Author Website
The problem of beginning …
The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a story (or a chapter or a scene) you should use all five sentences right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph: touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.
Jackson Pollock once said,
in answer to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings out of “accidental” splatterings, “I don’t use the accident. I deny the accident.”
The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.
Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course – sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of creation, gives me the audacity to experiment.
Even if you waste the entire day running errands and responding to “fire drills,” as my husband calls last-minute, drop-everything requests (which for me might range from picking a sick kid up from school to reading page proofs), you can redeem the day if, at some point – for fifteen minutes or an hour – you write.
Nothing else counts when you’re writing a novel. Shopping for groceries. Going to the dentist. Doing laundry. Carpooling to a baseball game. Making dinner. Answering important emails. Getting much-needed exercise.
Of course these other things matter. It’s all real life. But if you don’t put the words on the page, you have wasted a day. Because every minute you spend writing brings you a small step closer to finishing your book.
When you’re working on a novel, the words on the page are the only things that count.
Recently, in an impulsive moment, I offered to do the flower arrangements for a big party for a close friend. Other than cutting off the ends of the stems when you bring them home and avoiding spray-painted carnations, I don’t know much about flowers, but I figured how hard can it be?
Then the teak boxes, glass vases, hard green floral foam, clear glass marbles, and mountains of Gerber daisies, long-stemmed roses, and greenery arrived. 
I called my friend Liz in a panic. Liz is an artist not only by profession – she is a painter and illustrator – but in every aspect of her life. I knew she’d be able to help. Sure enough, she quickly made sense of the chaos in my kitchen. She soaked the floral foam in water, crushed the ends of the roses (with a hammer; who knew?), artfully trimmed the spiky leaves. She filled the teak boxes in a way that looked both sophisticated and natural, as if the flowers had arranged themselves. When I professed amazement at her artistry, she looked up from her work with genuine puzzlement. “What do you mean? Anybody can do this. It’s not brain surgery.”
Well, yes, Liz, actually it is. If you don’t have an intuitive visual artistic sense, arranging flowers can seem as daunting as cutting into someone’s cranium with a scalpel.
We all have areas of proficiency we take for granted. Liz makes arranging gorgeous bouquets look easy because she has a natural inclination for it, takes genuine pleasure in it, and has honed her artistic vision with years of practice. Recognizing and nurturing your natural creative inclinations is, I think, an important step in the process of taking yourself seriously as an artist (or musician or poet or novelist). I write fiction because I love it. I love it because it allows me to express what seems inexpressible, to weave stories that reveal larger truths about the way people relate to each other. This desire colors everything; it is the way I see the world.
Needless to say, the flowers were a hit. I tried to give my Cyrano credit when possible, but sometimes simply smiled and nodded and reaped the praise. What I was really taking credit for, of course, was my own genius in recognizing my limitations.
In the morning, when I sit down to write, I think of this depiction of the creative process from the novel The Waves by Virginia Woolf :
“I took my mind, my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about among these odds and ends, sticks and straws…. It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together — this is the daily battle…. The trees, scattered, put on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself into a dancing light.”
A literary historical novel set in Civil War-era North Carolina, based on a true family story and told from the perspective of Sarah Bunker, one of two sisters who married Chang and Eng, the famous conjoined twins…learn more