Every book was once a mere snippet of a notion with a pencil (or a computer keyboard) dangling off the end of it. The difference between an author and someone daydreaming out the window is that, finding the pencil or keyboard attached to a notion, the writer continues drawing, writing, pulling, prodding, and scratching at the notion until it becomes a book. But how does that book become wonderful? There lies the real mystery. No one really knows. . . but I have observed that Wonderful Books often emerge after the writer contacts a resonant event. Is it important that the event actually took place? Not so very. What Is Important is that the event (whether remembered or imagined) spontaneously emits for the writer the qualities of wonder and delight. The late poet Donald Justice wrote a brilliant biographical essay in which he recounts a childhood memory of a party where he encountered wonder of wonders! a plate of small sandwiches. The way he describes closing his hands around one of them would not be nearly so satisfying and evocative if he had not as he did so well first tell us that those little sandwiches were BLUE. Immediately we, his readers, join him at age 6 ( or 7, or . . . ). Our own sense of delight and amazement picks up his cue. One moment were reading along quietly minding our own beeswax when suddenly, with a secretive wink, our youthful spirit grabs a blue sandwich right off the page and we are jolted fully awake. For a moment we stand in awe, suffused with the light of creativity. We are inspired, and we didnt even try. A Writing Exercise
Go to a favorite book preferably fiction or poetry and plunge into a passage, any passage. Read until something strikes you, and then PING! Let yourself be stricken! Enjoy and delight in feeling silly with amazement, or wonder, or . . . or . . . a desire to eat something blue thats cut into the shape of a triangle. Allow this feeling to grow. At a certain point you will feel as if you can stand it no longer. This is not boredom oh, no. Rather, its that sense of urgency all authors recognize as Time to Write. Go to the page, to the paper or the computer keyboard, and begin. Doing this again and again, with great love, with wild abandon, and with only the vaguest notion of How Itll All Turn Out thats how the simplest book (or a life) becomes a wonder. Oops! Your exuberance is showing! Enjoy. |
