Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
One day a couple of years ago, when I found my desk drawer so full of microphone headsets that it would no longer close, I realized it was time for an intervention. I could no longer deny it: I needed to stop reading interviews with authors.
The Believer, Salon, The Guardian ? these were like the bars in which I could never resist just one more drink. My most dangerous source of interviews, though ? my home liquor cabinet ? was The Paris Review. These interviews, which Dwight Garner has rightly called ?about as canonical, in our literary universe, as spoken words can be,? are treacherous things for an aspiring writer. The Paris Review has been conducting them since the ?50s, and the entire collection is online, so whole days, weeks, months can disappear as you read about why Ray Bradbury has no use for college writing programs or consider the fact that Janet Malcolm no longer smokes while she writes.
The most serious danger in reading these sorts of interviews, for me, was not that they?d waste my time ? I have a whole cosmos of ways to do that ? but that they?d inspire me. Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there?s very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people?s nuts and bolts into their toolboxes. I might learn, say, that Alice Munro writes her first drafts with a scribbler (must find out what a scribbler is, then purchase). Or that Philip Roth writes at a standing-desk (this is apparently for lumbar, rather than literary, reasons, but no matter: begone, chair!). Or that Haruki Murakami feels it necessary to exercise like a marathoner in order to sustain his novel-writing momentum. Or that Don DeLillo once typed each paragraph on its own piece of paper.
I had, for a long time, a profound vulnerability to hearing about these sorts of routines. Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work, and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch. But I persisted in believing that I might one day come upon some technique, some set of tricks, that would vault me irreversibly onto the professional plane. I didn?t have a working printer, but I agreed wholeheartedly with Joan Didion that I needed to be sleeping in the same room as my manuscript, so as never to lose touch with it. It would be years before I?d written so much as a single chapter of a novel, but I knew that when I finished a book, I would, like Anthony Trollope, begin my next one on the very same day.
Not all of the techniques I took up were worthless.
There was the era, inspired by Hemingway, of carrying around bound notebooks in my front-right pocket, with the intention of capturing inspirations as soon as they arrived, whether in the dentist?s waiting room or on the stalled Q train. (This worked reasonably well until the rain and the molding properties of my leg transformed the notebooks into sodden lumps of ink-smeared pulp.)
There was the era, inspired by Saul Bellow, when I would, at great peril to myself, attempt headstands in the corner of my office. (This may have done something for my balance, if nothing for my writing.)
Then there was the era of dictation software, inspired by Richard Powers, whom I envisioned lying in bed, eyes gently shut, streams of literature flowing from his lips into his headset. (Be careful with this closing-your-eyes business. It happened more than once that I?d crack open my eyes for a peek at my river of prose only to discover that I?d forgotten to hit the little red ?dictate? button.)
I know how a confession like this is supposed to end. I?m meant, like Dumbo flinging aside his feather, to realize that all the tricks and tools are unnecessary, and that what writing requires is grit, and patience, and the willingness to produce and then discard such a number of pages that you would seem, to a curious alien, to be in the garbage-generating business. And all that is manifestly true. I?ve sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.
But I?m not quite ready to retire to a bare room armed only with a stack of blank paper and a sharpened No. 2 pencil (though that might, come to think of it, be something I read about in an interview). Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don?t begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don?t become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.
Among my magic feathers at the moment: a writing program called Scrivener, which I have been known to tout until my wife has to kick me underneath the table.
Also: albums of binaural sounds, which help to create an inner padded room on days when my attention is particularly restless.
In the imaginary author interviews I occasionally conduct with myself while brushing my teeth, I very happily expound on these techniques and a dozen others. But I also take care to note that the important thing is not the techniques, but the spirit in which you take them up. If you reach out, as I spent all those years doing, like a drowning man for a scrap of wood, then you?ll most likely flail until you and your technique sink together in an unhappy mass. If, though, you can reach out from a position of calm, as a swimmer reaches out for a kickboard before turning to begin his next lap, then you might find yourself feeling what all the tricks and tips are finally pointing toward: freedom. You might surprise yourself ? roll onto your back, do a flutter kick, or just float for a while. The water, after all, is the point, and not how you scratch away at it.
Ben Dolnick is the author of the forthcoming novel, ?At the Bottom of Everything.?
Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/stupid-writer-tricks/
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