A brief cautionary tale: one day some years ago, after I had published a book, I was asked for permission to excerpt a piece from it in an anthology. Delighted, I wrote back. As it happened, I used this anthology in a course I taught. I admired its selections, and found the study questions helpful. Not that I used the study questions much, I suppose, but I directed my students to them from time to time. I was pleased about being included in the next edition of the book, imagining students not just reading my work, but studying it. About a year later, the anthology arrived. Snappy new jacket (better than the first edition, I thought), well-designed pages, clean type.
I skimmed through my piece. No typos - good. And there, at the end of the selection, in those shivery italic letters reserved for especially significant copy, were the study questions. There were several under the heading "Questions About Purpose." One will do: "Why does Hampl establish her father's significance to her family before she narrates the major incident?" Beats me, I thought.
I had no idea what Hampl's purpose was. All the study questions looked quite mad to me.
Remember those grade school I.Q. tests, when the teacher would say soothingly, "Just relax, and answer with the first thing that strikes you as correct. You can't fail this test"? My heart always sank; I knew instinctively something worse than failure awaited me. Fate was lurking in those intelligence tests and I might as well surrender to my middle-range score before I picked up the magnetic-lead pencil.
This same sinking sensation swept over me reading the study questions. My study questions. If anyone could answer them, it ought to be me. They were not unreasonable. They were questions very much like the ones in the first edition (and how many other textbooks over the years?) that had struck me as useful.
Like a shady accountant, I had for years been keeping separate books on the imagination. In one ledger I logged questions about writing that proceeded from the completed work, treating it as the source and arbiter of itself. The story was the story. Period.
In the other ledger, apparently written in invisible trick ink, I wrote my own stories and poems. In that ledger, everything was up for grabs. "Hampl" had precious few intentions, except, like the charlatan I suddenly felt myself to be, to filch whatever was loose on the table that suited my immediate purposes. Worse, the "purposes" were vague, inconsistent, reversible under pressure. And who - or what - was applying the pressure? I couldn't say. The best I could say was that this pressure gave me the sharp nose of a scavenger, not the keen mind of a thinker.
It still amazes me that I could be so startled, that I could so instinctively go about learning to write one way, and yet look at writing that moved me in another, far more decorous way. For decorum was part of the problem. I was unwilling to admit any mess into the workrooms of the stories I loved. I was unwilling to admit there was a workroom. For me and anything I wrote - yes, of course, a workroom that sometimes felt like a sweatshop. But for the writers of the stories I read - no.
Every story has a story. This secret story, which has little chance of getting told, is the history of its creation. Maybe the "story of the story" never can be told, for a finished work consumes its own history, renders it obsolete, a husk.
Isn't that the point? Fiction, that ingenious architecture, hangs above life, suspended by the invisible tensile wires of the imagination. It glitters and winks up there, impossibly aloof, and performs its chief duty, which is the confirmation of enchantment. Don't mess with the veils and curtains, ladies and gentlemen; give the magician a little room, please.
But another piece of conventional wisdom insists that the best stories come from "life," from "experience." This sends a person scurrying back to the notion that where it comes from and how it all happens must have an essential bearing on what fiction is. An unbudging belief asserts itself that the hinge between life and story exists - and matters.
In their notebooks and (a more contemporary and public form of writer's notebook) in interviews, writers often puzzle over how the imagination works. A distinction: the imagination, not their own personal, unique imaginations. There seems to be an implicit understanding that the imagination is not owned, not contained within oneself, even though the experience of it is intensely interior. As F. Scott Fitzgerald says in a rueful, self-castigating note in "The Crack-Up," "I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent." This sense of being in the service of the imagination - not its master - is a trademark of an authentic experience of creativity.
After long and intimate contact, the imagination begins to be experienced as another. To Henry James it was, quite plainly, a pal. "Look also, a little, mon bon," he recommends chummily in his notebook, "into what may come out, further, of the little something-or-other deposited long since in your memory - your fancy - by the queer confidence made you by the late Miss B." Mon bon, my good fellow. Sometimes he refers to the imagination as his angel.
In the same notebook entry, James goes from addressing his genius as "mon bon," his good pal, to "oh celestial soothing, sanctifying process. Let me fumble it gently and patiently out." And he says of the story he is working on, "with fever and fidget laid to rest."
Again and again in the notebooks, James teases out a story with an offhand inquiry: "Isn't perhaps something to be made of the idea that came to me some time ago . . . the little idea of the situation of some young creature (it seems to be preferably a woman, but of this I'm not sure), who, at 20, on the threshold of a life that has seemed boundless, is suddenly condemned to death (by consumption, heart-disease, or whatever) by the voice of the physician? . . . Isn't there perhaps the subject of a little - a very little - tale . . . in the idea of. . . ."
These questions, tentative and unintrusive, bear the grace of a good host attempting to draw out a shy guest. No crude presumption or demand. This is not an interrogation. Inconsistency is perfectly O.K., indecision ("preferably a woman, but of this I'm not sure") is no big deal. Just keep talking - mumbling is fine. In a sense, these inquiries are not questions at all. They are brooms sweeping a clear space for the story to sit in and compose itself - only if it wishes, of course.
James is not unique, not even unusual, in his attentive courtesy to the imagination. But his notebooks provide one of the best paper trails ever charted to the creative process. His willingness to speak to the imaginative process as to a friend is almost childlike. The faith in the independent personhood of his ingenuity is striking. The vulnerability is breathtaking.
But vulnerability poses a threat. How does authority, that basic requisite of narrative voice, attach itself to someone so thoroughly humbled before the inchoate imagination and its imperious ways? In the story, it just won't wash to be iffy about the details. Sometime or other, James has to settle down and know whether that 20-year-old woman (or man?) on the threshold of life died of consumption or of heart disease.
The lax habits of the free imagination exhibit an appealing open-door policy. But to counterbalance this extreme permissiveness, the celestial process had better employ some sort of disciplinarian, an enforcer, to maintain order. Where else does the famous restraint and brevity of the short story come from? In other words, there must be a plan, an outline. Mustn't there?
Raymond Carver, in his essay "On Writing," turned to Flannery O'Connor when he was mulling over just this question. In her essay "Writing Short Stories," she talks about writing as an act of discovery. Carver found that "O'Connor says she most often did not know where she was going when she sat down to work on a short story." Most writers, she believed, didn't know where they were headed when they began a story.
"When I read this some years ago," Carver says, "it came as a shock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject."
The inevitable trouble of coming to writing as a reader is that the finished stories we read and reread, love and return to, reinforce our sense of their immutability and unity. We see no clue to their process - and forget such a thing even exists. We are enchanted. And that is enough.
For a while. But when you are Raymond Carver, or any writer at all, another form of enchantment lures you. How to do it becomes the call. You have plenty of examples of how it has been done. There are days when it seems you spend most of your time on your knees to these canonized idols. Much literary energy is expended in reverence.
Nor is this question of process something that preoccupies only writers. The Graywolf Press has reported that its all-time best seller is a book titled "If You Want to Write" by Brenda Ueland. It is not a how-to book, but an essay about imaginative process. In just a couple of years and with very little advertising, Graywolf has sold 50,000 copies of this little book, which is neither a novel nor a collection of stories. The call for this book clearly does not come from a coterie of writers but from what Virginia Woolf calls "the common reader."
Maybe creation is always magnetic. In any case, readers have only the story before them, the tantalizing story, which keeps its lip buttoned about its private life. A reader waiting at a bookstore to have a book autographed posed the question as well as anyone. "Where," she asked, "do you get your . . . um . . . ideas?" A little cloud of hopelessness attended the question, as if she knew in advance no bright answer would ever break through.
"Read it, read it, and you'll see how it's written!" Isak Dinesen crowed at an interviewer who asked much the same question about her story "The Monkey." But a particular kind of reading is called for, more investigative than the reading that is enchantment, less mechanistic and reductive than the mentality that speaks of "the techniques of fiction."
"The celestial process" suggests a different order of business. A writer must renew the faith in that process as a regular exercise. Otherwise, the blank page is no invitation. It is the abyss. And the writer waits to be hurled into it. The offense? Not having it all figured out in advance.
Just because the goal is unity doesn't mean the method is going to look - or feel - smooth and effortless. I'm not talking about facing up to hard work or discipline, as if the problem were faulty willpower or a poor character. There is such a thing as sloth, and everybody knows what it feels like. It is a form of cowardice. But when it comes to the imagination, there is probably more sinning done in the name of discipline than by any amount of lazy daydreaming.
As Flannery O'Connor said in the passage that encouraged Raymond Carver, when she started her story "Good Country People" she had no idea "there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg."
Then she brought in a Bible salesman, also without any immediate occupation for him. "I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg," she says, "until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable."
There's celestial process for you. Something a little devilish about it, after all.
Lest all this begin to take on the perverse aura of paradox: I am trying to describe (and lift descriptions from writers, like James or O'Connor and Carver, who have tried to express it) how the process is experienced. Not how it ought to happen, not how it might be better orchestrated, and especially not how it looks from the light end of the tunnel when the scary part - the writing - is over.
The obviously genuine reports of writers make it clear that the process that brings finished stories into being does not look like the stories themselves. The story is fluid; the process is given to fits and starts. The story speaks with poise and assurance; the process must fight fevers and fidgets, as James calls them.
So, if writers aren't thinking of plot and outline, if all that comes later or only in conjunction with something more fundamental, what is that more fundamental thing?
It's nothing much. Like a poppy seed, it looks like a speck, but it packs a wallop. Life is in there, life and the breeding instinct.
"Caress the detail," Nabokov said, "the divine detail." This is the atom that generates all the stars.
Probably every comp teacher living or dead has a heart inscribed with the phrase "Be Specific." Yet the generating power of the detail is too often obscured in discussions of writing. The detail is paid homage, of course; phrases like "a wonderful eye for detail" or "precise detail" are cliches of reviewing flattery. But such talk sees detail as ornament, an accessory. Worse, it is hired out as a symbol.
Literature engages in the work of transformation: a diamond earring can become a sexual wink, and in that glint, the earring breathes a soul and is an earring no longer. It becomes the shocking availability of the married woman wearing it. And so, yes, it becomes a symbol.
But the verb here is telling. Symbols become; they are figments of the celestial process, not techniques that stand for something or other. They don't stand; they carry. They are not static. As soon as they are imprisoned that way, symbols begin to die. That is why Nabokov's fervent command - Caress the detail, the divine detail - is a necessary caution. Creation is godly work. Well, but who is God? Nabokov once said in an interview that his characters were galley slaves. Yet when it is a matter of locating the godhead, even a writer as unabashedly imperious as Nabokov did not point to himself, but to the detail. Detail: the smallest, least organized unit of fiction. Next to grand conceptions like plot, which is the legitimate government of most stories, or character, which is the crowned sovereign, the detail looks like a ragged peasant with a half-baked idea of revolution and a crazy sure glint in its eye.
It comes down to faith. If, as Nabokov says, the detail is divine, there's nothing much to do but give yourself over to it as one properly does in worship. If there's any question about the divinity of the detail, by the way, think of that one thing that you can explain to no one but which is precious beyond expression. That is a divine detail. It is also a literary opportunity.
In his notebooks, Chekhov tries to describe to a friend how he writes a short story. "I write the beginning serenely, let myself go," he says, "but in the middle I have already begun cowering and fearing. . . . My start . . . is full of promise, as though I were beginning a novel; the middle section is difficult and broken up, while the end, as in a short short story, is like fireworks. . . . So what emerges is not literature, but something of the order of the sewing of Trishkin's coat. What shall I do. I simply don't know. I put my trust in all-healing time." Time spent cooped up with a pack of crazy details acting like juvenile delinquents, exhibiting no sense of responsibility but a lot of gorgeous random energy.
James provides a clue to how detail gets organized in his essay "The Art of Fiction," when he stakes a big claim for "the rich principle of the Note."
"If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with truth on the human scene," he says, "it could but be because notes had been from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one's greatest inward energy . . . to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember."
The note is evidence of the drive for accuracy. It is also a safe house where detail with its bit of intelligence can slip into a protected room and be debriefed by friendlies. No questions asked. Just sit a while. Rest a moment. Tell the little you were able to pick up. And vanish as you must. Another operative will come along to take your place.
Adrienne Rich once wrote in a poem, "The notes for the poem are the only poem." That is the sort of faith I've been thinking about here.
The dedication to the fragment, which is not itself discipline, provides a writer with the driving passion to spend all that time, Chekhov's all-healing time, with what often feels not simply lifeless but nonexistent. For remember, the story is nonexistent during most of a writer's intimacy with it.
"I recall kneeling on my (flattish) pillow at the window of a sleeping car," Nabokov writes of a childhood train ride in his memoir "Speak, Memory," "and seeing with an inexplicable pang a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth." This must be what James meant when he spoke of the habit of taking notes "from the cradle."
Everyone does it, in rudimentary form. Everyone has a memory with precious odds and ends tossed about. That is why we recognize this capacity for the note in others, especially in writers we trust.
This view of life as a collection of shards introduces the inevitable thought that life is full of brokenness, after all. Life is not a fixed star, not a unity. It makes sense that stories, for all their apparent seamlessness, should be formed of smashed, discarded bits. Scheherazade keeps going, on and on through the scary night, enchanting the ear of the king who would destroy her. Of course she must be steady, assured, of course the story must not hesitate. Her life depends upon it.
For all the misery of it, this work of writing stories seems to have to do with happiness, which even those who write stories best have trouble describing. "My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me," F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in "The Crack-Up," "but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books."
Maybe "the person dearest" cannot be, for a writer at such a moment, the wife or husband, the friend or lover of daily life. Maybe it is you, dear reader, stranger, who must be trusted with the ridiculous, broken bits that are held long in the hand as the writer struggles to tell the tale.
Excerpted from "The Houghton Mifflin Anthology of Short Fiction," a college textbook edited by Patricia Hampl and published by the Houghton Mifflin Company.