Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

Like most of the contributors here, maybe all, I’ve been on both sides of the writing advice coin — asking for it, asked to give it. I doubt anyone can pin down the best advice he ever gave. Or the most profound advice, or even the worst, most huevos-on-a-priest useless advice ever. These are too subjective. The same seeds can fall on very different soils.

The most effective advice, though? That much I can pinpoint, if only because I was privy to the effect it had.

To set the scene: a few years ago, a cool June night when a friend — more a found brother, really — rising crime novelist Sean Doolittle, was in town for a weekend’s visit. Hundreds of foul miles separate us, but, being big boxing fans, we try to get together once a year or so to watch a promising match. On this occasion it was for what turned out to be heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis’s last fight, and easily one of his most dramatic, against Vitali Klitschko.

Post-fight, we repaired to a local brewpub to speak of many things, as brothers will, including shoptalk.

I’ve always wondered if anyone’s ever conducted an alehouse study to determine the average point — say, 1.4 pints — at which the woes begin to emerge.

Sean’s new novel was not going well. He’d hit the tarpit that can lie in wait after a promising start of anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred or more pages. You can see what lies behind you, and maybe where you’d like to be, but for now you’re stuck, and the more you thrash in panic, the stickier the tarpit’s embrace seems to grow.

More than anything it was a crisis of story mechanics. He had characters in motion, and storylines unfolding in service of his central idea … but they’d all gotten away from him and he no longer felt sure of where they were going.

It can happen to anyone, but seems more prone to happening to those who have a small handful of works in the can. They’ve proven they can do it; they just haven’t yet acquired the grounded self-assurance that this crisis too shall pass.

“Don’t worry about it. Trust the process to see you through,” I told Sean. “Just trust the process.”

He looked at me as if I’d handed him a ring of keys and said, “You know that big roomful of gold at Fort Knox? Help yourself.” Although I’ll allow that it could’ve been the stout.

What I’d said to Sean required elaboration, of course. This wasn’t a moment for Zen-like brevity.

I was simply looking at his situation from a perspective afforded by a greater level of experience: eight novels, I think it was at the time, and many longish stories that had their own degrees of sub-novel complexity. At some relatively recent stage I’d realized that as long as I’d thrown myself into a work as wholeheartedly as I could, no matter how foggy the path ahead may have looked, everything each storyline and character arc needed to be resolved was right there, already in the extant text. It may not have been obvious, and may have taken some looking … but it was there, and it made sense.

This doesn’t happen by accident, though. A few requirements must be met first: It means getting to know my characters as intimately as they’ll allow, and crossing that threshold where they begin to shoulder at least half the work, at which point I cease to feel like a puppeteer and more like an interested observer keeping up with them.

It also means rendering their lives and their world in as much detail as is practical, illuminating whatever details instinctively seem important, even if I don’t know why yet. (And if something turns out to be irrelevant, that’s what revisions are for.) This is just applying the principle of Chekhov’s Gun. The playwright’s remark has been paraphrased many times, but the essence of it is simple: If you have a gun mounted on the wall in Act I, it better go off by Act III.

The day after our brewpub confab, it felt as if Chekhov’s Gun had gone off in my head. But never mind that.

Sean went home, got back to work, and saw the novel through to the end. He was returning to the same place he’d left off feeling thwarted, and with the same set of tools, just with a different outlook. Maybe a renewed shot of confidence and a more manageable level of anxiety.

Since then, Trust the Process has become a mantra we’ve tossed at one another now and again.

Trust the Process — and I do, probably more than ever. Even if I started wondering why, precisely.

In one respect, it’s something that feels better off unexplained, like the performance of a basketball player who can sink 50 free throws in a row, no sweat … until you ask him to start thinking about what he’s doing.

Then again, it can’t be self-sabotage to merely acknowledge that one of the prime movers behind the Process is the subconscious, a perpetual motion machine that seems to apply itself to everything from major creative endeavors to routine sorting and filing with equal dedication. It likes to shove the fruit of its labor to the forefront while the conscious mind is focused on something else, and the eureka moments come in all sizes: the sudden retrieval of a name we were trying to think of last week, long after we actually needed it … and then there’s Mozart, who reportedly woke up some mornings with entire pieces of music already composed in his head, and he needed only to write them down.

In Stephen King’s memoir On Writing — which I’ve been rereading in small daily bites, and came across this line today, after everything here was nearly finished — he refers to this integration of minds as creative sleep: “[You can] train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.”

Thus I got to thinking a few weeks ago: As long as this resource, this reliable partner, is hanging around anyway, and appears willing to help whenever needed, why be content with letting it operate on its own unpredictable timetable? Instead, why not try actively delegating things to it?

Believe me, I’ve conducted goofier experiments than this. Some people wouldn’t even regard it as that much … just low-tech programming, inputting a command to the wetware.

Whatever it was, I gave it a whirl. Last month, while laying extensive groundwork for a new novel, I was also writing a story promised to an anthology — 10,000 words, so it involved a measure of complexity and several things I hadn’t figured out in advance … all the bits and pieces that work themselves out as pages accumulate.

The difference? This time I talked to myself. (More than usual.) I had enough of a handle on generalities to know what specifics the story would require later in the day, or the next, or the day after that. So I asked for them. Out loud. Made a point of telling my subconscious what I needed — a resolution to this conflict, a historical component to underlie that element, an insight into a character that was being coy — and when. Then trusted that it would be there when I checked back.

And it was, each and every time. Usually when sitting down and getting back to work, summoned by a few minutes of fingertips on keys, but sometimes earlier, whenever the subconscious evidently couldn’t resist banging an envelope into the In Box.

After the fact, it reminded me of something Stephen King said elsewhere about writing The Shining, and anticipating Danny Torrance’s encounter with the dead woman in Room 217. King had a mental countdown underway, synced to the pace of his progress: Four days until Danny opens that door … three days … two … tomorrow he opens the door. I don’t know if he had already worked out exactly what was going to happen in Room 217, but in relating this he seemed to be implying that he’d needed extra preparation for the scene, and that consciously reminding himself of its approach was instrumental in getting there.

Would they have come to me anyway, these same ideas and answers, and right on schedule? Maybe. There’s no way to try something like this both ways.

Regardless, all it really amounted to was a more qualified approach to the same old basics: a commitment to the work, a belief in the core ideas, and a deep, abiding trust in the potential of the Process. No waiting around for divine intervention or for sprinklings of muse-borne fairy dust, because the usual requirement — having already poured in enough honest grist for the mill to grind — still stood. Anything else was just a reaffirmation of something proven many times over, and being curious to put it to a more conscious test.

Trusting the Process is really just another way of saying that you trust yourself, and more important, the story you must tell. After all, you can despair of your abilities one week and get over it the next, but if you don’t believe in the work they serve, it will never live and breathe. And no good can come of that: as Alfred Bester was prone to say, “The book is the boss.” Beyond that?

There is no beyond that matters … although, on second thought, there may be room for a touch of the divine after all. Because maybe the Process is really just one more manifestation of Geoffrey Rush’s note-perfect line from Shakespeare In Love, on how the Play invariably manages to come together out of all the clashes, calamities, and chaos:

“I don’t know. It’s a miracle.”