The handout I gave to my fiction students at the Foothill College Writers’ Conference, an essay about methods for starting a first draft and managing writers’ block.
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This will be a discussion about some or all of the following opinions RE: putting together a first draft of a piece of fiction, and it’ll be centered around the problems of figuring out what to write and getting through to the end of the draft. Quality is an issue for drafts two through infinity; here we’re just trying to get from zilch to non-zilch.
Some of this advice may feel insultingly obvious to you, and some may not apply to you. Mileage varies with writing methods.
The obvious question, and also the worst to generalize about. Each writes for his own reason, and is burdened with figuring out not only what their subject will be, but how it will be rendered.
The best advice I can offer—and the only rule I follow when trying to conceive a new story—is to write about your obsessions. Piano-playing, racism, loneliness, your stillborn twin, the infidelity your husband doesn’t know about, the time you slapped Tom Hanks. On a practical level, writing your obsessions is way to stay invested in your story, and it enables you to endow unfamiliar situations and characters with personal relevance.
Obsessions should not be confused with passions or hobbies, though there’s plenty of overlap; and they shouldn’t be confined to ideological or biographical obsession. In his suavely cocky way, Nabokov describes his entrée into writing as a way of doing something about his intolerable sensitivities:
A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver, and this inability enhanced my oppression.
I spent most of 2007 writing a novella about a young neurosurgeon. Though I come from a family of doctors, I know nothing about neurosurgery, and the choice of subject matter was mostly accidental. However, I do know plenty about the blind spots of the intellect: the impossibility of substituting reason for compassion, the connection between studying and solitude, and the isolation of being intellectually ahead of the curve but emotionally stunted. I also know a bit about the brain, and what I did not know, I accommodated with research. Those are what helped me understand the characters I was writing about; it wasn’t autobiographical, but it was true to my experience.
There isn’t anything you shouldn’t write about, necessarily, but then again, no subject is worth rendering as fiction unless you make the language work. A story about war or deep childhood trauma may make it personally relevant or therapeutic, but it’s not good unless you’ve made it good.
The default mental image of writer’s block is of a writer sitting dazedly in front of a blank sheet of paper with a long-ashed cigarette fuming between her fingers, or a desktop cluttered with wadded tissues, mugs of cold coffee. (Non-writers imagine Hemingway or Woolf; writers usually imagine themselves.) However, there’s no reason to have a blank page or screen at all; this is why you keep a notebook.
A writer’s first lesson, according to Walter Mosely, is that “Writing a novel is gathering smoke.” In a notebook, you are constantly taking down all of the impressions that you may want to use later. If you notice that a light rain makes the air look like it’s scratched, you put that in the notebook. If your girlfriend tells you that you look miserable, and you notice that instead of feeling sad you feel ecstatically validated: notebook. Doesn’t really matter if the insight is just so-so (the former example) or if it’s great (the latter). If no notebook is at hand, write on your hand. Empty email fields, voicemail to yourself, fine—just make sure it all gets transferred to the notebook somehow, because any of it may be important. (My novella grew out of a few words I overheard at my sister’s wedding.)
Good note-taking requires your brain to have one or both of its feet inside of your story at all times. This makes it more likely that you’ll spontaneously figure out something about your characters or plot that’s been nagging at you: you’re constantly making connections between what you see and think day-to-day, and what’s happening in your story. (This obsessive material-sniffing is what the friends and families of writers hate: it’s like having a microphone held to your face. So I’m told.)
Research also goes into your notes. Have you done much research? There’s the book kind and the interview kind and the ethnographic kind. Nearly all fiction writing benefits from it—if you have a character with a job you’ve never worked, you’ll benefit from talking to someone who has; if you have a character with an unusual last name, it’s worth Googling to see if anyone else has it, and trying to determine its provenance. (Name / ethnicity mismatch is a personal bête noire.)
In the past month, in the name of research, I’ve flown across the country, interviewed mechanical engineers, and attended a motivational seminar; most of it was useful, all of it interesting.
What happens once it’s in the notebook? I usually put my notes into whatever Word file I’m working on, polishing or adding to them as I transcribe them over. If I don’t have anything written yet, I’ll pick the most appealing bits and try to build them into sentences, or take a few of the bits and try to discern a connection between them. When I get stuck, I work on a different bit, or I go lie face down on my bed and come back and keep going at it. If nothing’s working, I take a walk or start revising an old story; then I come back to my notes. And then the next day, I’ll have more notes to add.
When beginning a book, the (Marxist, Lacanian, Slovenian) philosopher Slavoj Žižek tells himself, “I am just writing notes, I am just writing notes”; then he tells himself, “I am just revising my notes, I am just revising my notes”. (He has written fifty-five books and dozens of articles across seven languages, and, like David Foster Wallace, types rapidly with one finger.)
Many assume that you come up with a story idea first, and then you sketch out a story based around the idea. It’s a method that relies on sudden inspiration, which may or may not come, and it also tends to encourage clinging to the idea in a way that makes it difficult to recognize worthier ideas.
For a first draft, you want to eliminate any preconceptions of what your story is “about”, because it will absolutely slaughter any chance you have at surprising yourself as you write. It’s very tempting to plan out what happens next by making an outline of the plot and then just connecting the plot points, because you want your writing to go smoothly. Unfortunately, not many people can write good fiction from an outline (my opinion).
Instead, the process should be more instinctive and improvisational. Allow yourself to treat every idea in a first draft as if it has the potential to become a central element of the story; wait until you get to the end of the draft to decide what did and didn’t work. Also, don’t hesitate to bury the original idea: think of it as tearing down the scaffolding that was necessary for building the story, but doesn’t need to stick around.
Consider what minor elements of the story have the potential to become central. You may have mentioned a protagonist’s sibling in a throwaway line; who is that sibling, and what bearing might she have on the story in progress? Could an idea that you threw out from an earlier story find its way into the one you’re working on now? What if you just stick in a random sentence from your notebook that sounds good, and tried to make sense of it within the current story?
The auteur may object to this aleatory approach. Can’t I just work hard at an idea until it’s finished? And why write at all, if I don’t get to decide what to write about? You follow your instincts in order to write about what you want to be writing about at the moment, not what you decided you wanted to write about earlier. If that sounds undisciplined, and if it sounds prone to digression and tangent, that’s because it is; coherence and unity are for later.
I once wrote a ghost story, told from the perspective of the ghost, and full of all the requisite “ghost details”, e.g. nobody could see him standing in the corner, nobody could smell the cigarette he was smoking, etc. I was taking a writing tutorial at the time, and obligated to show my writing teacher everything I’d produced in a week; halfway through the draft, he told me to get rid of the ghost. While I’d been busy trying to figure out where ghosts get their cigarettes, it turned out that I’d written a self-sufficient and more promising father/son story, in which I was tangibly more invested. I scrapped the ghost; the teacher was right, god damn his ass.
This is related to the previous point. Some people write one sentence at a time, which is the most satisfying way to write; watching the sentences and paragraphs fill the page makes you feel like you’re headed towards a final sentence. But you can get stuck this way. If the next sentence just isn’t coming, then you’re toast. The wheels are in the mud. You start thinking about cleaning your room. Your room gets cleaned.
This is when I tend to skip to something else. If you have an idea for something that might happen later on in the story, but you’re not “there yet”, go ahead and write it. Or you might have hit upon something in your notes that doesn’t have a clear place in the story yet, but seems promising—go ahead and write about it, and see if your characters and story can find their way in.
(I submit that this might be a generational issue; my attention span is as deeply and permanently adulterated by multimedia as one can be. Nolo contendere. It’s the only way I can get any writing done.)
You need to make steady progress through a first draft. It’s easy to become unmoored before reaching the end of a first draft, because you don’t know how it ends. When you don’t write steadily, with a good sense of what’s happening, what the characters are like, what they’re thinking, you lose the big picture, especially for novels. What happens then is you spend a lot of time trying to get your bearings. It also tends to get very long and inconsistent. (Apposite Nietzsche: “A state that cannot achieve its ultimate goals usually swells to an unnaturally large size.”)
There are lots of ways to establish a writing routine, but you will certainly have to write every day. E-v-e-r-y d-a-y. Don’t feel soulless and unartful if you set a minimum word count per day (Mark Twain) or a rigid daily schedule dedicated to writing (most working writers, famously Anthony Trollope). Determine and exploit the times of day and conditions in which your brain operates best for writing (mine are 10 AM – noon after coffee; 9 PM – midnight, post-nap). It doesn’t matter whether you feel up to it or not, because writing steadily isn’t just about making steady progress, it’s about immersing yourself in the work daily, deepening your familiarity with its every aspect.
It doesn’t have to be all at one stretch during the day; you could work for 15 minutes in the morning, half an hour on your lunch break, a comfortable two hour stretch after dinner, and a few revisions and notes before bed. (This is assuming of course that you’re accommodating a normal work schedule like the rest of us. If you don’t have a full-time job, then you should be reading or writing all the time.) Just remember that if you don’t put the time in, then nuts to your writing.
I hate starting. How do you know when you’ve really begun, and not produced another false start? I could have a hundred pages written and feel like I’m nowhere. I’m never settled into a story until I’ve gotten a sound (or whatever—voice, tone, style) that I’m interested in expanding on. But getting the sound is harder, and far more consequential, than digging up good details. And it’s not, as some initially assume, just a matter of figuring out how your main characters talk and then transposing that onto the style of the narrative; how The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood talks (outgoing, girlish) sounds much different from how she narrates (frosty, appraising, and later on real nuts). And the narrator may be distanced from the protagonist, or may occupy several different characters.
In general it’s a matter of writing and writing until you produce a sentence or passage that works on all levels—it tells something insightful about the character / situation / subject, it’s unique, it’s memorable, it sounds good, it feels right. When you produce such a passage, you have earned a cookie:
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. —Nick Carraway / The Great Gatsby
I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. —Phillip Marlowe / The Big Sleep
It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. —Mrs. Hopewell / “Good Country People”
Yes—you, you alone must pay for everything because you turned up like this, because I’m a scoundrel, because I’m the nastiest, most ridiculous, pettiest, stupidest, and most envious worm of all those living on earth who’re no better than me in any way, but who, the devil knows why, never get embarrassed, while all my life I have to endure insults from every louse – that’s my fate. What do I care that you don’t understand any of this? —Narrator / “Notes from Underground” (and by the way, he’s addressing a woman he just raped, or thinks he did, anyway; it’s really complicated)
You’ll notice that in each of these passages, the voice is immediately identifiable with the text as a whole: Nick Carraway’s moneyed and class-bound insouciance, Philip Marlowe’s hardassery, Mrs. Hopewell’s sincere-yet-condescending traditionalism, and the Underground Narrator’s mindblowing cynicism. Each makes you want to read it in a certain way, act it out with a certain body language.
Once you strike one or a few of these (easy!), the rest of the first draft becomes easier, because you can be guided by a rough sense of how it’s supposed to sound; now all you have to worry about is what it is.
The only hard-and-fast reservation you should place on yourself when writing is to avoid deliberate cliché. This is the one thing you should really be tough about. Structural cliché (hammy plot, character archetypes) is harder to correct than stylistic cliché (phrases, idioms, cozy figures of speech), but neither belongs in your writing. Cliché breeds cliché; once it finds its way into a first draft, it can be a hell of a time to root out later.
Before we get dragged into a discussion about “But everything is a cliché!”, allow me to make the distinction between unoriginality and cliché. Unoriginal describes an idea or concept someone may have had before in the past; topics like “love” and “war” and “football” are unoriginal, and “I was pinned down” is an unoriginal, yet practical and functional sentence. At least it doesn’t waste words. A cliché is recycled art, something that your reader has seen or heard elsewhere, which you’re parroting out again to produce the same effect in them, with no contribution of your own. The dream sequence. Triggered flashbacks. Deathbed confessions. A beautiful, melancholy stranger next door. “I’ll be back in a heartbeat.” “He was gone like a flash of lightning.”
Clichés come from lack of effort, unconscious dependence on received ideas, and/or a willingness to celebrate your readers’ preconceptions, all of which are incompatible with good writing. Speaking of cliché on the sentence level, Zadie Smith writes:
In each of my novels somebody ‘rummages in their purse’ for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate ‘purse’ from its old, persistent friend ‘rummage’. To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence – a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same.
Yes.
We hear sentence clichés every hour; most spoken sentences contain one. Clichéd plots and characters are mostly picked up from reading and other media. Some plots are famous—Heiress Steals Own Diamonds; Sad Guy Has Life-Changing Romance That Teaches Him How To Live; Spunky Kid Warms Grumpy Man’s Heart—as are some characters (the Heiress, the Sad Guy, the Spunky Kid). Others may only be detected by the well-read, but ripping off L’Histoire d’Oeil isn’t really any less artistically dull than ripping off Romeo and Juliet. A clichéd plot isn’t necessarily bad if the writing is strong, but lots of times a clichéd plot is carrying a flimsy story.
Where was I going with this? Don’t write clichés. Not even in the first draft. Eliminate them from your mind; if everyone were more sensitive to spoken clichés, we would never again have to hear the word “ridonkulous”.
Can aid the writing process.
—Jul 13, 2009