John McPhee on Writer’s Block, or How I applied McPhee’s Wisdom to my own Struggle to Write a First Draft

 “Block.  It puts some writers down for months.  It puts some writers down for life.  A not always brief or minor form of it mutes all writers from the outset of every day.”

 So begins New Yorker staff writer John McPhee’s April 29 essay on the condition that plagues every writer that’s composed more than a grammatically incorrect tweet or two.  While it’s nice to know writer’s block is so common that McPhee, now in his 50 year publishing in the New Yorker, is still stymied by it, I’ve been so blocked in my own writing that I felt the need to dig a little deeper, to figure out ways of applying his gems of wisdom to my own current block.  Perhaps what I've written will ring hopeful with you. With one novel and a second prize in Amazon’s 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award under my belt, I’ve been blocked in writing a second novel ever since the idea for one first came to me, nearly 2 years ago.  I was able to commit a fully-fleshed outline and one page of a first chapter to paper.  Then I began toying around with where to take the narrative from there.  There were several feasible and quite interesting ways to go with it, and I managed to write a few scenes.  I even threw in a very colorful secondary character and gave her a very real place in the central character’s story.  But I couldn’t settle on any of the 3 or 4 scenes I wrote.  The secondary character is still very much alive – she’s too special to kill – but none of the ensuing scenes won the approval of my hyper-critical self-editor.  What was wrong?  I knew I could do this.  I’d done it before.  I’d even finished a major novel contest in the top 1% of 5,000 worldwide entries.  So I spent several weeks appraising the process by which I’d written THESE DAYS, and discovered that, although it often seems as if the novel had somehow written itself, that was far from true.   Don’t get me wrong – there is a certain amount of self-propulsion that all writing takes on.  Characters personalities take shape; they begin to speak in their own voices.  If you don’t believe me, just try to make them do or say anything seriously “out of character” and, mark my words, you’ll be rewarded with the stickiest, most miserable writer’s quagmire you’ve ever known.  But this shaping of characters happens only after you’ve done what Anne Tyler describes as “moving them mechanically across the page” for awhile.  Initially, characters are puppets, they move and say and think and do only by the writer’s hand.  Play around with them in this fashion for awhile, and about two-thirds of the way through that painful first draft, they will begin to move with more of their volition and less of yours.  It is only through this “playing” that you get to know your characters – their thoughts, fears, hopes, motivations – well enough to write their actions precisely as they, themselves, would write them.  I guess this is the essence of what it means to say the novel wrote itself; after a while, the characters in THESE DAYS did seem to write themselves, but only after playing around with them in this fashion.  So this phase equates to the courtship phase of an engagement.  You wouldn’t embark on anything as life-changing as marriage with someone you hadn’t bothered to get to know, at least not when sober and with mind not clouded by sex!  So why expect to write anything life-changing with characters you don’t yet know? In thinking about the process of writing THESE DAYS, I recalled at least a dozen scenes that had either been cut or revised so dramatically as to hardly be recognizable.  Many of these, especially the earlier ones, would not only have made for a wholly different story, they’d have made for a wholly different central character.  Becky Shelling, the central character in THESE DAYS, is a star-struck teenage strip-teaser enamored with the glory days of burlesque.  It’s the 1970s and burlesque is all but dead.  The strip joint in which she works is a thinly-disguised brothel.  She’s the owner’s young, impressionable and sorely manipulated mistress; and she’s determined to cast her situation in the best possible light by reviving the good old days of burlesque.   In the final version, Becky, as a child, is enamored with show biz and dreams of being a chorus-line dancer.  Her father is an underemployed jazz musician with the melancholy habit of romanticizing the “good old days.” When he abruptly disappears, Becky is left with an emotional wound that has her looking for love in all the wrong places.  She ends up a dancer, but not the kind of dancer she’d always dreamed she’d be.   In the first draft, I wrote Becky as a fledgling artist.  Her father is still a jazz musician who is off the family scene more often than on, and he still ultimately disappears.  But when he’s home he indulges his daughter in art classes.  I now believe I originally wrote Becky’s situation that way because THESE DAYS is based on my own experience as a teenage strip-teaser from a broken home.  My first passion was art, so why wouldn’t Becky’s also be?  Because Becky the struggling artist would’ve made for a wholly different novel than Becky the would-be showgirl.  Her father’s disappearance might still have had her looking for love in all the wrong places, but I could not have tied it together so neatly with a passion for show biz learned from her dad and subsequently sidetracked by his disappearance.   

“How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists?  And unless you can identify what is not succeeding – unless you can see those dark, clunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your prose as it develops – how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?” – John McPhee, on the necessity of getting something – anything – down as a rough, first draft.

 One of the scenes that got cut in the early stages was one in which Becky confides to a retired stripper that she feels trapped in the situation she’s in with emotionally-abusive Lenny, her strip-joint owning benefactor.  Lenny exercises control over Becky through the giving or withholding of love and approval.  He watches where she goes, what she does, who she sees.  I originally wrote this scene in the home of the older stripper.  No surprise I couldn’t work out how Becky gained the confidence and wherewithal to visit, of her own volition, another woman’s home.  In its essence, this scene remained, but in the final version it takes place in the strip joint where the retired stripper, now a barmaid, works.  Cookie Sweet is a long-time friend of Lenny’s; they’ve worked together in the past and she's currently employed by his best friend.  He trusts she won’t taint the mind of his impressionable young mistress.  As it turns out, he’s wrong.  But this set of circumstances is far more feasible than the earlier one. 

“The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once…. The hardest part comes first, getting something – anything – out in front of me…as a first draft.  [Once you have] that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus.  Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye.  Edit it again – top to bottom.  The chances are that now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see.  And all that takes time.”

 And then there’s what McPhee calls the “interstitial time.” 

“You finish that first awful blurting [of words], and then you put the thing aside.  You get in your car and drive home.  On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words.  You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem.  Without the [first draft] – if it did not exist – you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it.  In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working out it twenty-four hours a day – yes, while you sleep – but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists.  Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”

 I reached this point about halfway through the first draft of THESE DAYS.  My mind not only worked 24/7 on the story – on what I’d written and subsequently planned to write – but also on the characters, their motivations, their histories, what they desired, what they feared.  They lived in my head – Becky, the teenage stripper; Ernie, her jazz musician father; Lenny, her philandering, strip-joint-owning boyfriend; Cookie Sweet, the burlesque-queen turned barmaid in whom she confides.  I knew how they would react to any given situation; and when I didn’t, when what I thought I knew simply would not mesh, I knew it was because I was trying to force something unnatural on them. I’ll leave you with this gem of McPhee’s wisdom of 50 writing years, one that encapsulates all of the above and yet is too easily forgotten during that wretched phase of first-draft writing:

 “The essence of the process is revision.”

Good Luck in your own writing life!