Friday Write #079
Hi! This is Good Ideas, a newsletter about writing, creativity, and craft (and sometimes animals1), with weekly prompts designed to help you make progress in your current writing project. If you’re not working on something already, the prompts will help you start.
“I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.”—Jennifer Egan
Greetings, writers—
Every once in a while, the Lucky Day shelf at Portland’s Belmont Library—aka “the hold library,” because it’s tiny and half2 its shelves are filled with books already claimed by other people—really delivers3. The other week I brought home two huge YA titles (not for me), a longevity book I’m too embarrassed to talk about, and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, which, unlike The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, I read in approximately five minutes.4
Set twenty years after her amazing, Pulitzer-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad5 and involving some of the same characters, The Candy House is “a spectacular palace built out of rabbit holes,” “a novel of new tech and old wounds,” and “a kaleidoscopic new offering whose beauty resides in its elliptical returns.”
In other words, the book’s great. (Though an Amazon reviewer warns that “it erred on the edge of spiritual blasphemy on a few occasions,” lol.) And I think it’s especially interesting for writers, because the chapters are told from different perspectives and in a variety of fictional styles. The Candy House is like a concept album, Egan says: all the individual chapters (tracks) come together to tell a singular story.6
One chapter consists entirely of emails and texts; another, Lulu the Spy, 2032, reads like a list of instructions for a young and attractive secret agent. Here’s how that one begins:
1.
People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures. The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important. If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting. Necessary ingredients of a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness. The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible. When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes.
2.
Some powerful men actually call their beauties “Beauty.” Counter to reputation, there is a deep camaraderie among beauties. If your Designated Mate is widely feared, the beauties at the house party where you’ve gone undercover to meet him will be especially kind. Kindness feels good, even when it’s founded on a false notion of your identity and purpose.
The Lulu chapter was actually inspired by Egan’s life. Although never a spy herself (except in the way all writers are), Egan worked as a private secretary to a woman who claimed she was. Also, Egan keeps a lot of lists.
Here she is talking on American Masters: Creative Spark.
[Lists are] kind of how I organize my life. And one of my lists that I kept for some time and then forgot about it, so it kind of fell down the list of lists on my phone, was called “lessons learned.” I was trying to keep track of things I wanted to do differently in my life. And so on this list, which I rediscovered a couple years later, were things like, “Put ‘Don’t pick flowers’ sign up as soon as bulbs come up.” And another one, my favorite was, “Put train ticket in bag night before, ALWAYS” in all caps. And what I loved about these “lessons learned” was that I couldn’t remember the initial incidents in either case, but I didn’t have to, to know what had happened. So just having a lesson showed me what the action was that it was responding to. And as soon as I saw that and it made me laugh, I thought, ah, “How can I use that?” Which is a question I ask all the time about everything. I thought, I’ve gotta find a way to tell a story in the form of lessons learned. We’re not told this happened or that happened. We’re just told what the character learned from each thing. And that was really the beginning.
Remember how I said you can start with anything?7 Here’s proof! A long-lost list + an old job = a very intense, very dark thriller chapter. (It was originally published in 2012, in slightly different form, as “Black Box” in The New Yorker.)
Also, How can I use that? is a question that all of us should be asking all the time.
Egan goes on to talk about the “blind and basically improvisational” way she writes in the early stages of a project:
The way that I write is by beginning with a kind of sensory environment. The first question is, who is perceiving it? And that is the beginning of a character. The next question is, who else is there? What do they say and do? These are just observations that naturally arise. Those are the things that I’m looking for as I write.
How do you begin? Not are you a plotter or a panster, but how do you get into a story?
Today, your writing prompt is short and sweet. Borrowing from Egan’s lists, write a story/freewrite/scene/poem with the theme of “Lessons Learned.”
Happy writing—
Emily
Owl babies live cam, need I say more.
Okay, not half. Like 15%.
I can tell I’m going to use a lot of footnotes in this post. The Belmont Library also keeps a good collection of DVDs, if anyone out there still uses those things.
Fine, a few hours.
Egan says of Goon Squad: “I was writing what I thought were just individual short stories and because I didn’t think they would ever be part of one single story, I was doing what I normally do with stories, which is taking a different technical approach for each. That’s the fun of stories. You know, they’re each their own world, but there were characters in common among these stories, and I started to feel like, oh, wouldn’t it be fun to actually have them be a book?”
The downside to this kaleidoscopic, ensemble-piece structure: “I think my failure ratio is higher with this kind of book than with any other. I would say for “Goon Squad” and “The Candy House” that about fifty per cent of the first drafts I wrote were unusable.”
I was accused of writing an anti-outline post. People, I am pro-outline. I’m pro- writing of any kind! I just wanted to suggest that you could start writing without one—without almost anything, really, but the desire to write.