The Creative Process

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 5:07 am by Maggie Beaumont

The Creative Process 2016-04-29T05:07:11+00:00 Maggie Beaumont

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The Witch stares at the blank screen, thinking of the altar that stands on a shelf behind her. Would she see more clearly if she looked into the crystal ball that stands in the North? Would her vision be clearer by candlelight than it is by fluorescent? Is she trying to see into the future? or just the amazingly complicated present?

—

I’ve been writing fiction this month. Feedback from our small writing group suggests it’s not entirely obvious what’s happening in this draft: who is this main character? and what city operates like this, and what real history is she half-quoting anyway? First draft fiction, for sure; nothing I’m willing to let you read yet.

Instead I’ll just talk about the process.

Back in high school I was carefully taught that every writing project had to begin with an outline, or at least had to ‘begin with the end in mind.’

Good advice, for many things, but it isn’t how I’ve been writing this draft.

This time I just started with a character, without any details. I knew what she was wearing and what she was doing right now – walking down the street, say, coming from the courthouse. I watched her walking for awhile, and then wondered why she was at the courthouse, anyway?

“Filing the last paperwork from my parents’ estate,” she replied. (In real life, my own parents have both been dead for decades, and besides I wasn’t executor for either of them; where did this idea come from?)

What happens next? Something blocks her path, a stranger’s hand on her arm brings her to a halt. Okay, I haven’t thought about the stranger at all. Why is this hand on her arm? What blocks her path: the stranger’s foot? a construction sign? Who is this stranger, anyway – and is it someone I’ll have to know about later, or just a walk-on?

The story proceeds in just that way, questions arising, answers appearing out of nothing, no hint of outline or forethought. The answers don’t seem to have much to do with each other, but somehow a story develops, full of plot twists and peculiar surprises. The author is maybe more surprised than the reader.

“Now that I know I won’t live to run out of my mother’s money,” this character says to no one in particular, “I wonder what I can use it for?” A thought I haven’t had in ‘real’ life.

In this draft, tiny telling details keep appearing from thin air, apparently unmotivated … but then, paragraphs later, they turn out to be foreshadowing something.

Eventually I began to notice that this is how Life is.

No matter what my Five Year Plan has looked like at any point, by the time I get to Year Three it’s obvious that I’ve experienced a plot twist (or several); when Five Years rolls around, I’ve consistently found myself doing nothing like what I expected. In some decades, I made a new Five Year Plan every year, completely tossing the old one, laughing at the discrepancy.

I used to feel like a failure for doing that, believing that the purpose of a plan was to know where you’re going and then just follow the plan and make yourself get there. Just like my fifth grade teacher always said.

But now I think the purpose of a plan is to keep me in focus in the moment.

If there is no plan, then when I get home from work tired, I can just put my feet up and turn on something mindless, created by someone else as an explicit time-waster – whether TV or clickbait. But if there’s a plan …

Then I sit down to write a blogpost, and once I have a finished draft I get up and wash the dishes, and then remember that I wanted to do a load of laundry and get that started, and then do a second draft of the blogpost, answer my email, pay the bills …

Or, the phone rings and I talk for an hour to my brother, in which case I need to make a new plan for the three or four things I didn’t get done before bedtime.

Later perhaps I will pretend that everything happened exactly according to plan. But at least I won’t have wasted the evening on Facebook.

—

The Witch wonders why I’m talking about my fiction instead of writing it. She asked me yesterday why I was writing fiction instead of reading it … but she has that wrong. I’m reading J.K. Rowling via audio in the car (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, if you want to know), Neil Gaiman in bed (The Ocean at the End of the Lane), and Jodi Picoult in the bathtub (The Storyteller). That’s in addition to having just finished Kim E. Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States (which covers 1492 to 2012, more or less), which only proves that nonfiction has its charms and a well-rounded education in history will show you inconvenient truths about fair play and the difference between lofty ideals and actual performance. This is all the result of a plan made in September, about the time it first became clear that ‘free time’ was going to be short for a year.

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