Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.
Raymond Carver, a writer sometimes credited with the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s, talks about his own and others’ writing process in this piece from 1981, reprinted in this month’s Prospect. He talks about 3x5 cards he has taped up next to his desk where he writes, and his essay reads like a string of 3x5’s—snippets of thought: some his own, some from fellow writers, about the writing process, inspiration, preciseness:
Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.
It’s all here—most of the stuff I’ve been trying to tell you about in class over these past couple of weeks, right here in little bite-size chunks. If you don’t read anything else I post here this year, read this one—it will either give you a little new insight into your own writing process, or give you a little better understanding of writers as you interpret their works, or at least prove that I’m not quite as crazy as I sound sometimes!