How to Drive

A blank page is a blank page. No matter how immaterial, it still stares you down. Are you afraid? How do you start? Is it even possible to start? What will happen if you start wrong? I used to say that my first sentence took five years, the rest of the paragraph another two, and the whole rest of the text from two to six months, depending on length. I’ve calmed down a lot (thank you transition), so those numbers have declined in recent years. Even so, I’m still finding myself now and then trying to jam everything I have to say into the first sentence.

Joan Didion: What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Interviewer: The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.

Joan Didion: Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how it should be, but it doesn’t always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.

Didion is right, of course, as she always is. So how do her pieces start? “In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs.” “Outside the Monterey County Courthouse in Salinas, California, the Downtown Merchants’ Christmas decorations glittered in the thin sunlight that makes the winter lettuce grow.” “Every weekday morning at eleven o’clock, just about the time the sun burns the last haze off the Santa Barbara hills, fifteen or twenty men gather in what was once the dining room of a shirt manufacturer’s mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean and begin another session of what they call ‘clarifying the basic issues.’” Do those sentences let you know that you are about to read about, respectively, John Wayne, the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions? Those first sentences are all long-range establishing shots, sentences that let you appreciate the light for a minute before escorting you into the story. Do they actually seem to use up a signficant number of options?

I suppose what she means is that there lurks invisibly behind the salient features of those introductory sentences a heap of decisions about voice, stance, tempo, and eventual organization. Because otherwise her sentences do not depart greatly from the premises of the most sublime opening sentence in American literature: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” (James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice) All these sentences, that is to say, begin at the beginning, without undue fanfare. Which is an excellent and imperishable rule of thumb. It may be that you want to begin with a piquant epigraph, or an indelible image, or an action scene drawn from farther down the narrative, and that you have sturdy reasons for doing so. If you are not so fortunate, though, you may find yourself jamming together an improbable number of subordinate clauses covering the essence of everything you want to say, like eleven people trying to go through a door at once. You want your opening to be lapidary, epic, but under those conditions it will be portentous, overloaded, and will stop your reader cold.

So, when in doubt, it’s far better to be a simpleton and start from the top. (That will also free you from overthinking, always a false friend—it will lead you down the forest path and beat you senseless.) It follows from the premise of that poker-faced first line that what is to ensue will be a chronicle, relating the major points of interest in your narrative. This is assuming you have a clear narrative—and of course you do. Whether or not your subject even resembles a story, you do have a story: yours. The story you are telling is how you learned about your subject, however woozily conceived and erratically conducted the process was. If your job description allows you to follow through on that, you can take on the parts of your story not in chronological or even logical order but in the order that you learned about them. That procedure has all kinds of tensile strength, since it mimics the process of your initial inquiry. From your point of entry you segue, inhabiting the memory of your own aroused curiosity, to the second thing you learned, and then the third, and so on, reinforcing your platform with each step, just as you did when you were educating yourself. You’ll want to quit, in writing as in research, when you see yourself coming the other way down the library corridor. The result may not be linear, but that won’t matter if you believe in it sufficiently.

For that is the way of the intuitive writer, who recognizes that all writing is autobiographical, even if by omission. The intuitive writer further acknowledges the plasticity of writing—that you are making a malleable object—and the eerie power of chance. I’m afraid that chance, an oft-scorned but essential tool, is a bit like a deity: you have to believe in it for it to work. You have to believe that ordering your chronicle according to a purely personal, internal, and aleatory system will create resonance and distancing that will induce corresponding thoughts and emotions in other people. You have to believe that if you suspend thinking about structure, the structure will be handled ably by your back-office staff without your breaking a sweat. You have to believe that what hits your ear as right is right, and what clunks is wrong.

When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I'm sure I'm floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which is always the only one, and which is also harmonious. Is there not, in this precise fitting-together of parts, something eternal, like a principle? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry? (Flaubert to George Sand, trans. F. Steegmuller)

There is nothing occult or extrasensory about these operations, although nobody really knows that much about how the brain works. The operative agent is, of course, your subconscious, which can see far more clearly and in greater depth than your conscious mind can. It has stored away a vast library (which will keep expanding as you age and read and write) of every kind of thing, and can supply the right note when you need it if you trust it. It can also prevent you from doing the stupid thing without your necessarily being aware, much the way that when you’re driving, it can make you veer sharply around the stag in the middle of the road before you’ve consciously registered its presence. Flaubert’s principle, verifiable in the field, is more mysterious—but then again, as we’ve seen, writing is a kind of music, so it makes sense that the ear should determine the truth, and that ethics and aesthetics might not really lie so far apart.