Writing Process Questions For Writers

“How does a book or piece of writing begin to take shape in your imagination?
How do you work – do you plan carefully or explore in the dark, trusting the process?
Do writers have any moral responsibility in their work, wider than fidelity to their personal vision?”

I was recently invited by a friend and colleague to respond to questions about the writing process. As I worked through my answers to ten questions I found that the responses engaged me in a way I had not expected and opened me to some fundamentals about ‘my’ process that I enjoyed and that surprised me. The questions and answers follow an attribution to the source (ARVON and The Write Factor) of the exercise. – Robert Donohue

“ARVON, A place where people come together as a community of Writers” 

Arvon is a UK creative writing charity http://www.arvonwritingroom.org/admin/

which in partnership with The Write Factor - http://www.thewritefactor.co.uk/ - have issued an invitation to writers to respond to questions that get to important elements of the writing process.

Those ARVON questions and my responses follow - 

1. How does a book or piece of writing begin to take shape in your imagination? Do you feel your writing is a process of inventing or discovering?

Response - Personal recollections spur me to write; incidents in which I have had some strong feeling form the core of that encouragement. When I’m able organize a rough outline or some meaningful value to my remembrance and can follow events from beginning to end, with a measure of tension or colorful images of place, either intact or concocted, I am moved at the prospect and start building the set into a piece. Discovery is the larger part at the beginning of the process but in the end the early bits and pieces fall away and invention takes over. Sometimes as I invent, the origin of the original event will resurface to challenge what I’m building or to correct it with a more significant truth; I will respect that discovery and bring it into the invention.

2. What things trigger your imaginative process (for example, significant personal experiences, particular people, places, objects, dream imagery, myths, history, etc)?

Response - Historic events and personal stories stir my imagination. A photograph from an American Civil War battlefield, followed by a visit to that place, followed by an anecdote I heard of General Ulysses Grant and his young son upon their arrival in Washington D.C., followed by a dream image in which I saw myself as a subordinate of a leader in a hopeless situation, combined over a long period of four years to help form the foundation of a novel (that’s yet to be written) of the personal history and observations of a fictional character during the final thirteen months of the American Civil War. 

It was dream imagery, involving a monk in Renaissance Italy, and my personal experiences as a member of a religious community in my youth, and the birthing labor of a loved niece that began imaginings for the work of my first attempt at writing a novel. As mentioned in my response to the first question, the specifics of these elements fell away quickly once the form of the story’s beginning, middle, and vague end developed, and the work of invention took over. 

There has been an opaque image of my father in the late 1920’s standing outside a building in New York City late in the evening, waiting for my mother, as he smokes a cigarette and considers something (no idea at present what’s in his head) that has been agitating for more than five years as the foundation of another novel. Like most people, my parents’ early relationship mystifies me and I am excited at the thought of re-imagining them under those tense and wonderfully revealing pressures of their separate and combined psyches. New York City of the 1920’s and early “30’s provides a rich noir background and I feel very comfortable with the atmospheric intricacies of that place and time.

3. How do you work - do you plan carefully or explore in the dark, trusting the process?

Response - I trust the process. I place a spade into the earth and dig until my arms are tired or the hole feels deep enough. Then I stop and read what’s on the page after several hours and a few thousand words. I ask if what I’m looking at meets my criteria for where I believe I wish to be in the story. I prefer that my stories have short beginnings and long middles in which characters are fleshed and plot loops take place and which have tumbling endings where I’m able to feel the movement toward climax and denouement. 

I have tried to meticulously plan my work but I don’t like the act of writing and when I’ve planned to the point that I sort of know where things are to be going my distaste grows even as I put words on the page and I feel a pressure to get up and make myself a sandwich. 

When I stick to the general feel for where I am in the overall concept the sense of mystery and invention keep me comfortable enough to keep digging and piling results into heaps along the trench that I can then sort afterward.

4. Do you feel in control of your writing or are you responsive to the requirements of the work as it unfolds?

Response - I sort of feel in control when editing/cutting. Cutting always feels like pulling a trigger or plunging a knife somewhere: it’s about death and in that sense it’s clean. I feel I’m dreaming when I’m discovering or inventing. Like most fiction writers, I suspect, I have spent long writing periods having fun and believing I was developing something that would work to my wonderment and the appreciation of others and then set that work aside as either something for a later incarnation or an infatuation that I lovingly must leave. I fear control. My experience with it has been that it provides me more often than not with the illusion of certainty but that I usually discover that my idea of control extracts a price I don’t wish to pay in that the work is too often not original or takes a direction that supports something in my ego and not truth.

5. Do you write a first draft quickly and then revise it, or build carefully from the start?

Response - Quick first drafts work well at the scene level and sometimes at the chapter level. I cannot imagine completing a quick first draft for a novel. I wouldn’t recognize anything past the first chapter and by the time I’d completed the full first draft of the novel I wouldn’t recall what I actually had in mind in the early chapters. I do build scenes carefully, working to be sure that the scene serves to move and that the characters are as clear as possible about what they want and that all decisions as to who and what will be satisfied and why have been made and either delivered or held back deliberately. I trust that what I don’t know about the story will be revealed as I move forward and try not to worry when that revelation will occur.

6. How do you deal with blocks in the writing process?

Response - I abandon aspiration to create and let the moment have its way. This assumes a short block of time of course. When I’m unable to work for extended periods, i.e. several days, I sometimes resort to research for existing narrative or edit a short story or write poetry or I read challenging fiction. There is something about being at work on writing that gives me confidence that the desire will return and the action of putting new words to the page will pick up. I sometimes have experienced very long periods where I was unable to do new work. At these times I will look for a writing workshop or tutorial and will sit with other writers offering my work for critique or participating in writing prompts or listening to experienced writers talk about craft.

7. Do you write in service of any particular values?

Response - I value the idea of the story as a dream and am less interested in relating facts or fixed objects and firm story elements than I am of establishing place and rendering character interiors in that space.

I hold to the idea of authenticity and don’t feel comfortable mimicking or copying. I’m sure that I’m guilty of doing just that but I try to clean my prose and my narrative of anything resembling other writers’ work. An exception to my 'mimicry' rule has to do with Anton Chekhov: I was gobsmacked at the magic in the air about Chekhov’s characters, the electric sense of tension that crackled when lovers met or friends fell out or observers, witnessing the grotesque became what they witnessed. I aspire to infuse some of this kind of feel in the atmospheres I write.

8. What have you learned from the practice of your craft?

Response - I have discovered that it is more often the case that I feel separated from stories I write than I feel connected to them. It’s clear that I have put the words on the page that appear there but once I’m done with the work I don’t recognize them as coming from me. I’ve also learned that my work needs to be protected from other eyes during the birthing period and that I’m never quite sure when that period ends. This dilemma can be catastrophic if I move too early. I am constitutionally incapable of being honest about myself by myself and there are aspects of my work that don’t belong on the page. I need criticism. But I’m also unable to hear valid criticism when my work hasn’t developed sufficient breath and voice to dialog with me such that honesty and authenticity are assured/safe. I have missed brilliant input to my work because I hadn’t settled my mind and my acceptance into my work sufficiently to listen from a safe distance; this is also tragic. Picking the right moment to hear and respecting the work as sturdy enough to survive always challenges me.

9. What is the relationship between the writer's imagination and that of the reader?

Response - The writer has prepared an invitation for the reader to attend the retelling of a dream sequence or an event of some importance or interest, i.e. to take a trip with the writer. The fiction reader owes little or nothing to the writer other than to open him or her self a smidgeon to the suspension of disbelief. The writer operates the throttles and steers; he stokes the engine with coal and warns of hazards ahead. The reader rides. The writer has a profound responsibility to tell a story with impeccable truth. Accuracy isn’t the aim; truth is. With or without the reader in mind the writer ought to carry the responsibility of truth to the story’s purpose and respect for the reader’s time and effort (and cost/expense) in mind at all times.

10. Do writers have any moral responsibility in their work, wider than fidelity to their personal vision?

Response – The only moral responsibility I consider in my work is that I must not lie. My personal vision isn’t sufficient if it conflicts with a truth that I am aware of and recognize that by pursuing a particular vision I might create an intellectual hazard for some readers. An extreme example might be if I were to portray a character as credible – e.g. an authority on European Fascism in the 20^th Century – and supplied him with irrefutable evidence that the Holocaust had not taken place. If I did this without somehow discrediting the information or the character I could not proceed with the story as I envisioned it. Beyond that I don’t feel there is a moral standard for others and believe every writer needs to develop their own.

Sadness and The Teacher

Early one morning last Summer I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

As I walked from room to room, examining testimony, gazing at artifacts and watching film of witnesses and participants to the horror and history that this poignant memorial portrays, the overwhelming sense I felt was sadness. I felt sad for the world of the sisters, Anne and Margot Frank, trapped in innocence and powerless at the hand dealt them in a time and place in which louts terrorized unchecked. 

As I climbed steps and walked narrow hallways of the dark interiors that served as prison, brief haven and finally as a place of capture I thought of my own sisters and imagined them when they were young. 

How different my two younger sisters’ childhood had been. How, though at times they chafed in their dealings, they loved each other deeply and how freely they trusted that love. I was unable to imagine, had they been forced to endure what Margot and Anne had experienced, how my sisters would not have been destroyed. I shook at the prospect.

The magnitude of the Holocaust is beyond my ability to grasp--so inhumane that I can’t take it in and sort it other than with horror and disorientation. But thinking of Margot and Anne I am able to impose images of my sisters and a measure of the brutality experienced here takes faint form. And so my young sisters accompanied me on that day in July and the memory of them made it possible to feel, in my way, a tragedy that no one should be permitted to ignore or deny.

And yet, life proceeds even when we all are exposed to the horrors of our pasts. 

I sat beneath a tree near the entrance to the seminary I attended in Baltimore in 1959, reading a copy of “The Diary of Anne Frank”. I was filled with a sense of  sophistication at the thought that I was reading a book that was popular and dealt with meaningful issues that extended beyond parochial interests of my Catholic religion and the narrowness of a provincial Irish-Catholic life I knew growing up in my New York City neighborhood.

A priest, the President of the college I attended, approached me as I sat reading and asked that I hand him the book. As I gave it to him I felt a pride that I had taken the initiative to move beyond the few novels that made up my classroom requirements and had reached into the secular world for something of intellect beyond catechism.

“Who approved this reading?” he asked.

It had not occurred to me that anyone would need to approve anything I read since I wasn’t about to bring works that were  banned by the Church or on lists distributed by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith onto the campus of a Catholic seminary.

I stammered that I could not recall. Something I’m sure grew from my surprise at the question and my quick awareness that my reading preferences were clearly not mine to treat willy-nilly. My answer, as I think of it now, was more no answer at all.

“You don’t need to be reading this Jew propaganda,” the priest said. 

He held the book firmly—closed—in his hand, took a full draw on his cigarette and blowing smoke from his mouth and nose, he stared at me with clear objection. He took long deliberate strides  away from me--he was a little man with a massive head that made me think ‘dwarf’ whenever I wasn’t otherwise terrified of him--and toward the priests and seminarians walking in small groups along the school’s circular driveway. 

What I remember most of that exchange was the immediate conviction that settled inside me: I would not be stopped from reading that book or any other that I saw fit to read. I don;t know where the knowledge came from but I was startled at the  awareness. I had never held a rebellious thought toward my religion, toward a member of the clergy or to any statement by any member of the clergy, until that moment. 

Since then I have held thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of such thoughts. That priest's boorish act set me free: he showed me an interior path of examination that opened me to truths and understandings I cannot imagine would have happened had he not behaved as he had. In that sense, I suppose, he was my teacher.