Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process

The Book in the Mind

7 The Book in the Mind “A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.” — e. l. doctorow “aLL wrItINg IS autobIograPhy of the IMagINatIoN,” Susan Fromberg Schaeffer says. “Part of what goes on in writing is [an] interweaving of yourself and the subject.” Thus, every novel you write will be autobiographical, because it will grow out of your own experience of the world. There are many ways fiction may be autobiographical: It may be directly autobiographical, giving the form and • focus of a novel to a real experience or set of experiences. It may be indirectly autobiographical, using a real experi- • ence to spin a completely new story. It may find its genesis in your obsession with the experi- • ence of someone else, someone you know or someone you’ve only read or heard about. Such a novel is obliquely autobiographical: you recognize someone else’s story as akin to the life issues you struggle to resolve for yourself. In fact, these issues and your need to find a way to come to terms with them are probably what made you want to write a novel in the first place. Rooted in the most intense, often most painful, experiences in your life, they are your material, the most fundamental elements of every story you will ever write. Each writer’s material is unique, utterly his own. It carries the authority of experience and shimmers with the yearning to understand and come to terms with that experience. It is dangerous stuff. To find and use it, you have to plumb the depths of your soul. As Dorothy Allison says, “The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst 8 wrItINg a NoveL stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.” Chances are, you already know what your material is. You just have to find the courage to face it. If you don’t know, or if you think your life has been too boring or small to have yielded anything interesting enough to write about, consider Flannery O’Connor’s observation: “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.” For example, Jill McCorkle’s July 7th tells the story of one day in the life of a small town in North Carolina. No matter who you are or what your life has been, you have material. To find it, Theodore Weesner suggests, “Identify things that hurt, that caused pain enough to make you change how you perceive the world. When did it hurt? What made it hurt? Who were the people involved? It can be a modest hurt; it can be a big hurt. A very personal hurt, private , secret. Once you can do that, you can begin to try to create a story through characters and action.” In search of your own material, pump up your courage and consider these questions: What broke your heart? • What broke, or nearly broke, your spirit? • What scares you to death? • What hurts you more than anything? • What makes you so happy you can hardly bear it? • What are your secrets? • Was there some ideal time in your life to which you long • to return? What is still so painful that you cannot let go of it? • What enrages you? • What never fails to make you cry? • What do you wish had never happened to you or someone • you love? What deeply offends your sense of justice? • the Book In the MInd 9 What about your own life do you feel that you will never • understand? Delving even deeper, make a list of the times in your life when change occurred, times you think of in terms of before and after. Your list might include a move, a divorce, a death, an accident, an illness, a love affair, the birth of a child. Anything that seems significant to you, anything that in your mind marks some kind of ending and beginning in your life. There are always visual images surrounding these kinds of experiences, usually involving tension of some kind. These images are your “stuff”: the wellspring of raw material...