Climbing a Tree, Uncovering a Duck: Writers on Writing

June 8, 2010 | 12 books mentioned 13 5 min read

In class the other day, a student compared novel writing to climbing a very large tree. You’re on one branch, she said, and it’s wobbly. You don’t like it, it makes you uncomfortable—if not totally freaked out. Your hands are probably chapped by now, and the ground below grows more and more distant. Above you, there are sturdier spots, breathtaking vistas, but you have to climb carefully. You don’t want to fall out of the tree, do you?

A couple of weeks ago, I figured something out about the structure of my very-new novel that left me feeling exhilarated and ready to move forward. I’d been working and working on a certain section until—exhale—something changed. It felt like when I get a Thai massage, and the masseuse, upon discovering a particularly tough archipelago of knots, goes to town, grinding her fist (or—wait—is that an elbow…or…her teeth?) as I try to hold back tears. This time, though, I was the masseuse, and I was massaging the hell out of my novel. I couldn’t see its knots, I could only feel them, sliding and resisting beneath my fingertips. I didn’t stop, though—I would smooth them out, I would get to the bottom of this. When I was done, my novel did feel better. Also, it needed an aspirin.

I’ve always sought out writing metaphors and similes because they articulate the strangeness, joy, and frustrations of such an abstract activity, one that requires you to dream and to focus at the same time. It’s the not-exactly quality of figurative language, the pairing of two alien contexts to create a new familiar, that seems appropriate for a process that is at times so maddening. What is writing? It seems to exist in a liminal universe, where words slowly turn into worlds.

cover I have some favorites. There are many gems in The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard, which begins, “When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe.” Lorrie Moore has said that a short story is “like a mad, lovely visitor with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.” (Not sure I agree—but, lord, do I wish I did.) In an interview, Ron Carlson said, “Today, my writing day felt like pushing a big rock that was flat on every side, and heavy. Oosh. All I can say is: here’s my shoulder once again.” And was it Ann Beattie who compared writing a novel to walking into the ocean to die? (Now, that’s one I can relate to.) Of course, no essay on this topic can exclude Franz Kafka’s “A book should be the ax that breaks the frozen sea within,” but I prefer Joy Williams’s take, included in the contributors’ notes of Best American Short Stories 1995:

This was an extremely difficult story for me to write, and I could not get out, I could not get out of the story. Writing it did not break up the frozen sea within, this is no ax, the sea remains as heavy and unyielding as ever. Everything here seems to me to be cold and helpless and unresolved. There is such a difference between the living and the dead, it cannot be traveled really. So I perpetrate a lie here. I pretend to traverse some of the distance the living share. All art is about nothingness: our apprehension of it, our fear of it, its approach. We’re on the same trail here, we hurry along, soon we’ll meet. There are details along the way, of course. Even here there are tattoos and hairdressers and ice cream and dogs with slippers. But these are just details, which protect us as long they can from nothingness, the dear things.

Isn’t that just exactly how it feels? Upon reading these descriptions, and others, I feel less alone.

cover cover I decided to ask some contemporary writers for their own writing metaphors. In his reply to my email query, Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, asked me, “Is the metaphor supposed to relate to the act of writing, as in, it’s like pulling your hair out one strand at a time? Chewing chalk?” Yes, I wrote back, that’s precisely what I mean. Peter Bognanni, author of the debut novel The House of Tomorrow, was more practical: “Writing fiction is writing life,” he said. “Except characters don’t go to the bathroom as often.” (Amen to that. I always think, if I made myself into a fictional character, she would have to pee every 35 minutes… talk about squandering the drama.)

cover I received a few outdoorsy metaphors—maybe being chained to a desk sends our minds there immediately. Kate Christensen, most recently the author of Trouble, has been working on a new novel, which she compares to climbing a mountain.

I started in September at base camp with a full, heavy pack and lots of equipment. It was a long uphill slog through an avalanche, a blizzard, crevasses, and a couple of wrong turns. Last week I finally made it to the summit, oxygen-depleted and cautiously euphoric. I’m heading down the other side now, and I can see the ending at the bottom, but they always say the descent is the most dangerous part of the whole undertaking.

Antoine Wilson, author of The Interloper, is also working on a new novel. He compared writing to “fishing with a bent nail and cut hot dogs for bait. All nibbles, a constant feeling that things are getting away from you, a long slow day. And then someone hands you a spear gun. You realize you weren’t really fishing before, just preparing.” A surfer boy from way back, Antoine says he also relies on the adage, “Ride the wave you’re on.”

Hyatt Bass, who, aside from being the author of The Embers, may just be my doppelganger, compared writing to canoeing through a swamp: “It looks gorgeous from a distance, and you can’t wait to delve in. You start off fast and strong. Soon you’re totally lost, scared, worn out, covered in mosquitoes, and you can’t stand the smell of yourself. If you’re lucky, you find your way out and the swamp still looks good enough to lure you back several more times.”

cover Jennifer Egan, whose new novel A Visit From the Goon Squad comes out this week, told me she often compares writing to physical exercise: “If you do it regularly,” she said, “you can’t imagine not doing it. But if you fall out of the habit, you’re no more inclined to write than you would be to run when no one is chasing you.”

Matthew Specktor, author of That Summertime Sound, gave me an architectural metaphor. Regarding the revision of his new novel, he said, “I feel I’m picking up a very large house, with all its support beams intact, and moving it fifteen feet to the left. The structure’s the same, only all its views are shifted.” Emily St. John Mandel, fellow Millions contributor and author of The Singer’s Gun, also had a revision-specific metaphor:

I saw a television segment when I was a kid about a man who carved very realistic ducks out of blocks of wood. There were a few before-and-after shots (block of wood, then duck), and the interviewer asked the man how he did it. The man said, “Well, I start with the block of wood, and then I just cut away everything that isn’t the duck.”

For some reason that’s always stayed with me, and since cutting away extraneous parts is such a large part of the revision process for me, I think of that television segment all the time when I’m polishing my work—I think of the process of revising a novel as getting rid of everything that isn’t the duck.

Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine, is usually quite the jokester, but when I asked for a metaphor, he got serious on me. “Writing is a self-inflicted wound,” he said. Ouch, I thought. And also: Man, that’s true.

Now that I have visualized writing as tree-climbing, mountaineering, running from a murderer, and self-mutilation, among other things, I am feeling pumped to get to work. How about you?

Image credit: Flickr/JonRiivera.

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. She is the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them.