It’s Shit Until It Isn’t
Friday Write #171
“I’m not sure I understand the process of writing,” Elizabeth Hardwick1 told the Paris Review forty years ago. “There is, I’m sure, something strange about imaginative concentration. The brain slowly begins to function in a different way, to make mysterious connections.”
What you can’t figure out on a Monday, Hardwick suggests, will become clear to you on Friday. And it won’t be because you’ve become smarter or better or more focused. It’s because of the weird and wondrous—but also rather private and humble—magic that happens when you simply keep returning to your work.
As I liked to say when writing my first novel, it’s shit and it’s shit and it’s shit—until finally one day, it isn’t. Obviously we’re not talking about a Monday to Friday transformation here; this a process that takes years.
One of my current novels (the one I call Book A) is definitely still shit, and I’ve been pecking at it off and on for what feels like ages. The other day I opened it up for the first time in a while and found that I’d written prompts to myself inside of it. I have no memory of doing such a thing, but here are a few of them:
Write a scene in which one of your characters makes an offering to another; your main character is given something to look forward to.
Write a scene of preparation.
Write a scene of pity. Of surprising generosity.
How about we all pick one of those and write from it today? And even if our sentences are shit, someday they won’t be!
Hardwick was a novelist, critic, essayist, and co-founder of The New York Review of Books.