More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For Morrison, the prospect of sitting down to write doesn’t come laced with the dread that cripples so many writers. Quite the opposite, in fact: “Writing has always been a solace,” she says. It’s “where I spend the liveliest, most confident part of my day.”51 When she’s writing, she feels “almost . . . magnificent.”
Morrison’s novels are concerned with the “how it happened.” The narrator in The Bluest Eye sums it up as well as Morrison ever has: There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
The characters themselves are part of the why and how. They come after that initial idea. “Once you have an idea,” she says, “then you try to find a character who can manifest the idea for you.”
This plot foreshadowing was entirely deliberate, as were most things about Edith Wharton. She always knew each of her characters and their fates this well, having worked out “from the first exactly what is going to happen to every one of them.”
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.
For Orwell, it was most important to secure the hunk of clay first and worry about sculpting it later.
Armed with a confidence in his own abilities that bordered on hubris, Nabokov never wavered. Ironically, it was that very hubris (“I write like a genius”) that kept him steadily at work from one decade to the next.
But his own life may have been the biggest literary influence of all. “Imagination is a form of memory,” he said.
Writing would always be difficult under these circumstances, but over time, the pretending ceded to doing, as living in hiding became the new normal.
Didion keeps notes all the time, even more so when she is writing a book. In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes: “See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.”
Kerouac was in reality hardly a free spirit, plagued by his search to find the right way to live; he was not so much unhinged as he was meticulously organized; and finally, the 120-foot scroll was not the first draft of On the Road, but rather the culmination of a couple years of work—these are the true realities of Jack Kerouac’s writing days.
The subject that most fascinated Ernest Hemingway as a writer revealed itself to be Ernest Hemingway, and his fiction started off and remained intensely autobiographical.
Rivaling his talent with the written word was Hemingway’s knack for networking, which had as much to do with his success as anything. At the same time he was working so hard to develop his writing chops, he made sure that those who might further his career knew him and liked him.
“The test of a book is how much good stuff you can throw away,” he said.
Wherever he was, Hemingway started by rewriting the previous days’ work, then moving forward, always going until around noon, at which time he was done entirely, both mentally and physically.
Joyce also loved to take walks, alone or with company. In his high school days, he wandered the streets of Dublin daily, exploring obscure nooks and observing obscure people.
Ultimately, Joyce had to leave his native country in order to write about it the way he wanted, and he never set foot in Ireland again after 1912, the year he turned thirty.490 Not even his father’s death and funeral in 1931 could lure him.
David Norris, a director of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, put it this way: “For Joyce, Dublin was always the Dublin of 1904. The clock stopped. That meant he had stable material with which to work as an artist.”
“Well if I have to deal with being fucking depressed,” he says, “I’ll figure out some way to make some art out of it.”
Unlike a writer such as Jack Kerouac, Díaz’s life informs his fiction, but his fiction isn’t directly based on it. The way he describes it, his real life serves the same function as a theater set: The scene is recognizable from his life, but the minutiae of what happens within it comes from the imagination.
He became drunk easily and didn’t hold his liquor well, which can be charming only when one is very, very young. Over time, Fitzgerald found himself unable to strike a note of moderation, and his days became an increasing and continual struggle to remain sober enough to write worthwhile material.
Also around that time, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler became a go-to read that he would come back to again and again, including Butler’s theories on the impact of wealth on a person’s soul. Fitzgerald even organized his own notebooks using Butler’s as a template.
Although a compulsive planner in his work, Fitzgerald rarely followed through on his own agendas. He loved the idea of order—his letters to Perkins and Ober are filled with plans, timelines, and self-prescribed deadlines.
Not a pure recluse, then; just a guy who found that he thrives on solitude. More often than with friends, throughout his writing career Roth passed the evening with a good book, a not only enjoyable activity, but one that he found useful in terms of keeping the mind working.
But the details can sometimes come back to bite Atwood. If she runs into trouble, it’s often because she gets enthralled by the details and descriptions to the detriment of plot. She has in fact abandoned novels that, as she puts it, “have wonderful descriptions of things, but nothing actually occurs.”651
The way Smith sees it, this kind of approach denotes a certain category of writer: the Micro Manager. Authors fall into one of two primary camps, she explained in her 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind.691 Macro Planners work out the structure of their novels and then write within that structure. Micro Managers, on the other hand, don’t rely on an overarching configuration (don’t even conceive of one), but rather home in on each sentence, one by one, and each sentence, as they come to it, becomes the only thing that exists.
