The nuts and bolts of writing... 🖊️

“The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have a craft.”

Jean Erdman Campbell

Hi there, it’s been a while…

One of the things that always made me wonder when I was reading books in my early days was a pretty common question: how do they do it? How do authors come up with the stuff they write? It was a mystery to me for most of my life, and I assumed it had something to do with talents and gifts and all of that stuff. Then, when I actually started trying to do it myself, I ran into a somewhat telling interview with Stephen King. Basically, the interviewer asked him, 'why do you write all this horrific stuff?' His response was agile and somewhat mystifying. He said, 'what makes you think I have a choice?'

I didn't really get that in the early days. I still am not sure I fully understand it now, but I feel like I'm living it, because I think that is part of the creative process. It's baked right into it. The mystery of creation itself never goes. Where do stories come from? It's all well and good to say something along the lines of 'I am writing a zombie story about a guy in London who becomes patient zero and somehow does not lose his reasoning faculties... also there's a sentient crow that escapes from a lab in the U.S. and spreads mayhem' (true story, by the way - stay tuned for that bizarro caper). But I never really set out to write that story - rather, the story is what it is and it's up to me to deliver it. I heard Elizabeth Gilbert speak about a phenomenon on a podcast, wherein she was writing a story with the exact same elements as Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder some time before it was released. Then she got distracted from it for a few years. When she came back to it, she realized Patchett’s book was out and was almost identical to the one she had previously started. In her estimation, the stories are already written and if you miss your chance, someone else gets the inspiration.

Alan Watts, a philosophical entertainer to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for his influence on my life, once said that you could create a genius school, where day after day geniuses are streaming out, to the point where everybody was a genius, if you had two things: teachers who taught the students the technical skill in question, and teachers who showed the students how to get out of their own way. While I think it would be beyond the pale to label one's self genius (I think they call it an ego-verload), there seems to me to be something of merit to that idea when it comes to learning one's own artistic process. The first part is a simple but not easy - technical skill in pretty much any field can be taught, as long as the student has the discipline to make learning a big part of their life. The second part, the getting out of one's own way... now this is where the whole thing gets interesting.

Personally, I started with the first bit. The technical skills of expression were available to me, as I was learning the art of writing through my day job as a lawyer - not exactly fiction, but certainly I shot for impeccable style (good enough to put before a judge, anyway). I also (surprise surprise) read fiction for fun, and there are only so many times you can read good and bad pacing, plot, characterization, etc. until you start to osmotically understand what makes an interesting story. Then there’s the discipline to practice writing stories.

There was a book I read, called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, that is more like a motivational coach than anything that's going to help you develop good grammar and sentence structure and that kind of thing (Strunk and White's The Elements of Style can do you for that one). The War Of Art is an extremely enlightening text and I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn any form of art. It's very basic - butt in chair, no excuses. Do your work every day. He also speaks of the force, Resistance, that comes up and tries to throw a stick in our spokes - whether through addiction to substances, to bending the rules so one can make time for social plans, to loafing and Netflixing one’s self to death, to doing everything it can to keep us from writing. Somehow, there's always a comfortable thing that calls to us and tries to get us to give up on our dreams.

It seems silly, to believe in such a force as Resistance, or some foe with whom to do battle, because it starts skating into metaphysical territory. It's pretty much like saying that there is a force in this universe like the Muse, who smiles on us when we are seated in our chairs and doing our work, who shines down inspiration on her devotees - which is exactly how Pressfield describes it. Things just start to click after a while. Even though we've been writing page after page of less-than-pedestrian trash, somehow small worthwhile bits start to eke in. Without even planning it, we get glimpses of some vast treasure pile beyond the veil from which we are being fed coins.

But all the while, there is what I would call an experience of crushing self-doubt. Of being an impostor. Because, come on! You keep sitting down and writing and nothing but garbage keeps flowing out. No matter which way you try to slice the apple, the thing is mealy and rotten. There's nothing of substance, nothing that makes you feel like you are getting anywhere. Those stories you've been telling yourself about how useless you are - these are proving to be true. And yet, in spite of what seems like failure after failure, you keep putting your butt in the chair. This part requires grit - it's like trying to lose weight and in spite of all of your diligent efforts with food and exercise, the scale doesn't move. For months and years on end.

Grit aside, what about the second bit, the getting out of one's own way? As far as I have seen it, it comes down to a question of identity: who is the person getting in whose way? How can you get in your own way if you are singular being? In terms of self-doubt, there is a self and there is a doubter - a schism. Doesn't getting in one's own way require two separate things, one trying to go forward and another to get in the way? This is where the individual circumstances of the writer's process comes into focus. Each one of us has a unique way of creating art, as totally ours as anyone else's belongs to them. And - here is the important bit - none is better than the other. For example, in his book, On Writing, Stephen King was less than glowing about writing classes and groups. Verbatim, he said that he was ‘doubtful about writing classes, but not entirely against them.’ According to him, these writer’s groups that offer shared critiques of snippets of your work are distractions that pull you away from writing the thing. And, he said, ‘What about those critiques? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry.’ Per King, the real lessons that you need to learn are are learned with the door to your office closed. It's great to have people who take the business of writing seriously in a peer group, but unless you are making those mistakes yourself and analyzing your own work, you are not going to get a felt understanding of what makes a good story. I’m reminded of Carl Jung’s statement about a patient in psychotherapy, that ‘anything he has not acquired himself he will not believe in the long run, and what he takes over from authority merely keeps him infantile.’ But that’s just one line of thought, associated with a single writer. Other people, like Chuck Palahniuk, spent a great deal of time in writing groups over the years, learning from all kinds of established authors and others like him. His work is obviously of high caliber, as I think most would consider King's stuff. It seems he does not share King's opinion of the value of writing groups, though - it’s my understanding that he regularly offers writing workshops as part of his thing.

Then you have guys like Alan Watts, who just let everything flow and whose assistant said after his death that the editing was down to a couple of periods and punctuation here and there of the first draft. It came out, as it were, pretty much fully formed. Sure, it wasn’t fiction, but in my opinion, this off-the-cuff writing is absolutely wonderful.

Here's my process: I just sit down and write. I do not judge, I do not self-criticize, I do not assume that the first draft is always shit, as Mr. Hemingway allegedly declared. Been there, done that - got the t-shirt. I have to let it flow exactly as it wants to flow. It does not come out absolutely perfectly, but it comes out eerily better than I could have hoped. It's bizarre how things fit into each other when the book or story is finished. I don't outline, but I do ‘get’ book names and chapter titles in advance. When I say ‘get,’ I’m being as woo as a sage-smudging aficionado talking about ‘wisdom downloads from the great beyond.’ I usually won't know why a book is titled the way it is, nor even what the themes or messages or any of it is about, and then I finish writing the last chapter and realize that it has turned out to be a totally perfect title or subtitle, more appropriate than anything I might have come up with after the fact. It turns out that releasing the reins into the chaos of the mystery has dumped a perfectly ordered text into my lap. In those moments, I sit back and wonder at the existence of Pressfield's Muse or Gilbert’s idea about the independence of stories. The book seems to already have been written, I'm just on obstetric duty. Then I go through several drafts and have an editor who evaluates and gives criticism when I'm ready to give it up. That said, I have yet to rewrite an entire section of a story in its totality. But the idea of never rewriting anything as a general rule can seem amateurish, depending on whose opinion you read about the craft.

Herein lies the problem with dogma, or some traditional method of teaching of a skill in this part of the artistic arena: it always started as someone else's experience. If you want to learn how to write like Mr. X, then buy Mr. X's book on writing. Follow it to a tee and you may get a nice clone. But if your own process, which is by its nature unique to you, does not jive with dogma and you want to make it fit into the box that Mr. X says it should, you are getting in your own way. You are cutting yourself off at the knees because you're not letting the mystery flow where it wants to go. It takes courage, sure, because you might feel like you're actually going your own way, off into a vast unknown. In fact, you are - and that’s a good thing. Joseph Campbell once said that if you can see your path laid out in front of you, that’s not your path - it’s somebody else’s. In my universe, that repeated stepping out over the cliff like the Fool on the 0 of the tarot deck: that is the only way I can do it properly, be it life or writing. It’s the only way the Muse will smile on me and let me into the vast treasure trove beyond the veil. I spent years paying my dues, fighting the war of art, and now I have a peaceful method that produces stories with which I am happy - they are the kind of stories I would love to read. Many of my readers enjoy them, and like anything, there are some who do not. I do not frequently feel like an impostor anymore, though, because the stories are me, through and through. The only way one feels like an impostor when one is being one's self is because there is a split between identities - that wasn't me, that was Patricia, to quote the film Split. But who is the real self and who is the impostor? Does this divide actually exist? In my world, buying into the impostor thing is abdicating my responsibility to live a purposeful life. That is not going in one's own way but rather getting in one's own way.

This is a heretical opinion, I know. You have to maintain crushing self-doubt to be an artist, do you not? Certainly the memes on Facebook say so. But for me, the process of writing is about self-liberation. It's about an affirmative 'yes' to life, of no longer doubting that I am capable. Self-doubt was my dragon in this arena, to use Hero's Journey mythological terminology. But, in those same psycho-mythological terms, when you slay the dragon, you gain its power - you become the owner of its pile of gold. I played the impostor for most of my adult life - as a younger man I not only thought that living in fear was the only way forward, but I was certain I was never going to be good enough. That I would never have what it takes to be a writer. And yet, here I am, doing what I'm doing, and am quite happy to have finally found my voice. I am proudly me, an integrated being, moving forward in my own way.

Of course, it ain’t all rainbows and sunshine - nothing in life is. As Campbell said about walking your path, the birds still shit on you from time to time. But the value - the pure unadulterated wonder that comes from following your soul’s calling - it’s way more gratifying than anything Resistance has on its menu of short-term highs, addictions, and comforting paths to general malaise.

There it is, my writing process in a nutshell. It's my method - and it's not recommended. What is recommended is the first bit, if you have a dream of creating art. Grit and determination. Don't ever let Resistance take you down - you'll figure out how to get out of your own way eventually. I also recommend Jimmy Buffett's take on it.

Drop your comments in the box below if you have any thoughts!

Andrew