BOOKISH: Writers, Take Note… or Not

We are told writing is sacred. All writing, but especially our writing. We all have something special to say. From our first scribbled notes to the eventual mountain that accumulates with age, our writing is invaluable.

And so we keep our notes. We have banker boxes full of pages. Our computer files bulge with stories, characters, openings, closings, facts and figures. We have CDs from the Nineties, flash drives from the 2000’s, and now the cloud, filled with notes notes notes.

One almost hopes for a fire.

Why? Because we know, deep down, none of it has value. We page through a pile, pick through another pile, pick up a third and let it drop. No one wants this. It’s bad enough the writing is bad. Now you want to save the worst part, the most unfinished part… the notes?

I suppose. Everyone else does. But will I ever use my notes? Will I ever say, I’m stuck, where are my notes? Well, I haven’t yet, not through eighty thousand poems and forty-seven novels. Will I need my notes for the forty-eighth novel?

No. I’ll write as I always have written. Despite all my notes on characters and story lines, I’ll plot the whole thing in my head. Then start writing, page one chapter one, cranking out the words day after day for three months. That’s all the time anyone should spend on a single project. If you have anything going it will be obvious. If you don’t you’re not much of a writer. Don’t feel bad. Few are, including our bestselling novelists. There’s just not much there. They write like the front page of the NYT. There’s no attitude. No sharp view that renders their prose unique.

No snark.

It’s dead writing. The books are invariably attractive, the author’s name booming across the cover, the stellar blurbs twinkling from the back. It’s a sort of nice house, nobody home feeling.

BTW I haven’t written eighty thousand poems, or forty-seven novels. I’ve written one novel, finished this year. It just feels like forty-seven novels. If you’ve ever written a novel, you know what I’m talking about.

With that novel I learned something. Among one’s sources are, indeed, written notes. Followed closely by memory, the internet, and the imagination. These provide the details, the facts that are the beating heart of any novel. Let’s repeat: Notes, memory, internet, imagination. When I fact checked my book I found my imagination was, by far, the most accurate.

You heard right. The stuff I made up was better than any other source. Revisiting Seattle, it all appeared exactly as described. There were the glass doors opening to a skyscraper, there was the fair source coffee shop across the street, the hipster business people smoking pot on their break, the Indian restaurant around the corner. All made up. And all right there.

Imagination won the day.

I did use my notes for little things, like street names. But then I hit a snag. As the novel wrapped up I could not remember what Caitlin said when Lance threw himself on his knees. These were secondary but important characters. I had to know. So I went to my notes.

“Caitlin stood frowning. My god men were idiots. She put a hand on his bristly head. One could almost see the University of Miami helmet he once wore. It might have been the last time he was happy, the last time life made sense. She decided, then and there, to fulmigate the coxylwheek.”

She decided what? Fulmi… I had written rapidly, the scrawl racing off and dying. After much head scratching I threw the pages down and made up another ending. Caitlin takes him back. If she can’t love someone, at least someone can love her. Why not this blubbering, handsome, overgrown man-child?

She does fulmigate the coxylwheek. So to speak. I’m checking those notes again.