I start out somewhere familiar, let’s say a room I know
very well, or maybe with a person I know very well. Okay, so that person is
usually me. Or the female version of me. Or the elderly-man version. Or
whoever. And I don’t care what anybody says, there is a part of you in your
characters. There has to be. The only way we know what it’s like to be human is
through our own experiences of being human. So this me/not-me version of myself
describes this room (or town, bar, field, whatever), but you can only explore
the “room” for so long. Maybe a great writer could stay in this room for the
length of an entire novel, but most of us need more toys for our characters to
play with. Either somebody has to enter this room, or your character must find
his/her way out. But the thing is, by the time your character’s hand reaches
for that doorknob, they’ve already started to change. They are no longer you.
They’re closer to becoming whoever they’re trying to be.
The book
I’m working on now is like that. It starts out in a small Colorado town similar
to one I lived in during my twenties. But soon there’s a twelve-year-old boy
walking around in this town on a kind of bizarre scavenger hunt. And soon after
I started writing, I realized that this boy’s older sister had committed
suicide the year before. And then there’s this tree at the center of it all
that was stolen and has something to do with the boy, the dead sister, and the
town. The only similarity to the town of my past is the mountain looming in the
background, but even that soon starts to unhinge itself from whatever picture I
once had of it. It’s almost always like this when I start. Like I’m fighting
something. Or uncertain of myself. Or afraid to leave the familiar. But once
I’m out there, in new territory, meeting these new people, it’s like I can’t
believe I ever resisted it in the first place.
And I
think it's okay for the familiar to be a kind of starting off point. But make
sure you let everything after you leave that safe place become less and less
familiar. That’s when you’ve abandoned your known world: when your characters
become separate from you, people you’re following rather than pushing. And this
being led about by a character is what I think most mean when they talk about
the magic of writing. But maybe ‘magic’
isn’t quite the right word because it implies something mystical, something us
ordinary people just can’t access. But I don’t think that’s true.
Ezra Pound
once referred to something he called the “golden thread in the pattern” weaving
its way through poetry. It’s sort of like that. You begin to see clues in your own
writing, hints, parts of this special thread slowly being unearthed. But those
hints aren’t put there by some kind of magic. They’re put there by you. The
only trick is knowing how to find them. It’s only once you leave the familiar and
finally get lost, once you realize you’re standing alone in some strange desert
with a thin wind blowing about your feet, that you're forced to look for these
clues. And soon you realize there’s nothing to be afraid of; you’re fine out here
in the desert. You're terrified maybe, but in a good way. Your heart is
pounding. You look around and maybe a snippet of dialogue rises from the sand,
a nothing bit of nothing talk that starts leading you toward something. Maybe
it's just a mirage, but that's okay, everything in this desert is a mirage. So you start to
follow this thread and the next thing you know an hour or two has passed, and,
when you finally pull your head up from the page, the outlines of your everyday
life begin to take shape again.
It happened. You left. You did it. And now that you’re out there,
you know all you have to do is sit back down, be patient, and it’ll be waiting
out there for you again.
And you can’t wait to get back to it.
What a
wondrous, glorious, magical thing
that is.
