OUT OF THE BLUE…
The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Agnes De Mille
He lifted the sardine sandwich to his lips. She could see a couple of the fish tails, sticking out between the edges of the wheat bread. Not silvery, like the fishes’ shiny bodies. More like cellophane, these little fins. See-through, kind of. And dead, of course, right along with the rest of each sardine. But not dead and gone. Dead and here, about to be swallowed by the fourth or fifth bite.
How did most of these words, scribbled onto a file card a couple of years ago, end up in my completed manuscript? I haven’t a clue. One moment there was a blank card. The next, something about sardines, of all things, though as soon as I reread the passage, I could see its link (dead and gone?) to questions about the existence of an afterlife, a potential theme, I knew.
For weeks, I filled file cards, the stack growing thicker and thicker, with me alternately delighted and mystified by what appeared. The part of me that indulges in left brain thinking didn’t know how it would all finally come together. The other part – call it the unconscious, the higher Self, the muse – did know. By trusting in what arrived, seemingly out of the blue, I ultimately discovered a story along with a narrator’s voice.
Out of the blue...
I’d first played with this approach – described in the book, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler (Grove, 2005), when I began a previous work of fiction. Butler declares a moratorium on conventional brainstorming in favor of what he calls dreamstorming. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer insists that, for six to twelve weeks, one resist any temptation to develop outlines or plotlines.
He writes, “…you’re going to go into your writing space, you’re going to go into your dreamspace, you’re going to float around, and you’re going to dreamstorm potential scenes… you’ll try to float everywhere in the novel: beginning, middle, end – all over.” He assures the reader that, when it comes time to revisit all the cards and to arrange them in an order that makes sense, one will find the story that was there all along.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal – “How to Write the Great Novel” – reveals that a number of terrific writers use strikingly similar methods for getting the story on the page. For example, Dan Chaon’s recent novel, Await Your Reply, started out as scattered scenes recorded on cards: a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun, and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice.
Similarly, Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, had its genesis with two images: one of a patient lying in bed talking to a nurse, and another of a thief stealing a photograph of himself. Novelist Edwidge Danticat says she first creates a collage on a bulletin board, tacking up photos from trips to her native Haiti and images she clips from magazines, the collage sometimes growing large enough to fill four bulletin boards. Whether always writing before dawn or jotting down dreams daily or following images where they lead, these writers, too, honor a form of guidance that is more magical or numinous than logical.
“The crucial awareness you must keep is this: do not will the work,” Butler insists. “Do not write until it’s coming from your unconscious.”
I get this. (Apparently, so did J. R. R. Tolkien who wrote, “Not all who wander are lost.”) I accept that the more I welcome, rather than will, what comes in my writing, the closer I come to what I’m meant to write. What shows up on the page is not so much created, as given. Well, Spirit/Source, here I am.
