The Solitude

So here we are with little to do, safely ensconced in our homey paradise. I'm passing the time by still teaching - moved online starting this week, a method of lesson delivery I've successfully put off until . . . well, now. I've also spent time writing and editing. Editing the proof copy of a novel whose launch has been delayed because of the pandemic crisis. Seems it's a poor time to get everyone excited about reading a new book - unless it's a post-apocalyptic plague novel, of course. On that note, the novel I've just started is a post-apocalyptic plague novel. Checking the social media. Also, longer naps. Counting each day how many meals' worth of food I have left. And generally mulling over life.

In my erstwhile day job, I teach college students how to write, mostly for academic purposes but I also encourage creativity. Indeed, a lot of my effort is to encourage young writers that they can write and that what they write is worth writing. My favorite saying (which I though I coined although I've seen similar statements attributed to Hemingway and Benjamin Franklin) is this: "If it's not worth writing about, it's not worth doing." To that end, I often talk about my books, especially how I get the ideas and develop them into a full novel. Sure, a 500-word essay comparing high school with college is tough. But try inventing an intriguing adventure tale in a made-up universe featuring a cast of 20 characters, each with their own motivations and agendas, that goes to 233,000 words. Sorry, boasting again.

So as I lay about at the end of the summer, I pondered a little weak, a little weary, what exactly was my process. I was well into a new novel (the one that's been delayed) so I could examine how and what and why I did this and that. I matched events and ideas in the story with real things happening at that time and found several uncomfortable comparisons. It was (still is) what I would call a "crime thriller", or as close to one as I'm ever likely to write, and I knew how it began. One day a what-if question popped into my head. I'm not sure what caused that pop-in, but shortly after there were two mass shootings in Texas, about a week apart, which caught me viscerally. That was the idea I had for my just-started novel, so I was shocked and almost put away my writing effort.

Looking back more recently, I found the file where I just typed out a short "blurb" - enough to remember the idea for when I could have time to write it out and see where it went. From that "note to self" I knew the idea probably formed when I was planning for a friend to visit me from overseas, someone I had met and worked with in China the summer before. We met two summers before that when I was teaching a class at a university in Beijing. (You can scroll back through these many blog posts and find the details, if you're interested.) So the note went a little like this:

Foreign student scheduled to stay in US arrives just after wife & daughter die in drunk driver crash, so only the husband/father is host.

That premise seemed intriguing to me at the time, in the initial stages. The situation seemed awkward and rife with possibilities for exploration of many issues. At first, I imagined the wife and daughter being killed in a car wreck. Then the shootings happened. I changed the plot to have them killed in a mass shooting. Sorry. If you're a fellow writer, you understand; there's nothing personal in the decision, no attempt to exploit real events, no making coin off someone else's tragedy. In fact, those questions eventually are raised in the novel. 

Back to the process - the Writing Process (trumpets blare!). In class we spend a lot of time understanding where ideas come from. I give lots of examples from my own writing, academic papers included. Even a grocery shopping list starts from some idea, maybe what you need most urgently. Then you expand on that item. I didn't have enough corn chips to finish the guacamole, so chips is what goes on the list first. With stories, as Wordsworth (poetry comes from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" - Lyrical Ballads, 1805) and T.S. Eliot (e.g., the analogy of the catalyst from "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1922) have declared, it is a strange and unpredictable cross-pollination of disparate items that in the writer's mind become melded together as something entirely new. Half the time, this is how I get an idea for a novel. The other half of the time, I am told or directed to a particular idea and I work from that.

Last semester, I composed a set of steps in my personal writing process. Here is step 1:

An idea comes to me from somewhere, seems like an idea worth developing, so I think about it, maybe start some "test writing" and see where it goes. When I know it can be a good book-length story, I set up a file and think of the opening scene, type it out. I rarely outline or plan the whole story out, but I do think ahead chapter by chapter. After reading a lot and writing other books, I find I have a feel for the pace of a novel, the arcs of characters, and the place for certain things to happen. Usually before each day's fresh writing, I edit the previous chapter, then go straight into the fresh text.

Yes, it often seems that one-third of the entire effort is coming up with the right premise, the log-line of a fiction work, asking the best question which the novel when written will answer. I like to raise questions and take 100,000 words to answer them through a grand illustration.

More on The Process next time.


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