method and madness

I think often of a passage from Patricia Hampl’s gorgeous memoir, The Florist’s Daughter. Scattered through the book are images of her father, short films as it were that emerge from memory. Here’s my favorite one:

He’s in the design room, just off the first greenhouse where all the shiny green plants are kept. He’s holding a knife, the pocketknife every florist has in his pocket at all times, the knife that is never loaned to anyone else.

It must be a Sunday afternoon. The greenhouse is closed, the design room silent. He’s getting something ready, no doubt for a funeral or the early-Monday hospital delivery round. I’m sitting on the stool by the design table, as I always do, just watching.

He emerges from the walk-in cooler with an armload of flowers — tangerine roses and purple lisianthis, streaked cymbidium orchids, brassy gerbera daisies and little white stephanotis, lemon leaf, trailing sprengeri fern, branches of this, stems of that. He tosses the whole business on the big table, and stands in front of what looks like a garbage heap. An empty vase is set in front of him. He appears to ignore it. He just stands there, his pocketknife in his hand, but not moving, and not appearing to be thinking. He doesn’t touch the mess of flowers, doesn’t sort them. He just stares for a long vacant minute. He’s forgotten I’m sitting there.

Then, without warning, he turns into a whirlwind. Without pause, grabbing and cutting, placing and jabbing, he puts all the flowers into the vase, following some inner logic so that — as people always said of his work — it looks as if the flowers had met and agreed to position themselves in the only possible way they should be. He worked faster than anyone else in the shop, without apparent thought or planning. I could distinguish his arrangements — but they weren’t anything as artificial as an “arrangement” — from across the room from the dozens lined up on the delivery table for the truck drivers.

(What a writer Hampl is.) Now, I am no artist — it seems that Hampl’s father was an exceptional artist indeed — but there is something here that reminds me of my own working methods. I often hear about writers who write 500 words a day, come rain or sleet or snow or Breaking News. And that’s admirable! But I have never written that way and never will.

Now, to be sure, I always have at least one and usually two writing projects going on, and I’m working on something almost every day — but the working doesn’t always mean writing words. I can’t write words until the words are ready to be written, and sometimes they might not be ready until I’ve read and re-read books, until I’ve made and then deleted and re-made outlines, until I’ve re-ordered my index cards in half-a-dozen ways, or — this is most common — until I’ve just sat in my chair and thought for a long time about what I need to say. Then I write.

So it’s not uncommon for me to go ten days or even two weeks without writing a single word that ends up in the book or essay I’m working on, and then write 6000 words in a morning. I’ve learned not to force it, I’ve learned to recognize the symptoms of readiness — and maybe more important, learned to note and heed the absence of such symptoms. Whenever I have tried to do the 500-words-per-day thing I’ve just ended up with more stuff to delete. My job, as I understand it, is to wait patiently and be ready when the words are ready.

I don’t recommend this method to anyone else. It’s simply the only one I’m capable of following. And I describe it here only because it may be encouraging to some other people who feel guilty about not being able to be perfectly regular in their habits. It’s possible to follow a practice that looks highly inconsistent and irregular and yet, over the long haul, ends up being consistently fruitful.