1. Organic Writing

"When you sit down to write a book, how much of it do you already have fixed in your mind? Do you know how it will end? Do you know how it will get there?"

This is one of the questions that comes up most frequently when I meet my readers. (It runs a close second to "What is Bill Brohaugh really like?" and is a whole lot easier to answer.) And it's a point, certainly, that I've addressed from time to time over the years, discussing the relative merits of planning and spontaneity, the security of a detailed outline, the freedom of travelling without a formal itinerary.

I was thinking the other day that, however carefully the writer plans ahead, with or without an outline, you never really know exactly what's going to happen next in any truly engaging piece of fiction. Because good writing is never merely a matter of assembling a boxful of component parts according to a sheet of directions, and that holds true even when you're the one who handcrafted the parts and wrote the directions.

Writing, you might say, is an organic process. It grows as it goes. Each page is the product of everything that has gone before it, including of course the preceding page. I may know—or think I know—exactly what I'm going to write today and tomorrow. But something unplanned will happen during today's stint at the typewriter, some unimportant piece of dialogue, some bit of description—and what I write tomorrow will be changed by it.

Here's an illustration, from a letter I received from another writer a few months ago.

In a story I'm working on now, I needed an unusual barkeep, and in creating her I gave her just three fingers on one hand. No reason, other than to make her distinctive. But by the end of the first chapter, I let her do some of the talking, and she explained how she had lost two fingers, and very shortly the loss of the fingers became important to the plot then unfolding. Including reference to the three-fingered hand was, in a sense, sowing a seed that I harvested—by making certain fictional connections—later.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Sometimes significant plot developments derive from minor character tags or scene dressing, as the writer above describes it. In other instances, little bits of business which the writer drops into one chapter will create echoing elements in later chapters, in a way that seems to give the overall work a fuller texture.

Sometimes what looks like a theme—and would very likely get labeled one by a critic—grows out of this sort of organic accident. An example that occurs to me cropped up in The Triumph of Evil, a book I wrote some years ago under the pen name Paul Kavanagh (and due to be reissued in a year or so under my own name). Early on, the lead character, one Miles Dorn, watches robins nesting outside his window. Later on, his young mistress's pet cat kills a baby robin. That scene, which led to an interesting emotional exchange between Dorn and the girl, would never have happened had I not had him looking out the window earlier on with no plan to make use of what he saw there.

But that wasn't the extent of avian influence in that book. At another point in the book, Dorn is in a city and watches a woman feeding pigeons in the park. He muses that for all he knows the woman is poisoning the birds, and ruminates some on pigeon eradication programs which so affect the birds that they lay eggs without shells. And, still later, he's in New Orleans and wanders into a museum where he sees row after row of glass cases containing stuffed birds, some of them of species which have since become extinct.

If anyone were dotty enough to think The Triumph of Evil merited scholarly analysis, some sort of thesis could be propounded on the use of birds as a symbol in the book. (I wouldn't be surprised if there were other mentions I've since forgotten.) Now we could argue that such a thesis would be pure nonsense, since the author is in a position to attest that he had no conscious intention of using birds as a symbol, or as a metaphor for something or other. On the other hand, I wouldn't dream of denying that one bird reference gave rise to another, unconsciously if not consciously, and I am perfectly willing to entertain the hypothesis that my unconscious mind may have had some sort of grand design in mind, one way or another.

Most of us who've spent a fair amount of time writing have come to see that the conscious analytical/intellectual part of the mind has only a small amount to do with what winds up on the page. It's another portion of the mind altogether that just plain knows, sentences after the introduction of a newly-imagined character, what that character will or won't do, say, notice, respond to, or remember. It's that obscure side of the mind, too, that keeps producing fictional ideas—not just the initial idea that sparks the creation of a piece of writing, but the endless parade of creative ideas which must follow to see the work through to completion.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the non-writer's perennial question, as if the initial idea is everything, as if after that one merely has the tiresome chore of filling in the blanks. But it is not like that at all. The writer's mind generates ideas without pause from the first page to the last. Whenever a character opens a door, the writer has to think of something to be on the other side of it. Some of the larger pieces of furniture in the room, if you will, are dictated by a plotline that has already been determined, but other furnishings must be dreamed up on the spot, and some of them will derive from what has gone before, and will lead to what ultimately follows.

My perception of my own role in this process has varied from time to time. At times I think I am the source of all my work. At other times I see myself more as channel than source, conveying stories from some unknowable well—the universal unconsciousness, the sublime music of the spheres, the mind of God, call it what you will. Perhaps everything we would write already exists in perfect form; it emerges on the page in one degree or another of imperfection, depending upon the extent to which we are open channels.

What is it, Arnold?

I was just wondering if you were going to suggest we use Ouija boards instead of typewriters, sir.

Not unless you can find one with an automatic carriage return, Arnold. No, I'm not so much recommending that we try to channel our writing as suggesting that we're always doing just that, that that's precisely what our imagination and intuition is always doing.

Let's return for a moment to the letter from the writer who created (or channeled, or whatever) the three-fingered bartendress, sowing a seed for later harvest.

Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Block.