A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Five-Hundred-And-Sixty-Seven

The novelist E. L. Doctorow famously described his process for writing a novel with the metaphor of a car driving down a dark road at night.  The car's headlights don't show whole of the road, but they let you see enough to steer through the whole way.  In the same way, he said that he didn't have to know the whole of the story: he knew what to write next, and that was enough.  He could see the road in front of him, as it were.  As much as I would like to be able to plan out my fiction more explicitly, I think that I will always be in this same mode as a writer, and it is probably best to just accept such proclivities .  I am finding that the more I accept that I am kind of along for the ride, the more that I relax about writing, and when I am able to be relaxed in that way, I am a more productive writer.  I think I have been fighting that inclination a bit while working on this new book, in part because I do have a clear, if broad, sense of the story.  As I began, I was trying to steer the piece more directly towards what I thought it needed in order to write the story I have in mind, but when I just let go I found myself starting in a different way than I had anticipated, but the more I trust that intuition and allow myself to just go with it, the more I am able to actually write.

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