When our writers’ group met this week one of our number described how the rise of the ‘plotting and typing’ approach to writing was driving her demented. How all the work is done before you’ve typed a word and then you just carry on thwacking through, typing typing typing … .
But how, however much is planned ahead (even though planning is necessary), in the end the story will just be what it will be. How a story is quite subversive in the way it will just suggest things. How getting it right is a very mysterious experience.
Needless to say I entirely agree. And then I found an essay by Patricia Lockwood at The Tin House, called How Do We Write Now? Lockwood is a poet so her prose is particularly lyrical. The full article is here but she said she was happy for me to quote a few of her suggestions for what to do (and what not to do) first thing in the morning, if you write:
The first necessity is to claim the morning … if I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day.
The single best way to give the morning back to myself is to open a real book as I drink my first cup of coffee. I’m not sure why real books are best. I think the pages remind me that I have fingerprints.
It sometimes helps to let someone else tell you what to do, so listen: … Read the most minute descriptions you can find about other artistic processes: Moss Hart writing plays with George S. Kaufman, his teeth glued together with terrible fudge; Maya Angelou on the road in Europe with the company of Porgy and Bess.
If you have an afternoon, cook something that takes a long time, it will think along with you.
Keep a physical notebook. Remember how to use the kind of pen that runs out … . Learn the names of trees.
The best advice. All of it.
And the thing I would love to have made in a parallel universe where time is infinite and all things are possible is a glass of tea I was given the other night after dinner. I had no idea how it would look or taste, I just asked for what Frantoio – a restaurant in London we’d never been to before – described as lily and jasmine tea. The first thing that happened was a waiter brought a large wine glass and set it beside me. Then he put something that looked like a nutmeg into the glass. Then he poured boiling water onto the nutmeg lookalike and told me to wait. So I did. And this is what happened.
And it was entirely delicious. And, if you’re my kind of vintage, it might remind you of those magical paper flowers you dropped into a glass of water and watched bloom.
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