William Landay

Official website of the author

Creativity

The Five Commandments

The last couple of weeks I’ve been cleaning up a few final details for my last novel and trying — futilely — to get the next one started. How, exactly, do you start writing a novel? Honestly, I have no idea. I’ve been spending my days writing and unwriting the same few sentences, kneading the same few barren ideas in the hope they will yield something new — a character, a scene. So far, nothing.

Of course, the initial stages of a new project are always hard. There is nothing to work with, just a few very vague concepts and reams and reams of blank pages. Big deal, right? I’ve been here before. I know how the process works. I know this period is going to suck. I expect it to suck. The trouble is, well, it has sucked.

It is an intractable fact of the writing life: a writer who stops writing for any reason is vulnerable to all sorts of infection. Laziness. Time-wasting. Loss of confidence. Now a new peril: impostor syndrome, as the rave reviews for my just-completed novel increasingly diverge from the endless fail-loop of my workdays, and the disconnect between hype and reality becomes harder and harder to ignore.

Enough is enough. Herewith, a reminder to myself of some basic rules. They aren’t really commandments; in fact, they may not work for other writers at all. And there aren’t even ten. But they’re important enough to me to recite them here, again. (If you’ve been reading this blog awhile, you’ve probably run across these ideas in bits and pieces.) These are the things I tend to forget when I fall into an unproductive rut in the beginning stages of a novel, as I have now.

[Read more…] about The Five Commandments

Creating Billy Bathgate

“He was born in that first sentence, in the rhythm of it, in the syntax. You could even hear his breath just by reading that sentence out loud to yourself.”

— E. L. Doctorow on the creation of Billy Bathgate, a character who arose not from Doctorow’s research or his own childhood memories — not, that is, from a concept — but organically in the moment of writing, from words on the page. In another interview Doctorow has said of the 131-word sentence that opens the novel,

“I found Billy in the syntax of that sentence. What you see, if you care to look, is all there in the breathing. It was the only thing I was sure of when I began — that the story came from that first sentence. It carried his rhapsodic intelligence and was capable of sustaining his keenness and emotional response and fear. His voice sustains or finds its form in a long roving sentence. It’s part and parcel of Billy. In all my books I’ve stumbled upon a voice in which to tell the story. It’s not my voice — it’s the character’s.”

The lesson (if there is one): Don’t wait too long to start writing. Don’t waste time perfecting your ideas. Trust that inchoate notions will coalesce into concrete things as you write them into existence. (Of course, an alternative lesson you could draw from all this is “Be E. L. Doctorow.” Now there’s a demoralizing a thought.)

Enjoy the process of creation

Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Creative Personality”

Chuck Close: Inspiration is for amateurs

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

Chuck Close (via)