My brother asked me one time, “What’s it like inside your brain…being a writer and all of that?”
“You don’t want to go there…” I replied.
“No, really. How do you come up with stuff to write, think of things like that column on the Alaskan stewardess, stuff like that?”
Okay, so let’s say, I was going to describe the inner workings, maybe as if you were kind of taking a stroll through a museum or something…
First of all, there is that collection of old ideas over there in the corner. That’s where I have been throwing them over the years. Sometimes I even forget they are there, then I’ll be wandering around here inside my brain, and Crack! I’ll walk right into one of them.
The result is usually a headache. Other times, I just stumble across them, usually when I’m wandering around in the dark trying to find an idea, and all of a sudden, there is one I had forgotten about which was still good. I pick it up, and, well, you know the rest.
Actually, it is dark in there more often than not. At least until I find that idea. A faint glimmer may begin in the distance, I run toward it thinking “Here’s an idea!” Then, it either just disappears or it begins to glow a little more, and gets bigger, and bigger.
If it is a really good idea, it can light up the whole place! Rockets go off, firecrackers explode and the sky is filled with incandescent illumination. But most of the time it goes off at about 60 watts. That is the average illumination for writers’ ideas, in general, although some may burn at a whopping 100 watts at times.
Now there are other corridors in there also, of course. There are those where I am trying to figure out a way to say something that makes sense. I wander down this one and up another one, checking in corners and stairways as I go.
They generally are like a maze, where you walk around, turning corners and keep finding dead ends. Sometimes it takes a long time to work your way through, and just when you figure you are there, Bingo! Dead end. Start over.
Then there are the miscellaneous piles of clutter everywhere. A paragraph from this, a sentence from that, bunch of words never used, that are just everywhere. Let’s face it, everyone’s brain is full of stuff like this.
Writers, however, have an over abundance of it, kind of like walking through an overstocked antique store. The more you investigate and peek into nooks and crannies, the more curiosities you find, some of which you can’t make heads nor tails out of. Kind of like that ending of a book I wrote once, but never wrote the rest of:
“She turned, her ebony hair framing a face that would have launched ships in another era. Her eyes met his, only for a fleeting moment, and their hands touched, almost by accident…but not quite. They both felt the shudder of recognition, of desire…but it was too late.
“I must go,” she stammered. “I must.”
“I know,” he whispered. “Go, go now before it’s too late for both of us…”
The sounds of her footsteps disappearing into the dark echoed through the silence.
See what I mean? Clutter. That’s the way it is with a writer’s mind. Nothing but stuff piled everywhere, including phrases and expressions from other writers collected over the years.
Things like “Call me Ishmael…we’ll do lunch” or “Four score and seven years ago, I bought this Buick. What a pile of crap!” or the famous “Whose woods these are, I think I know and I know he won’t mind my hunting in them…”
Of course, there is other clutter type stuff that everyone has to deal with as well, like questions which arrive to the conscious being from time to time, usually in a writer’s case, when he is in the middle of trying to make deadline, like “Cheez. How much did I tip that girl anyway?” or “Hmmmm…did I turn my car lights off when I got out?” or the ever present “I wonder what the lunch special is today?”
Or even, “Is that effective or affective?” You never know what you will find in a writer’s brain. I have even discovered unburned piles of firewood stacked neatly in one corner of my cerebellum at times, and a long lost notepad in my frontal lobe, along with a couple of forgotten dance moves in my cerebral cortex. Those are the kinds of things that make you think.
Like the actor John Malkovich, I sometimes feel like I am sitting inside my brain looking out at the things which pass before my eyes, and wondering “Where the hell is this guy taking me anyway?”
Usually, the best ideas spring up when you least expect them, like when you are driving down a busy road and don’t even have a pencil or paper handy. You know you will forget it; so, you try to make some kind of association so you won’t.
Like you get a great idea to do a story about someone who is doing something different for Valentine’s Day, like giving a day at the spa. Hmmm…spa, Valentine’s day, you say to yourself…let’s see. Valspa, a scooter, rolls on wheels…remember wheels. Then later you wind up taking your car to have new tires put on instead.
That’s the way it is with a writer’s mind, though. You never know what is going to come up next, like that eight ball fortune thingy where you ask a question, then shake it and the answer appears in a little magical window. Like “Will I win the lottery?” Answer: “Try again.” Or “Does that cute waitress have a thing for me or what?” Answer: “Get a life.” Or like the time I was sitting in the editor’s office, discussing the next week’s story about flying…
“Hey, wait a minute,” I suddenly interrupted. “Fourteen, fourteen…that is the number of guys they fit in that phone booth that time. I wonder if there were any girls in there too?”
He looked at me, scratched something down on his pad, then continued. I know the note had to be something about calling someone, no doubt.
Maybe it’s time to shake the eight ball thingy again…
The above is an excerpt from the book Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sanity… by Dick Martin, a Glocester resident, former Burrillville High School teacher and contributor for NRI NOW.
Martin can be contacted at [email protected].
Love the Malkovich line! And I enjoyed reading about your “process.” Do you walk around with a notebook? As bad as an English student that I was (surely you remember!), I have always harbored a desire to write a novel. The problem is that I get my best ideas in the shower. By the time I’m out of the shower the idea is gone as if it was never there.