A New Path to the Waterfall

AN EARLY poem by Raymond Carver called “Looking for Work” opens with these lines: “I have always wanted brook trout / for breakfast. // Suddenly, I find a new path / to the waterfall.” The poem, collected in A New Path to the Waterfall (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), is, like much of Carver’s work, enigmatic and spare, but I’ve always read it as a parable of the artist’s search for creativity and originality. When I’m stuck on a story, or when every word I write sounds trite and tired, I sometimes find myself quietly saying, “I need to find a new path to the waterfall.”

But how to find that path? How to leave the safe, well-traveled road without getting lost in the woods?

For me, the answer seems to lie in a regular return to those most basic tools of writing: pen and ink on paper. Several times a year, I print out a copy of whatever I’m working on, settle into the comfy chair beside our gas fireplace, and read the manuscript from beginning to end, making revisions as I go. I am always surprised by how revising my work the old-fashioned way, with a pen on paper, rekindles the spark that started me writing the piece in the first place.

Like many writers, I mostly work on a laptop, focusing on short, discrete sections of a longer piece, honing dialogue, tweaking verbs, tightening the connective tissues within and between scenes. This is necessary micro-level work that seems best done on a screen, where I can tinker with problem scenes, producing, then erasing, then rediscovering, words and sentences quickly and seamlessly.

But printing out a manuscript and reading it from start to finish allows me to see my work as if I were its reader and not its author. It’s a subtle yet powerful shift in perspective. I make many small, necessary edits, which is satisfying, but my greatest creative leaps come when I take in the book whole and see what’s missing—how the voice seems off in one chapter, say, or how the characters’ motivations have subtly shifted over the course of the story.

It can take a week or more to read through an entire manuscript, but when I turn the last page of the draft, my head is back inside the story and I have pages and pages of notes toward revisions— some minor, others drastic—that will keep me busy for months.

Last fall, a particularly heady reading of a book-length manuscript got me wondering how other writers find their new path to the waterfall. It turns out I’m not alone in my belief in the value of pen-on-paper editing. Novelist Jennifer Egan, whose latest novel, Manhattan Beach (Scribner), was published in October to rapturous reviews, writes and edits her books almost entirely by hand, using her computer mostly as a tool to render her text legible to herself and others.

In 2012, after seven years of historical research, during which time she also published her novel The Keep (Knopf, 2016) and her Pulitzer-winning novelin-stories, A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf, 2010), Egan sat down with a legal pad and began to write the novel that would become Manhattan Beach. “I write without a story or characters at the start. I just have a sense of time and place,” she says, “so I just started writing, and that’s where my characters came along.”

Over the next eighteen months, Egan filled twenty-seven legal pads with the sprawling first draft of her novel, which she then typed into her computer, printed out, and read—an experience she says left her with “a pretty vertiginous feeling of not knowing what the hell I was doing.” Undeterred, Egan wrote and rewrote the novel, chapter by chapter, working as much as possible with a pen on paper.

“Everyone has their way,” she says. “I edit by hand on hard copy and then type in my changes and reprint it. The reason I do that is for fiction—and this isn’t true for journalism or other kinds of writing—I don’t seem to be able to

When I run out of words, I find it helpful to run out the door. Even if I have only fifteen minutes and it’s February and freezing, I find physically moving quickly gets my mind going again. It also helps if I listen to music with a driving rhythm and lyrics I admire. Over the five years it took to write my first novel, I turned to the bluegrass music of Valerie June more than anyone else.

—idrA novey I do almost all of my writing on my commute because I like being in the in-between—you can pick up so much.

—CHriS CAmpAnioni When I feel stuck, despondent, bored of my writing, I watch Richard Linklater and Noah Baumbach movie trailers.

—CHloe CAldWell

access good ideas or even very fresh language if I’m looking at what I’m doing as I do it, which is the experience of looking at a screen. I’m looking to access deeper material and deeper ideas that are less conscious and therefore hopefully more interesting.”

But turning away from digital tools is by no means the only way to draw on this deeper creative intelligence. Anthony Marra, author of the bestselling A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth, 2013), writes primarily on a computer but swears by the laborious process of retyping each draft from beginning to end without stopping to fine-tune individual sections. Retyping each draft from page one, even the sections in which he plans to make no changes, allows Marra to “tap back into whatever wellspring of inspiration first generated the language itself and the story itself,” he says. “It feels more akin to the process of writing a first draft than it does to editing.”

This revision technique, which he has used since his years as a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, also helps Marra get his creative juices flowing again when he hits a snag in the story or if he is forced to stop writing for more than a few weeks. “Even if I haven’t finished a first draft,” he says, “I’ll usually spend a few days retyping whatever I’ve last been working on, almost as sort of like wind sprints or something, to try to warm myself back up and get the atrophied muscles working again.”

Every writer at one time or another has faced this problem: how to get back on track when the well runs dry or when work and family obligations pull you away from the desk for an extended period. In a career spanning eight poetry collections, including, most recently, The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), Jane Hirshfield says she has come to expect that the creative spark will sometimes fail to catch. “When I was young, poems arrived amid every kind of busyness,” Hirshfield says. “I didn’t decide to write. Poems simply came, the way bees come to a field of flowering mustard, or apples come to an apple tree in June. In college, there were times I might write three poems a day. That changed.”

But if Hirshfield has, as she puts it, “no enforceable contract with the Muse,” she has learned to make room in her life for creativity to flourish. “Time at artist colonies has been, over decades now, invaluable for that,” she says. “A month at an artists retreat is short, and rare; it is both a validation from the outside to be asked, and a privilege of good luck to be asked, to be able to go. I don’t want to waste such a chance. I treat those weeks as monastic time.”

Hirshfield’s longest creative silence, in 1996, lasted a year and ended only when she wrote a poem for a multidisciplinary performance piece to be performed at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. Not accustomed to writing to order, Hirshfield had agreed to the commission only provisionally, but in the end she was grateful for how it turned out. A set of close-up photographs of the commissioning artist’s hands, taken during a performance of a classical Indian dance, led her to write her 1997 poem “A Hand,” which broke her creative logjam. “In the end, what restored me to writing after so long away from it was someone else’s offered question but one I was able to take into myself as my own,” she recalls.

Of course, not every writer can count on being offered a commission or weeks of splendid isolation at an artists retreat. Novelist Matthew Klam says he finds inspiration in rereading books he loves. “I’ve reread certain books a dozen times, and I’ve listened to books on tape more than a dozen times,” says Klam, author of Who Is Rich? (Random House, 2017). “Just yesterday, I was listening to William Hurt reading [Ernest Hemingway’s] The Sun Also Rises, and it’s amazing. Hurt’s ability to do voices was so instructive to me. I was inspired to be inside other people just by listening to William Hurt, so that helped me get excited about differentiating my characters.”

Even smaller, subtler shifts in daily routines and habits can jar the senses and get the creative juices flowing, he says. A few years into writing Who Is Rich? Klam bought a stand-up desk, hoping a simple change in posture would shake up how he approached his work. For his part, Marra, in an effort to trick his eye into seeing his work as a prospective reader might, sometimes prints out drafts in Garamond, a font often used in printed books, rather than in Times New Roman, the default font many writers use for manuscripts. “You’re always trying to find different ways of allowing yourself to see something that is for you probably pretty old in a new way,” he says.

One of my secrets to maintaining confidence is a yearly viewing of Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic

Ed Wood.

—emily SCHultZ Each year I reread Wright Morris’s Plains Song, and each year my heart gets broken again. And why is having your heart broken so inspiring? I’m not sure, but I find this so.

—peter orner Most of the poetry I’ve written since 2008 has been written to the music of the band the Be Good Tanyas, specifically the album Hello Love and more specifically the song “Human Thing.”

—CArrie murpHy

Two themes come up a lot when writers talk about sustaining the creative spark on long-term projects. The first is the need to eliminate distraction. Here, the Internet is often the unmentioned elephant in the room. The advent of wireless connections, and now social media, has transformed a once-solitary activity—a writer alone with a manuscript—into a potentially raucous social scene. Writing a novel or a poem is hard, and shopping online or sounding off in a Twitter spat is easy, so it’s no surprise that many writers, when faced with a scene that won’t pop or a line that won’t scan, find succor in digital distraction.

Then there is the role of comfort and the need to disrupt it. If you’re looking for a new path to the waterfall, writers say, it helps to be willing to dive headlong into the thicket. This might mean something as simple as printing out a manuscript in a new font or accepting a commission when you’re not used to writing to order. Or it might mean having the courage to follow up seven years of historical research by sitting down with a legal pad and a pen with no idea what or who your story might be about.

Creative disruption is not always pleasant or welcome, of course, and in the short term it can actually shut down writers. In November 2016, novelist Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), was working on her third novel when Donald Trump shocked the world by winning the U.S. presidency. Munaweera, who was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in Oakland, California, was so shaken by the election that she couldn’t write for months. “I felt incredibly disconnected from my project,” she says about that period. “It didn’t feel worthy of what we were going through as a nation. The old nagging questions popped up with a vengeance, ‘Why would anyone care about any of this? Why would anyone want to read this book?’”

When Munaweera returned to her novel, she found that her outrage at American politics had injected fresh urgency into her work. “The book I’m writing now is very different from the book I was writing before,” she says. “I had to infuse my present reality with the earlier themes of the book to reconnect with it again. Once I infused it with everything I was grappling with personally—questions about race, gender, the history of this country—then it started having power for me again.”

The country’s charged political climate found a place in Munaweera’s work, but many writers may find themselves simply overwhelmed by it. Not so long ago, writers could choose whether to engage with the politics and cultural tumult of the day; in today’s wired world, it is forever one mouse-click away from the manuscript on your screen. Some writers embrace this shift. Klam, whose recent novel is set during the run-up to the 2012 election and touches on themes of massive wealth and income inequality, says he made a conscious decision to work online, where he would have access to the vast, cacophonous library of the Internet.

It worked for Klam, whose novel deftly folds its social commentary into an antic riff on middle-aged angst and marital infidelity. I’m no longer sure it works for me. More and more, I find myself needing to draw a fine line between the engaged citizen glued to the news and calling elected officials in Washington and the writer trying to finish a book, which, in practice, means setting down my digital devices and picking up pen and paper.

But the value of the printed page isn’t just that it doesn’t have an Internet connection. As Hirshfield puts it: “The written page—and not a screen—has a kind of thusness to it that lets me see the words as themselves, separate from me and my knowledge and relationship to them. That objectivity is helpful, for seeing what they might say to someone who is not me, and for offering a solid surface able to receive the chisel of revision.”

That’s it, exactly. A document on a screen retains, for me, the provisional quality of an unspoken thought. If I want to unthink it, I can hit the delete key and it disappears. This is enormously useful, especially early on, when I need to experiment without an imaginary reader peering over my shoulder. But there comes a time when I need to make that private document public, so I can see it plain. To do that, to clear away the mental underbrush and find that new path to the waterfall, sometimes I have to turn back the clock to a time when all it took to write was a pen and paper and a quiet room.

I take my cue from visual artists, who can spend an entire career consumed by a singular shape, or color, or a set of strokes, meticulously working through “the problem” canvas by canvas with no or very little or only very subtle changes. Think of Rothko, as an example. Think Glenn Ligon’s textual paintings. Think Jay DeFeo’s “The Rose.”

—riCkey lAurentiiS Prepositions are handy little multi-tools, and having a list of them tacked to the wall next to your writing desk, as I do, can keep your work moving on, toward, up, and above.

—tony tulAtHimutte I will retype another’s book until I feel love and not despair.

—lo kWA mei-en