Obvious or Not?

Every Word Is The First Word

First, a hypothetical question

You’re very small and you catch the mumps. Your grandmother brings you an 8000-piece jigsaw puzzle to pass the time. Let’s say it’s one of those puzzles that comes with no image of how the completed project should look. How do you put it together?

At the in-person workshop on Thursday nights, Trish said she’d assemble the outer edge pieces, then group the remaining pieces by color and begin to look for how they related to one another. At the online Monday workshop, Tony said the same. Note how they don’t tackle the project in a linear way. They create the sub-assemblies, then look for how those smaller clusters of pieces relate to each other.

This seems obvious now

In hindsight, this strategy wasn’t always so obvious. As a beginning writer I assumed every writer began with some form of “Once upon a time …” It seems safe to say that readers assume that writers create stories in the order those stories are eventually read. Beginning at the start. Ending at the end. And it took me years to get past that tendency.

Now I realize that my best stories start from a thousand places, like crystals forming in a solution. Each of these small sub-assemblies reaches out in all directions until it bonds with other sub-assemblies. At any time, the scene I’m writing might eventually fall at almost any place in the finished book. This method is apparent in the original short story of Fight Club, and it’s inspired by Amy Hempel’s story structure in The Harvest, a story Tom Spanbauer used to teach us the style of Minimalism.

The nonfiction oral history style, which intercuts quotes, is an especially good framework for quilting small things into larger ones. I used the oral history form in Rant after enjoying it so much in books like Edie, An American Biography and Lexicon Devil, The Fast Time and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs. Decades ago, I sat for several hours with Andrew Sullivan and just recorded everything he said. To write a profile on him, I only needed to excerpt his best trains of thought. My father was a brakeman on the Northern Pacific Railway, and it was fascinating to visit the “hump yard” and watch while freight trains were assembled, car by car.

Always a surprise

My friends who don’t write assume a writer begins at the start. Such friends can accept that a movie is shot in a nonlinear way, each scene filmed when the sets and actors are available, then assembled in the editing room. Of course, the screenplay is written, but even that is subject to constant rewriting.

If you accept the nonlinear way of writing, then any small observation or anecdote you work on today is valid. It’s you putting together a few pieces of the puzzle. Say, the red pieces, or a few edge pieces.

For me, the joy comes when you begin to achieve a critical mass. When the sub-assemblies grow larger, and you can see how they might relate to each other. When you’ve been working from a thousand centers, you’re not consciously controlling the plot. Elements are growing together from every direction. The book or story completes itself in a heartbeat when you see how the larger fragments finally interface.

And, yes, this method might be maddening for people who need to outline and map out a book project. But it’s incredibly satisfying to trust that every idea is valid and has a place. And that eventually the critical mass of those ideas will create a book that you never could’ve anticipated with any meticulous planning.

Why now?

Duh, taxes. In 1973, the CETA program allowed my mother to become a bookkeeper and tax preparer, and she drilled all of us kids into keeping our check stubs and receipts. Dutifully, every week or so I total and bundle my receipts. Month by month I total the totals, and by the year’s end it’s a delight to see every detail fall into place on my income tax return.

There’s something so abstract, yet so intimate about tax returns. The schedules and whatnot. I can see why David Foster Wallace chose that world for his final book, The Pale King. It’s always a joy to sit down with my CPA—shout out to Ryan—and learn about tax law changes, and hear gossip about other tax payers. The latest trend among clients, he says, is to try to deduct pet-related expenses such as animal health insurance. This is almost always a non-starter. His one exception being a client who needed a trained attack dog to accompany said client as he serviced in-store cash machines.

In closing?

Whether today’s idea looks big or small, write it. Print it. Like those bundled tax receipts, it will find its own place. And what looks like chaos, for now, will someday organize itself within moments to become a perfection you could never have consciously anticipated.