On Writing and Discovery

To get myself into the habit of reading a book with the aim of writing about it for the blog, I started with Stephen King's On Writing. Although it is primarily about fiction, and therefore doesn't directly relate to any of the writing I'll be doing here, it did give some general insight into the writing process, and the way to think about writing from a reader's perspective.

One of the images that most struck me in the book was King's description of a piece of writing as a fossil to be uncovered. For him, the process begins with an idea—a question or a situation—and his job is to discover the characters and mechanics of the plot. I've heard many writers describe the moment when the characters "take over" the novel, but I had never heard the entire writing process articulated in quite this way:

"Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small, a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same." (pp. 163-164)

In another life I was a graduate student in mathematics, so King's fossil analogy brought to mind the question of where mathematical proofs come from. The mathematician Paul Erdös described particularly elegant proofs as coming from "The Book." The implication was that for each theorem, there is an ideal proof waiting to be discovered. But even if your proof isn't going to be the most elegant, the thought process is still one of being lead forward, step by step, from logical deduction to logical deduction. In fact, one way to think about the job of the mathematician is to set or assume a series of definitions, and to use logic to discover what other facts and relationships they lead to.

Of course the process of discovery is going to be more subjective in writing than in mathematics (which is never supposed to be subjective). If Stephen King and I start with the same narrative situation, I guarantee that we will write different stories. But I do think that the same idea can apply to both fiction and non-fiction, to storytelling and argument. In other words, in King's analogy, the job of any writer is to start with the germ of an idea, and to prod and scrape it inch by inch until they have discovered the fully formed idea underneath.

As an aside, in reading On Writing, I realized (or remembered) how much I like Stephen King as a writer. From this and the little else I have read, I enjoy his no-frills style and find it refreshing how seriously he takes his own reading and writing, without taking himself too seriously. In fact, I enjoyed the book enough that I may plan a Horror series specifically to read one of his more well-known books. My first series, though, will be on Food Writing.

I recently finished Ruth Reichl's debut novel, Delicious!, which was a perfect post-holiday read. It centers around a food magazine unexpectedly shuttered (a situation Reichl knows first-hand) and the sections describing the magazine and various meals are wonderful. The plot has its weaknesses, but it was charming and a good lead-in to the real genre of food writing. I haven't settled my whole list yet, but I'm now leaning toward adding one of Ruth Reichl's memoirs. I will start, though, with The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher, if only to begin near the beginning of great twentieth century food writing. More on that soon.

Other books finished since my last post:
The Kept by James Scott
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead
The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld
All the Names by Jose Saramago
Delicious! by Ruth Reichl