Most people have the notion that a writer is working only when he or she is sitting in front of a computer, typing words into a contraption.
I think of that as the last step in writing. You type only after most of the work is over.
Writing is a species of thinking. It involves research, including reading other writers and talking to other people.
It also involves the kind of thinking that comes to a point — that makes a narrative of the collected facts.
People do it in different ways. They naturally get organized to do it in different ways.
Years ago, I dug into Andre Gide’s journals, just to see how someone who has such a different sense of what writing is went about it.
Gide said he created while lying down, composed by pacing, wrote standing up and copied sitting down. Therefore, his workroom had:
• A bed for creating.
• An open space for pacing.
• An upright desk for writing.
• A small table and straight chair for copying. (Gide, a child of his day, thought of editing as getting a fair copy.)
Gide thought the postures were almost indispensible. He reminds me of Anglican Christians, who can’t really worship without standing, sitting and kneeling.
Gide banned books, except dictionaries, from the workroom. Nothing must rescue — that is, distract — the writer from work. Likewise, the room contained no serious art, although he thought that a few portraits or death masks of writers and thinkers would be fine.
And while he banned books, in general, he didn’t mind reading a few lines from the ancients. Apparently, it was a kind of prompt. A quotation or short passage might get him going.
He set down one rule of conduct for writers: Originality.
His theory of creativity was that you have to have an idea first. Then you can imagine it. You turn it over while you’re walking or pacing.
You have to wait for it to ripen. It’s a mistake to put pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard — until you’ve done some thinking.
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