September 1 is the new January 1. If you lose track of time, Labor Day is the holiday that shakes you out of your reverie and reminds you that all those lovely resolutions you made last December now have only four months to come to fruition.
I’ve had a pretty decent writing year but I am forced to admit that client work and the garden took precedence from May to August. I have far more jars of pickles and tomatoes, far more frozen blueberries, figs, and spinach than short stories.
Would that my story crop matched the garden crop!
To inspire myself, this week I reviewed some quotes I’ve collected over the years from other writers and creative types. Some of these quotes have lived on my hard drive for more than thirty years. I’ve done little with them, and now—as a wiser and (ahem) older writer, I understand why. Most of them are full of it.
Let’s take the topic of process, for example. Here’s the late David Lynch offering advice on how to write a movie script. I saw him discuss this ages ago in a written interview. Decades later, he discussed it again in a video that went viral.
Here’s his advice:
“You get yourself a pack of 3x5 cards and you write a scene on each card and when you have 70 scenes you have a feature film. So on each card, you write the heading of the scene and then the next card, the second scene, the third scene, so you have 70 cards each with the name of the scene. Then you flesh out each of the cards and walk away you’ve got a script.”
I ask you: Is this useful advice? Do screenwriters, producers, and show runners today use index cards while blocking a script? Sure! Their work is collaborative and a cork-board of cards helps them communicate their vision to others, just as storyboards do.
Do fiction and nonfiction writers use the same technique? Yes! Not all, but I know people who do. One friend texted me a photo of his bulletin board when, disbelieving, I asked for proof.
I suppose you could do such thing, if you want to go to the expense. The Scrivener software I use even has a “cork-board” mode that allows writers to create digital index cards and move them around to build their story. But it is far from the only way to write a story, script, or whatever. I still rely on a scrap of paper, especially when outlining shorts. When a decent idea hits, I use whatever’s handy to capture it.
I am sure that a million film students watched this clip and bought index cards. A moment’s thought tells you that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about an index card. It’s a freaking blank slate. What matters is what you put on it.
I laugh every time I think of Lynch and his cards. He was possibly the most whacked-out moviemaker of his age. Some of his movies track as if they were indeed filmed not from a finished script but a stack of index cards, albeit dropped on the way to the set, hastily picked up, and sloppily reshuffled. What Lynch might have written on his cards would be vastly different from what you would scrawl on your cards.
Also, Lynch forgot to mention in that clip that his index cards—since they originated in his imagination—were made of equal parts straitjacket fabric, demon’s breath, chocolate shakes, and tuna melt sandwiches. Oh—and you could only buy them at a stationery store that has now, with his death, sadly closed up shop.
Back in the 1980s, I was a fan of the BBC series, The Singing Detective, written by Dennis Potter. He also wrote the BBC series Pennies From Heaven. You don’t need to have watched those productions or to have read any Dennis Potter to know how much he influenced British and American TV. To put it mildly, TV shows critics fawned over and called “groundbreaking”—such as The Sopranos, in which the real world blends seamlessly with the dark fantasy lives of its characters—would not have been possible if Potter had not unleashed his singular vision on the world. People say the same thing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—a series I loved—but to be fair Peaks aired three years after The Singing Detective, and 12 after Pennies.
In 1988, Potter did an interview in which he said in a roundabout way that he routinely explores the same themes—and that that was a good thing:
“I’m not afraid to keep going down that same road, you know. The more a writer writes and the more self-confident he becomes, the more he digs in the same little patch. To me, one of the definitions of an amateur writer is that he can appear to be versatile. He will write A and then he will write B before he’s finished A. Well, forgive me, but I think a real writer will be going A, A, A, and will never actually get to B, never wants to get to B.”
Intriguing quote. We know it’s true for him because he said it. But is it empirically true? (Is anything in this profession?) Do his words feel true to you? Do you think that if you are versatile that you are still an amateur?
The other night, at a book event, I heard a young writer quote Bob Dylan saying that he basically has written the same five songs over and over.
I cannot confirm that Dylan ever said this, but I think artists of all types do embrace core themes and explore them in their work repeatedly. It’s the nature of the artistic mind. You work to exorcise or relive experiences, feelings, memories. According to Rabbi Googlevitch, Picasso had no fewer than six art periods in his lifetime. Dali, says the good rebbe, had four.
Lawrence Block says in one of his nonfiction books for writers that outlines are hand-holding devices to give writers the confidence to write just this little piece. As more words hit the page, you deviate from the original plan or you revise the outline. I’m paraphrasing him, but that advice jibes with a famous line by E.L. Doctorow that gets quoted by other writers constantly:
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”Heaven help me, I cannot find the source for this quote. Let me observe that this is just enough advice to get a young writer in trouble, especially if they are attempting to write a book for the first time. The quote sounds reasonable. I hear those words, and the subtext assures me that novel-writing is a straightforward, linear process. The truth is, on some projects it doesn’t freaking matter if my headlights are on. I am likely to drive myself into a ravine. Or, somewhere between Chapter 13, Chapter X-P, and Chapter 67 Sirius-Blue, the car has turned into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, flown into a tree or submerged itself to take in a coral reef in the Dead Sea. Or the road has turned into molasses, and I am about to be baked into a loaf of Anadama bread, car and all.
When writers or artists say these things, they know that the spotlight or camera is on them. What they are about to say is being recorded for posterity. They want to look wise, even if that wisdom differs greatly from the messy truth of their process. So you should probably stop searching for truth in other people’s quotes—Are you listening, D’Agnese?—and enjoy them for what they tell you about the speaker.
When I was in college, I must have read this New York Times interview with E.L. Doctorow in which he argues that some of us are just innately blessed with the ability to glean truth from real life, regardless of our own backgrounds. (I was on a Doctorow kick at the time.)
“Henry James has a parable about what writing is. He posits a situation where a young woman who has led a sheltered life walks past an army barracks, and she hears a fragment of soldiers’ conversation coming through a window. And she can, if she’s a novelist, then go home and write a true novel about life in the army. You see the idea? The immense, penetrative power of the imagination and the intuition.”
Oh yes, young Joe thought. How profound. How deep! I don’t really have to research something before I write it. I can just glean inspiration from open windows!
At the time, I mentioned this line to a journalism professor of mine who had served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. In a heartbeat, he quipped, “Well, she might be able to, Joe, but I don’t want to read it.” (Once again, I have no idea where this Henry James parable originated. Anyone know?)
That professor loved mystery fiction. Reread parts of the Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe canons each year the way other people rewatch favorite Christmas movies. When Robert B. Parker made an appearance at the campus bookstore, he insisted a group of us students stop by and buy a few paperbacks. It’s the only time I had ever met Parker.
Another of the writers that prof urged me to read was James Lee Burke, whose books I later inhaled. Last year, Burke, then 87 years old, was interviewed on a podcast by North Carolina reporter Tommy Tomlinson. In that episode, Burke said that he had no plans to retire and no plans to wrap the Dave Robicheaux franchise anytime soon.
I know Tomlinson slightly, and follow his Substack. He and his wife devour mystery novels and TV mystery series. In a column written a few weeks after that podcast, Tomlinson said he’d been haunted by something Burke said. On the strength of this graf, I looked up the podcast and listened to the whole thing. These are Burke’s words:
“This is what I believe, and it’s metaphysical … the only activity that we do in the same way that God does is creation. That’s it. It’s like a baptismal font. Once you do that, you step into infinity.”
It’s the kind of quote that makes me want to start believing in writer quotes again. To that end, I wish you all a lustrous, productive fall, wherever you are and wherever the waters take you.
Thanks to Patricia Furnish for Rabbi Googlevitch.
See you in three weeks!
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