In February, I spilled some secrets about how writers write. There’s plenty of other useless advice out there. For example, you’ve probably read some version of the quotation, “Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”1 Ray Bradbury unhelpfully said, “Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” And William Wordsworth uselessly said, “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” (For someone with “Words” in his name, you’d think he could offer better writing advice.)
As I listened to an episode of the podcast The Writing Life yesterday, author Yan Ge said this about how she writes:
“I like the idea of approaching this new territory—this new fictional realm—that is completely dark, and you have this one flashlight and you go forward, and as you go, you light up a little patch bit by bit.” (at the 13:40 mark)
This idea hits closer to my own process, but for me it’s as if there’s no flashlight. Instead of lighting up little patches as I go, it’s more like I’m feeling my way blindly through a passageway, sometimes taking a wrong turn and ending up in a dead end because I couldn’t see that I should have gone left instead of right.
One common metaphor involves the idea of a spectrum between “pantsers” at one end (people who just start writing “from the seat of their pants”) and “plotters” at the other (people who write from a highly detailed outline that they’ve plotted out in advance), with most writers falling somewhere in between.
But I view all writing to be “pantsing.” Even if you’re rigidly following an outline, you’re still making it up as you go. That’s the joy and the hell of writing. And so, to me, there seems no better metaphor than wandering blindly in a pitch-dark netherworld, reaching out, grasping, touching, and feeling words, considering which ones go together, and having to choose without seeing what the other options are.
And that’s why you can give 100 writers the same writing prompt and get 100 different stories. Because we’re all feeling our way through the dark, hoping that when we reach the end and turn on the light, we’ve written something worth sharing.
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This quotation has been attributed to sports columnist Red Smith, Thomas Wolfe, and even Ernest Hemingway. But the earliest form of it likely comes from Paul Gallico, author of The Poseidon Adventure.