“Writers tend to hurry at the precise moments when they should be slowing down. As a result, they wind up asserting big emotions, rather than allowing their characters to experience those emotions. They lunge at genuine feeling and arrive at sentiment.” - Steve Almond, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey
My brilliant and talented friend Lisa read the latest draft of my novel and suggested I might be missing an important scene. Basically, what I had down was: “and then this really awful thing happened…and then…”
Lisa thought I should write out the really awful thing. She was right, of course. How could I have missed it??
Oh, I remember. I missed it because I didn’t want to write that scene. I didn’t want to “write from the center of the pain,” as my late mentor, Diane Freund, used to say. But I decided to pull on my big-girl pants and set to work.
Part of this work entailed getting out an enormous & ancient family Bible, a 19th-century heirloom given to me by my grandmother. I wanted the character to use one like it in the scene. I cracked it open for the first time (it had been living decoratively on top of my bookshelf for years) and discovered a horde of ephemera tucked into the pages—a homemade paper doll of my great-grandmother, a lock of hair wrapped in tissue paper, an advertisement draft for the sale of my grandparents’ ranch, a photo of a man marked “Mr. Bender,” holding an enormous halibut, and part of an 1890 letter reprimanding a niece for backing out of her promise to visit. In short, I hit gold.
I presume you know where I’m going with this.
Once I finished combing through these delightful ancestral treasures and started writing, more treasure unearthed itself—ideas and words and images that could only be revealed through the momentum of actually writing.
It was one of those universe-hitting-you-over-the-head metaphors, one I couldn’t resist very unsubtly passing along here: Write the thing!
You’re welcome.
Cheers,
Lacy
P.S. This same thing happens in Netflix’s adaptation of Tick, Tick… Boom!, Rent creator Jonathan Larson’s musical about writing his first musical. In the show, Larson’s composer idol tells him his show-in-progress is missing a song. But Larson doesn’t want to write this song and so he procrastinates it for a few years until he’s up against a deadline and then bangs it out from scratch the night before his workshop performance. Whew! I loved it.
As always, love your post. The perfect inspiration. I am going to put a little sign on my desk that says, "Write the thing." :)