The First Key to Writing is to Write, Not Think
Tonight I stumbled on one of my favorite movies while flipping through the Prime offerings. It was strange because rather than the normal indication that the movie was either included in my subscription or that I could rent or buy it for $X, I was offered the opportunity to view the movies for free if I was prepared to allow advertisements. That was a big throwback to my TV Network youth and very “uncablelike”, but I deigned to accept advertising, figuring that it was fine for fifty years, it would be fine for an evening with an old friend of a movie. That movie is Finding Forrester, starring the late great Sean Connery as the reclusive writer William Forrester (a role clearly modeled after J.D. Salinger). Salinger wrote one great novel, Catcher in the Rye, a post-war coming-of-age story that is considered one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century. He then promptly disappeared and thereby became an enigma to the literary world. He was challenged as a potential one-hit wonder. Forrester supposedly wrote a book called Avalon Landing to critical acclaim and then disappeared back into his family neighborhood in the Bronx. Strangely enough, Avalon Landing supposedly won the Pulitzer Prize where Catcher in the Rye lost out to Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (a great story, but known for the Humphrey Bogart movie version more than the book).
In the movie, Forrester is tasked with tutoring the young Jamal, who is both an aspiring writer and a kid struggling to find his way in a new private school where he is a bit of a fish out of water, a fish with a solid free throw shot from the foul line. This tutoring is in exchange for keeping Forrester’s identity a secret (he stumbled on the truth during his literature class). Jamal spends evenings with Forrester in his lonely apartment, a vestige of his youthful family life in the then Middle Class Bronx neighborhood, which has since gone downhill. Forrester puts an old typewriter in front of Jamal and tells him to start writing. When Jamal does not start pounding the keys immediately, Forrester asks what’s wrong. Jamal explains that he’s thinking. That’s when Forrester tells Jamal that the key to writing is to write, not think. Given the cerebral nature of the characters (both Forrester and Jamal, who is quite brilliant and learned), it is a funny and unexpected sentiment. It speaks to the importance of writing from the heart and with feeling, explaining that thinking is reserved for second drafts and editing.
As a storyteller, rather than a writer, I too believe in writing from the heart. But with me its less about writing first and second drafts, and more about how my stories develop and come into creation. I always start with a title. It has imbedded in it a raw and undeveloped idea that strikes me as interesting for some reason. Sometimes it is as simple as a catchy phrase or a passing quote from a movie (like Finding Forrester). Sometimes it is the importance of the person who says the words I use in the title. And sometimes it is more forced and labored than all of that. Every once in a while, I even drift in my storytelling and go back and change the title, but not too often. I find that the challenge of making a 1200+ word story out of a spur-of-the-moment title idea to be an exercise I enjoy and in which I take pride.
As I start writing, I let the muse flow as freely as Forrester wants Jamal to let loose. I find that my best friend in my writing is Google, and most often, specifically, Wikipedia. I can easily get lost in impromptu research on some reference or term and find the learning part of writing to be almost as much fun as the story-crafting. I might be breaking the Forrester rule about thinking because the research generally leads to ideas that I enjoy weaving into the story and it would be hard to deny that it involves doing some thinking. I could try to say it all just naturally flows from me, but what happens is that the fact pattern of the story is more like thinking but the path of the story is much more intuitive than deductive. There are several major themes in my life that form the backbone of my thinking and feeling and I usually find myself coming back around in those directions sooner of later. While if I am not careful, this can get repetitive and preachy, I think the counterpoint is that I feel my stories have more gravitas this way rather than being totally random. I more or less pre-defined my themes by establishing my categories of Business, Humor, Love, Memoir, Politics and Retirement. Those are the things (other than Gardening and Home Projects, which fall under Retirement) that are consuming my life these days, so it is not strange that they get inextricably woven into all my stories.
If I were trying to detail that more, I would say that the broader themes are liberal social justice, extreme work ethic, generalist versus specialist work, humor in everything and an abundance of unconditional love. I can attribute my mother with imbedding in me the sense of achievement and drive, as I attribute my lovely Kim with my understanding of love in its totality. The humor and social consciousness I will attribute to the full melange of things that have molded me into who I am, the ups and especially the downs. That which teaches you not to take yourself too seriously is what gives you the ability to laugh at yourself and that is the foundation for the best kind of humor and the type of understanding that allows you to appreciate the needs of others with kindness. The richness of my life experiences, starting with getting dragged around the world as a child, being trained to never miss an opportunity to go for it, a dearth of fear of failure that comes from plenty of just that, all drive the palate to the colorful extremes you read about in this blog.
As of today, this will be my 817th story in just under two years with this blog. Assuming I write one story every day (which has been the 99% situation) until the second anniversary of the blog on February 23rd, that will be 874 stories in 731 days. Where did the extra 143 stories (1.2 per day) come from? I attribute it to first year overzealousness and perhaps having too much to say. In 2020 I have been much more reserved and learned to advance schedule my stories rather than publish more often than daily, with rare exception. That means I will hit the 1,000 story mark by the end of June. Given that I am now well over 1 million words, I think that I will commemorate the 1,000 story mark by self-publishing several books of my stories, curated by category. Until I go through them I won’t know how many of them are worthy of saving in that way or which stories lose meaning out of temporal context. But here is what I do know: I have far more stories about memoirs and love than anything else and the fewest stories about business advice and fiction. I find that is a relevant piece of data and I bet that over time that trend will move more decidedly in that direction. It is the way of the world for people of advancing age to focus more on their memories and the love they are learning is all-important. Business and fiction fade as reality and self-awareness blossom.
The more time passes, the more the key to writing will be to write and not think too much. The time for thinking has past and the time for intuitive emotion may be all that we have in the end.