Letters 1849-1859

A few years ago, I read several craft books that left me with the impression that the best writing was improvised—that the real authors were like jazz musicians who could just jam with a natural flow.  I heard that Robert Frost quote: “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader,” and took from it: to plan is sin.

So I tried to improvise.  My results were often irrelevant wanderings from the story, or else just spattering sludge.

To my relief, I discovered that Dostoevsky spent much time planning.  He described to his publisher maps of whole novels he was only beginning.  He considered works written at once, in a fit of inspiration, immature.  He believed in revising over a long period of time in order to let the ideas take shape. “Believe me,” he says, “Work is necessary in everything, and an enormous amount of it.”

It would be easy to take from this: to not plan is sin.

But sometimes Dostoevsky would simply chuck all his plans and just blunder into the draft.  He often mentions ideas and even drafts of novels that never came to anything, and his projects were almost universally more ambitious in the planning stages than when published.  It’s clear that he never slavishly followed outlines and that he had an agile willingness to hop off his own tracks at the first hint of a better way forward.  An episode from a failed novel became a short story.  His imagination had a way of starting with his intention and twisting it until the story had a life of its own.

Witnessing his process from his letters, I get the impression that he had no consistent, efficient method, only an intuition for the next thing to try.  This is bad news and good news.  

Bad news because I want a neat system to control the process.  Fiction is scary because it’s such a gamble.  I have no idea if I’m headed toward a cliff.  But if I’m going to follow after my hero, I must be willing to stumble along in the dark.

But it’s also good news.  When all I can do is what seems to be the next right step—now outlining, now freewriting—I’m forced to let go of the results.  And when I do that, a morning of scribbling just might turn out to be fun.