How Sharon Olds writes

 I learned with relief that Sharon Olds also makes indexes when she’s working on a good notebook. I’m not the only one.

Sam Anderson’s profile of Olds in The Times was most interesting when he describes the way Olds writes:

She writes in spiral-bound notebooks. When she’s on a roll, can fill one up in a few days.

Then comes the “fussbudget” phase:

• She reads and rereads.

• She dog-ears pages.

• She makes an index.

In this way, she builds up a huge archive of thinking and feeling; although her finished books tend to be slim, they carry inside them, hidden like dark matter, the gravity of all the unpublished writing that helped make them possible.

I’m interested in the connection between writing and thinking. I contend that writing is a species of thinking, simply one way of doing it. And the way many, many writers do it is the way Olds does it, by working out a notion through a notebook.

Through the years, I’ve been astonished at people who sat at a typewriter and stared at blank sheet of paper or who, in later years, stared at a blank computer screen.

Writing doesn’t begin with typing. It starts with thinking about an idea. It ends when you just can’t think about that idea any more.

A notebook is a good way to work out an idea.

Here’s Anderson’s description:

Olds writes searchingly, as a way to think and feel herself through the world.

I like that. When I write, I’m searching for something.

• Source: Sam Anderson, “Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate”; The New York Times, Oct. 12, 2022.