Any good instructor will tell you that all writing is born out of planning. It’s a skill every one of your TAs in English class is trying to drill into you right now. And, while planning ahead or mapping out processes are skills that have broad applications, they are particularly pertinent to the practice of writing.
Fiction writers plan almost obsessively. You’ll find writers who have devoted whole journals or years toward planning the substance and course of a story. André Gide, for instance, posited that he found planning his works—in particular “The Counterfeiters”—far more interesting than writing the works themselves. Nearly every author worth their clout—or not—kept journals of their plans for work.
It’s the same for nonfiction. Henry David Thoreau ranks high on famous journal keepers, considering that 1) He kept it up nearly his entire adult life and 2) He often repeated important tidbits from his journal in his published writing.
You can tell when authors have a plan. If you look at the works of, say, a satirist like Sinclair Lewis or Evelyn Waugh, you can see quite well the mechanistic thought at work under the ribbing of the text. “Yes, and here is where we’ll satirize the landed gentry,” they’ll say. “Oh, and this will be a perfect spot to put in the comment about air pollution.” Or: “We mustn’t forget to include the political straw man.”
You may think such planning is anathema to the process of creating art. And it is. Kind of. But only when you think that writing is a plan and not a process. Because while a plan never hurts, a plan isn’t everything, and really isn’t anything unless you allot for spontaneity in writing.
Like with planned writing, spontaneous writing can be recognized, although it’s always iffy. In the best cases, spontaneity manifests itself as a happy quirk or something shaken out from the ironclad plan. More often than not, spontaneity in writing is when you’re writing toward something, and the right thing—for the scene, for the work, for the situation—just happens, without feeling forced.
Here’s one example, from “Humboldt’s Gift” Humboldt is trying, insistently but without malice, to court Ginnie, an acquaintance of the narrator’s girlfriend. After she closes the door on him, leaving him at her threshold, he proceeds to blurt out, relishing the joke, “You don’t know what you’re missing. I’m a poet. I have a big cock.”
I would like to think, when Saul Bellow was writing “Humboldt’s Gift,” that this line was not planned out, since it is an indelible caricature of Von Humboldt Fleisher. It jumps out at you.
Another example comes from a book that was very planned out, in style and substance, yet still has its share of spontaneity. “Brideshead Revisited,” by Evelyn Waugh, is a rumination on adultery, English nobility and Catholicism. It’s not very subtle. I can, however, think of one moment that seems almost inexplicable, yet its inclusion makes perfect sense. It’s a minor detail, hardly touched upon, but it’s one I’ve remembered. I’m talking, of course, about the tortoise.
In “Brideshead Revisited,” one character, Rex Mottram, presents a jewel-encrusted tortoise to Julia Flyte, whom he is wooing. Now, he does not give her a fake tortoise. No no no. He gives her a live tortoise whose shell has been studded with real jewels. The tortoise, I might add, proceeds to disappear; the house thinks it might have buried itself.
It’s perfectly ridiculous. Waugh could have had Rex give anything to Julia and had both Rex’s latent cruelty and innate gaudiness come across, but he chose a tortoise? Great.
There are plenty of other examples of spontaneity in literature, but I’ll leave off with this. The reason I admire what I see as “spontaneous” in literature relates to an image John Steinbeck postulated in a letter to his editor, Pascal Covici. Steinbeck talked about places on the page that were bright spots, which poked through the text like gold through ore. In phrase and in plot, that is what spontaneity signifies for me: bright spots.
Any spontainious responses to Sean’s column? Email him at seanreichard@wisc.edu.
