Ideas are everywhere. Lift up a big rock and look under it, stare into a window of a house you drive past and dream about whatâs going on inside. Read the newspaper, ask your father about his sister, think of something that happened to you or someone you know and then think about it turning out in an entirely different way. Make up two characters and put them in a room together and see what happens. Sometimes it starts with a person, a place, a voice, an event. For some writers itâs always the same point of entry; for me itâs never the same. If Iâm really stuck, nothing helps like looking through a book of photography. Open it up, look at a picture, make up a story.
If you decide to work completely from your imagination, you will find yourself shocked by all the autobiographical elements that make their way into the text. If, on the other hand, you go the path of the roman à clef, youâll wind up changing the details of your life that are dull. You will take bits from books youâve read and movies youâve seen and conversations youâve had and stories friends have told you, and half the time you wonât even realize youâre doing it. I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience Iâve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. Itâs from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what youâve forgotten, that ideas start to grow. (I could make a case for the benefits of wide-ranging experience, both personal and literary, as enriching the compost, but the life of Emily Dickinson neatly dismantles that theory.)
When I was putting my first novel together in my head I didnât take notes, nor did I write down my customersâ orders. I figured if I came up with something that was worth remembering I would remember it, and I would forget about the rest. (This approach did not extend to what people wanted for dinner.) I donât think my theory on memory is necessarily trueâIâm sure Iâve forgotten plenty of things that would seem good to me nowâbut not writing things down, especially in the early stages of thinking them through, does cause me to concentrate more deeply and not become overly committed to anything that isnât firmly in place. Also, in the early stages of thinking up a novel Iâm not exactly sure what I would write down anyway. Itâs like walking through a field in a snowstorm and for a long time I see nothing but the snow, but then in the distance thereâs something, a tree or a figure or smoke, I just donât know. I always have the sensation that Iâm straining to see whatâs in front of me. The snow lessens for a minute and I catch a glimpse of an idea, but when I get closer the light starts to fade. I squint constantly. It goes on like this for a long time. If I were taking notes they would read: I see something. A shape? I have no idea . Itâs not exactly the stuff that literary archives are made of.
The Patron Saint of Liars , the novel largely assembled at a now-defunct Nashville branch of T.G.I. Fridayâs, started like this: there was a girl in a Catholic home for unwed mothers and she goes into labor. The home is far out in the country, maybe forty-five minutes from the hospital, and the girl decides sheâs not going to tell anyone whatâs going on. Sheâs not going to cry out because she wants to ride in the ambulance with her baby, although I think that should be plural, I vaguely remember she had twins. (Were I in analysis, I would say in retrospect this idea probably had something to do with the fact that I had left my husband and was very, very glad I wasnât pregnant and didnât have a child. But who knows? I certainly wasnât thinking about that at the time. I rolled some silverware into napkins, took daiquiris to the
If you decide to work completely from your imagination, you will find yourself shocked by all the autobiographical elements that make their way into the text. If, on the other hand, you go the path of the roman à clef, youâll wind up changing the details of your life that are dull. You will take bits from books youâve read and movies youâve seen and conversations youâve had and stories friends have told you, and half the time you wonât even realize youâre doing it. I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience Iâve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. Itâs from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what youâve forgotten, that ideas start to grow. (I could make a case for the benefits of wide-ranging experience, both personal and literary, as enriching the compost, but the life of Emily Dickinson neatly dismantles that theory.)
When I was putting my first novel together in my head I didnât take notes, nor did I write down my customersâ orders. I figured if I came up with something that was worth remembering I would remember it, and I would forget about the rest. (This approach did not extend to what people wanted for dinner.) I donât think my theory on memory is necessarily trueâIâm sure Iâve forgotten plenty of things that would seem good to me nowâbut not writing things down, especially in the early stages of thinking them through, does cause me to concentrate more deeply and not become overly committed to anything that isnât firmly in place. Also, in the early stages of thinking up a novel Iâm not exactly sure what I would write down anyway. Itâs like walking through a field in a snowstorm and for a long time I see nothing but the snow, but then in the distance thereâs something, a tree or a figure or smoke, I just donât know. I always have the sensation that Iâm straining to see whatâs in front of me. The snow lessens for a minute and I catch a glimpse of an idea, but when I get closer the light starts to fade. I squint constantly. It goes on like this for a long time. If I were taking notes they would read: I see something. A shape? I have no idea . Itâs not exactly the stuff that literary archives are made of.
The Patron Saint of Liars , the novel largely assembled at a now-defunct Nashville branch of T.G.I. Fridayâs, started like this: there was a girl in a Catholic home for unwed mothers and she goes into labor. The home is far out in the country, maybe forty-five minutes from the hospital, and the girl decides sheâs not going to tell anyone whatâs going on. Sheâs not going to cry out because she wants to ride in the ambulance with her baby, although I think that should be plural, I vaguely remember she had twins. (Were I in analysis, I would say in retrospect this idea probably had something to do with the fact that I had left my husband and was very, very glad I wasnât pregnant and didnât have a child. But who knows? I certainly wasnât thinking about that at the time. I rolled some silverware into napkins, took daiquiris to the
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