Process

In truth, a career as a writer is enjoyable, but also lonely. Tell that to a construction worker, a nurse, a truck driver, and you will likely be mocked. But conceiving of interesting ideas and conveying them in words is intellectually, if not physically, arduous.

To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, writing can be a grueling, unforgiving business, but even at its worst it’s better than having a regular job.

Those sentences, in the right hands, collect themselves into paragraphs, chapters, and novels that by their very nature do physical things to us: quicken our heartbeats, send shivers down our spines, keep us awake turning one more page long after we should have been asleep.

Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem. Genius is far more tedious, far less romantic, far more rote, far less effortless, than we imagine it. The great writers in this book do not by and large put the right words on the right page in the right order on the first try. But in the place of perfection, they possess the quality of perseverance and a willingness to recognize their own shortcomings.

Solitude was a compulsory feature of Kafka’s writing process. “Being alone has a power over me that never fails,” he once wrote in his diary. “My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper.”6 The better Kafka’s writing was going, the more isolated a person he became.

Late night was the only time of day he could achieve his solitude, and as he courted Felice Bauer, he made it clear that this unusual daily existence would continue should they be married.

He became a vegetarian and adopted an eating technique called fletcherizing, which involved chewing each bite for several minutes before swallowing.

Despite his affinity for formal structure in his life and his knack for creating a routine and sticking to it, in the act of writing itself a different Kafka emerged, incapable of conjuring his work on command or being meticulous in its organization.

Although Kafka stuck to a careful routine in life, the hours spent writing were unpredictable. To try to control his writing was to destroy its ability to take shape. He could only work by writing impulsively.

Kafka had no problem coming up with ideas to spark a work, but it was a continual struggle for him to see those ideas through as comprehensive stories.15 It was in fact Max Brod who was largely responsible for editing some of the work into a readable configuration after Kafka’s death.

Sustaining an idea through hundreds of pages proved too heavy a burden for a mind that second-guessed every move.

Were it not for Max Brod, most of Kafka’s work never would have been read by the public. He overrode Kafka’s wishes to have his work burned after his death.

“I did not want to be distracted, did not want to be distracted by the pleasures life has to give a useful and healthy man.”

While living in Washington, DC, and teaching at Howard University, she joined a writing group just for fun and because the food was good. Because she wasn’t allowed to keep attending unless she finally wrote something, Morrison thought back to the little black girl who wanted blue eyes and started working on a story.

It helps that Morrison doesn’t seem too interested in having a social life. “I don’t do any of the so-called fun things in life,” she says without regret.42 Ultimately, she found the choice to write was where the real fun started, anyway. “The writing was the real freedom, because nobody told me what to do there,” she says.

“For me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular . . . For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”44

Visual imagery looms large in Morrison’s fiction. She uses it to establish her stories, and she lets it course through them. She has said, in fact, that she takes more influence from painters in her work than she does from other writers.

Along with those images, Morrison uses color to convey moods and settings. She knew from the outset that she wanted the opening of Song of Solomon to be red, white, and blue, and she deliberately wrote the novel in what she called “painterly language.”

That word “struggle” is apt: Even though Morrison is the rare writer who takes joy in the creation of her work, she is not a fast writer.

Once she has done that, once a novel is complete, “a kind of melancholy” sets in. She experienced it the first time after completing The Bluest Eye, and it didn’t lift until she came up with the idea for her second book, Sula.83

“The Nature of Fun,” he wrote, “In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it.” But success in writing changes the writer, he believed. “Things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary.” To come out on the other side, he wrote, one can “sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid.”90

Most writers start out not knowing how to write and gradually gain a sense of competence, if things go well.

“For me, 50% of the stuff I do is bad,” Wallace once said. “The trick is to know what’s bad and not let other people see it.”112

David Foster Wallace’s writing days were, in his own words, a ricocheting contest “between periods of terrible sloth and paralysis and periods of high energy and production.”122

“These writers are important not because they are the greatest writers I’ve ever read, but because I read them at the exact formative time in my life to get me to the next place . . . It’s strictly about being young and who makes you want to write,” he says.

Price reads less while in the midst of writing a book, and he steers clear of anything that might be too closely related to his own work, or too good, which is “like trying to sing while somebody else is singing another song in the background,” he says.

The challenge, he says, is “making art and not in just compiling notes or compiling observations. You’re meeting interesting people, then you have to take all that ocean of interaction and carve an allegory, carve a truth that is not a journalistic truth, but sometimes you can nudge it into a greater truth.”

Although Price takes notes during his research phase—sketches of something he observed, a perfect line he heard someone say—he tends to find them less helpful than he’d been expecting. He partially blames his less-than-thorough note-taking skills, but he also realizes that he’s not writing journalism. “I constantly have to remind myself: You can make stuff up,” he says. “You’re not gonna get in trouble by making stuff up.”145

The dialogue is the easy part. Getting the prose to read like something other than deliberate prose presents a higher challenge. “With dialogue it’s pretty much all there, the first shot at it. I have a much more difficult time with the King’s English, you know, descriptive paragraphs. I torture them to death to get them to work.”148 The quest for perfect prose can keep Price frozen in his office for hours.

Price confesses that he hates writing. “The only thing worse than writing is not writing,” he once told the London Telegraph.152

choosing the anxiety of writing over the small death of not doing it.