Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

by Sarah Stodola

inspired by a popular nineteenth-century parlor game called the Confession Book.

The most famous variation on the Confession Book was penned by Marcel Proust

In truth, a career as a writer is enjoyable, but also lonely. Tell that to a construction worker, a nurse, a truck driver, and you will likely be mocked. But conceiving of interesting ideas and conveying them in words is intellectually, if not physically, arduous.

To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, writing can be a grueling, unforgiving business, but even at its worst it’s better than having a regular job.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer known to write with otherworldly facility, in fact rewrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise, three times completely before having it accepted for publication.

Junot Díaz spent ten years laboring over The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, at one point becoming so hopeless that he made a list of alternate careers he might pursue once it was clear he could no longer be a writer. And then he kept going.

(A note from my muse) Ah, this sounds familiar doesn't it!

seminal

elucidated

Despite his fanatical commitment to writing, for many years Kafka kept his literary aspirations secret. Not even his eventual literary confidant and alter ego, Max Brod, would learn of them until five years into their friendship.

it was the very experience of navigating and existing within that faceless establishment that inspired much of what has come to be known as “Kafkaesque” in his writing: the insubordination of the individual to the larger machine, the overwhelming and confusion-inducing bureaucracy, the incomprehensible structure imposed from some nebulous above.

Solitude was a compulsory feature of Kafka’s writing process. “Being alone has a power over me that never fails,” he once wrote in his diary. “My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper.”6

The better Kafka’s writing was going, the more isolated a person he became.7

Kafka could be a stickler for routine. When he woke in the morning, he spent a long spell in the bathroom getting ready for the day. He was meticulous in his grooming, always worried about how others perceived him. He always arrived at the office at 8:15 a.m. on the dot, always ate a plain roll while he walked there.10 He returned from the office around 2:30 p.m., at which time, if he could get away with it, he took naps lasting up to four hours, in order to have energy for writing into the late night.11 “Now, in the evening,” he wrote in his diary one night, “out of boredom, washed my hands in the bathroom three times in succession.”

Kafka's routine

fletcherizing,

“The mere attempt to write in a calculated manner or to structure his texts logically or analyze them rationally would have destabilized his ‘inspiration.’

Although Kafka stuck to a careful routine in life, the hours spent writing were unpredictable. To try to control his writing was to destroy its ability to take shape. He could only work by writing impulsively.

Kafka had no problem coming up with ideas to spark a work, but it was a continual struggle for him to see those ideas through as comprehensive stories.15

It’s clear from this approach to writing that Kafka was hardly able to separate the writing of literature from life itself.

Among his literary influences, none loomed larger than Goethe,

The inconsistency in Kafka’s writing routine can also be partially blamed on his infinite powers of self-criticism.

Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of everything he ever wrote.30 “Today burned many old, disgusting papers,” he wrote in his diary in 1912.31 Kafka’s perfectionism contributed to his trouble writing novels—of the three he began, none was ever completed, although all were published posthumously.

Sustaining an idea through hundreds of pages proved too heavy a burden for a mind that second-guessed every move.

The total of three engagements Kafka entered into (twice with Bauer, the other with Julie Wohryzek, a poor hotel chambermaid) disintegrated, generally speaking, because of Kafka’s inability to envision any kind of what we today call work-life balance. His asceticism was meant to foster his writing, but it also made him a largely unhappy person, which hampered his efforts. Near the end of his life, he wrote in his diary of the severity that led him to become a “physical wreck”: “I did not want to be distracted, did not want to be distracted by the pleasures life has to give a useful and healthy man.”

Likewise- it appears to be my own fate.

The cup of coffee in the moments before light began tiptoeing up from the horizon became a reliable beacon. “For me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular . . . For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”44

Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 soft pencil

Morrison happily cut socializing from her daily life, narrowing her focus to two key elements: her kids and her writing. She doesn’t force the writing if it’s not coming, but even in those dry moments, she’s always thinking about her next words.

What’s the difference between a character in a book and a real person, and how does language dictate one or both?

The Broom of the System, in which the plot becomes secondary to the twenty-four-year-old protagonist’s doubt in her own reality and belief that word choices are controlling her life.

he began to notice that in the midst of all that excess, humans maintain a crystalline capacity for boredom. Boredom as a concept for Wallace was interesting to think about precisely because it was so tedious to experience, and because it thrived amid the availability of more entertainment than the human race had ever known.

The frailty of reality, the pitfalls of excess, the maddening persistence of boredom—one after another, Wallace took these notions to weird extremes, distorted them in ways one wouldn’t expect to provide clarity, but did.

It was the concept of reality, in particular, that led to Wallace’s most famous stylistic quirk: extensive endnotes that tailed much of his work, especially Infinite Jest. “Reality is fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in,” he said to explain why he started using them. “The difficulty about writing . . . about that reality is that text is very linear, it’s very unified. You—I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting.”87

“The Nature of Fun,” he wrote, “In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it.” But success in writing changes the writer, he believed. “Things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary.” To come out on the other side, he wrote, one can “sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid.”90

If he’s writing dialogue, which is often, he might be overheard talking to himself, working the lines out to an empty room.

Wharton would not become a published author until her late thirties, when her innate desire to write books finally—and indeed inevitably—bubbled to the surface. She would go on to write a total of forty-four books.

she had access to her father’s gentlemanly library, assembled more out of convention than a genuine love of literature, and rarely used by anyone aside from the strange little girl who read any book she could get her hands on and wrote story after story on any piece of paper that came her way.

Wharton always kept a donnée book (a French word meaning the nascent elements of a story) in which she recorded the plot outlines, little one-liners, social critiques, and clever analogies that would someday be used in one of her books. “Mrs. Plinth’s opinions were as hard to move as her drawing room furniture”

Curious term

“The subjective writer lacks the power of getting far enough away from his story to view it as a whole and relate it to its setting,” she observed in The Writing of Fiction.193 That detachment could lead her to be callous in her borrowing from real life: A carriage accident in which a neighbor fractured her skull and died went straight into The Fruit of the Tree.194 And the infamous sledding accident in Ethan Frome came from an actual tragedy in the winter of 1904 near her home in Lenox, Massachusetts.195

The key for Orwell was a denial of creature comforts. Wherever he might encounter luxury, he eschewed it. Whenever he might find respite from penury in his “lower-upper-middle-class” background, he turned his back on it. His penchant for asceticism seeped into his writing, permeating his string of living quarters and his routine. Ultimately, through these conditions, he developed a writing style that was inextricably linked to his environment of manufactured hardship. Orwell found his voice as an author through the down-and-out lifestyle, and his continued dedication to living austerely helped him become one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

By nature, he narrated his own life in his head, as if it were a story in midconstruction. “For fifteen years or more,” he wrote, “I was carrying out a literary exercise . . . [T]his was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind.”

Absolutely. I came equipped with an internalized voicebox through which the great muse sings.

His brain functioned like a writer’s without any prompting, but he resisted this impulse to become one well into adulthood. As a respectable descendant of gentility, he first went into what he thought was a more appropriate career with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

he headed out into the field to gather new ones. He posed as one of the vagrants of East London, which provided him with material that proved important in that it was grippingly dramatic and dealt with the downtrodden. He’d sometimes go undercover in the slums for a few weeks at a time, and it was this experience that finally freed him of the clichés and contrivances he’d been struggling with up until then.203 He found he could write about this experience with clarity and from a singular perspective. It brought him to the breakthrough he’d been waiting for, along with the onset of the direct, unembellished prose style that would characterize his writing going forward, like in this passage from Down and Out: It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, [sic] is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. Such prose ultimately became synonymous with the name Orwell.

Orwell had to be invented. The pseudonym—he was born Eric Blair—was very likely a tool for preserving his privacy as well as a psychological ruse, part of an effort to get himself writing in a certain style; his writing as Orwell stood in contrast to the work he did as Eric Blair, allowing him to let go of sentimental propensities that had marred his early work. “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality,” he wrote in “Why I Write.” Surely the pseudonym played some role in that effacement.

After the publication of Animal Farm, which brought wealth and renown, he longed to escape both, telling the writer Arthur Koestler, “Everyone keeps coming at me wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc—you don’t know how I pine to get free of it all and have time to think again.”207

writing is “a horrible, exhausting struggle,” but still he wrote unceasingly.

Orwell’s dedication to writing superseded all else that might be considered important in life, including friendships and romances.

At this point, he’d inevitably dive into another extreme episode, living as a vagrant in the slums, or joining the action in the Spanish Civil War, or moving to a desolate Scottish isle, undergoing long periods of research before spewing forth a book.

if animals were to become aware of their strength in relation to humans, humans would lose their power over them. To him, it was the perfect metaphor to explain the suppression of the proletariat at the hands of the rich, a concept he’d been eager to examine in his fiction. “I proceeded to analyse Marx’s theory from the animals’ point of view,” he said. “From this point of departure, it was not difficult to elaborate the story.”216

“The rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of job,”

For Orwell, it was most important to secure the hunk of clay first and worry about sculpting it later. Orwell arrived at his spare style by reading the work of many other authors, internalizing the styles of his favorites. He drew on the their work in many ways, often blatantly. From a very early age, Orwell appreciated literature with a political bent, especially Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which he read at least seven times during his lifetime, starting on the eve of his eighth birthday.219

“He is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is a book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of,” Orwell wrote in the essay “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” in 1946.