Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

by Sarah Stodola

In Song of Solomon, she used an Edvard Munch painting “almost literally” to help her describe a scene she was having trouble with, of a man on the run from responsibility and from himself.

arranged not so much for easy retrieval as left haphazardly in the place where they’d lost her attention.

To mitigate the paralysis that continually plagues her, Didion retypes her own sentences every day from the previous days’ work, to create continuity and incorporate edits. “Towards the beginning of a book, I will go back to page one every day and rewrite. I’ll start out the day with some marked-up pages that I have marked up the night before, and by the time you get to page, maybe, 270, you are not going back to page 1 necessarily anymore, but you’re going back to page 158 and starting over from there.”

Didion started A Book of Common Prayer more than twelve times,

After her first novel, she never started another without rereading Joseph Conrad’s Victory, using the novel to set the mood the way a restaurateur might use a lighting scheme—