selling writer I know has an elaborate reward system for himself based on four specific word count goalposts per day. When he hits the first number, he lets himself have coffee; the second, lunch. If by 3:00 p.m. he hasn’t reached goalpost four, he allows himself a cookie and then it’s back to the keyboard. If by 3:00 he’s surged through and hit his final number, it’s a beer and a little dance music. John MacPhee went through a patch of restlessness so intractable that he experimented with chaining himself to his chair, but gave it up when he found it made accepting FedEx deliveries difficult.
Perhaps the biggest difference in approaches is the “I only start out on well-marked trails and a map in my hand,” as opposed to the “I bushwhack and hope for the best.” I’ve done both. I hope, every time, never to have to bushwhack my way out of a scene again, but so far I have consistently found myself knee-deep in some narrative bog or other. The truth is, most “I plan every step” people expect to fall off their paths at some point.
I think every writer, in her heart of hearts, wants to know where she’s going and I think novels run off and refuse to be put on a leash or snapped to a gps. In the end, generally there’s a messy wrestling match between the writer and the book’s inclinations. Some confrontations end in an embrace, others in splints and bandages. And there’s no way to know, going in, what will happen. You just have to keep going.
That’s the process. .
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