I occasionally get a note from a reader who tells me that my books kept her company in a difficult time, or that something I wrote triggered a new insight. Those are moments of pure magic.
“You never know how your creative work leads to small but meaningful decisions in other people’s lives. To actions they take, or a gateway that opens up to them through your words.”
– Dan Blank, “Art Lasts,” Creative Shift newsletter
How often have you written something and realized later that you were working out a personal problem on the page? Or sniffled through the day’s work, then discovered that the pain you felt that morning had eased? Our characters’ troubles may be very different from our own, but the process helps us and creates a deeper experience for the reader.
“Q: How does writing help an individual cope with life’s setbacks?
A. It’s been my experience that as writers we tend to process life events (positive and negative) through story. It’s often on a subconscious level, hovering below the surface of our thoughts and then woven into the fabric of our stories. And it helps. This is how our brains are wired to process life. By creating story we can deal with the unexpected curve balls life hurls our way.”
– Debbie Macomber, The Writer, June 2014
“What advice do you have for beginning and early-stage writers?
I know the frustration which never goes away. You want so much to sit down and get it right. You have to learn to tolerate that frustration. You have to be patient and just keep writing. You’re only going to learn it by doing it and by reading. You read and you write, and you read and you write. That’s the hard part for beginning writers: having to accept that it may be a very long process. Also you have to be willing to expose yourself – to put your true emotions in your work, or it will be flat. It really won’t be something people want to read or find any comfort in reading because it won’t be conveying to them some aspect of the human condition that they’ve experienced but don’t know they’ve experienced until they read it, and then they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’ve felt that.’”
– Elizabeth Strout, in The Writer, August 2013
When you’re thinking about a new story — whether you discover your story in the form of a plan or outline or in the form of sentences and scenes, whether you decide on a theme or watch it emerge — this is wise advice.
“What do you care about the most, right now, as you plan a new story? What hurts? What makes you really angry? There will be something in your life, or in the life of a friend, or in the news, that sparks an idea in your mind. Maybe it ties in with another idea, and so a third, new one is born?”
– Anne Perry, The Writer, November 2011
When I’m working on a project, which is pretty much all the time, and I have to be away from my desk, whether for an afternoon of errands or a weekend at a convention, I play a little game with myself. What three things from my own experience—what I think, feel, eat, hear, notice, worry about—can I give one of my characters? It’s a way of consciously keeping the subconscious engaged. Play it often enough and you’ll just do it, without thinking about it. So I like what Anthony Doerr has to say about creating the opportunities for story questions and insights.
“If you’re working lots every day, suddenly the world starts glowing and crackling with little gifts you can harvest and plug into your projects. You see a woman in a gown get into a Pontiac and start to cry and you think: What is the story there? What if my protagonist sees a similar thing? Or you read a description of how the sea sounds in rocks, and you realize, I could use that same word – “sounds” – when my character goes to the sea and hears it gurgling through the pebbles. Or you see light bounding down through the leaves of an oak, or a nun slip on ice, or a row of dead mosquitoes on a windowsill. And your mind starts translating these things into language. . . .
“The more hours a project is part of your day, the more it will be in your subconscious during the rest of the hours when you’re not working.”
– Anthony Doerr, The Writer, Oct 2014
A book out next Tuesday — Between a Wok and a Dead Place — and another spread out on the desk. Of course the little gremlins of doubt are nattering at me. I have learned that they can be useful at times, when they spur us to improve our work, to go deeper into character and motivation, to reach for a better phrase or keener observation, to sharpen the dialogue, but when they tell me I’m not any good, I tell them to go read a book in the corner or nap with the cat and we’ll talk later. And then I get to work and trust we’ll all be in a better place next time.
“Accept that your work will never feel satisfactory, because without that self-critical element, we’d never try to improve. Our yearning to accomplish more is what makes it possible to endure a learning process that for quite some time may offer little promise of external reward.
. . .
[I]t isn’t up to us to believe in ourselves, it’s up to us to do the work.”
– Kathryn Craft, “The Hidden—but Crucial—Mad Skill,” Writer Unboxed, 12/9/21
I’ve got a new mystery coming in just 10 days — Between a Wok and a Dead Place, out July 18 — so no surprise that when I scanned my collection of quotes about art, writing, and creativity, this one jumped out at me.
“The detective isn’t your main character, and neither is your villain. The main character is the corpse. The detective’s job is to seek justice for the corpse. It’s the corpse’s story, first and foremost.”
— Ross Macdonald, a pen name for the Canadian-American mystery writer Kenneth Millar (1915-83, creator of Lew Archer, one of my favorite detectives
“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”
June Jordan, American poet and activist (1936-2002), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (quoted by James Clear in his newsletter)
(Welded sculpture of heron at Flathead Lake; author photo)
“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp … The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.”
— Muriel Spark, in A Far Cry from Kensington, quoted by my friend Stephanie Rosenbaum Klassen
I don’t know whether Spark was being literal or ironic. My own cat loves my desk chair — he’s about the same color as the leather, creating a hazard for us both — and he’s been known to stomp across my desk and step on the keyboard, even sending an email full of periods once. And I regularly apologize on Zoom calls for the loud cries of the cat protesting being shut out of the room. But mostly, he reads (with his eyes shut) or supervises. Could I do the work without him? Maybe, but I’d rather not try.
I’m a firm believer in learning from artists working in other disciplines, such as music and painting. My husband and I recently attended an opening at the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana, for our friend, painter Haakon Ensign, who quoted the great painter, illustrator, and sculptor Frederick Remington as saying “you need detail, but the right detail.”
Or as a contrasting pair of American novelists have put it:
“Be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.” — Henry James
“One of your gifts as a writer is that you are a sensitive witness to the Universe.”
– Johnny Worthen, speaking at the 2023 Pikes Peak Writers Conference.
(Painting: W. Haakon Ensign, oil on canvas, from the exhibit W. Haakon Ensign: Wildlife and Water — Lucky in the Flathead, June 2 — Aug 6, 2023, Hockaday Museum of Art. Look closely for the artist’s dog, Lucky, sniffing the ground just above the lakeshore.)