The Broccoli Speaks

from P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction

". . . however well I think I know my characters, they reveal themselves more clearly during the writing of the book, so that at the end, however carefully and intricately the work is plotted, I never get exactly the novel I planned."

I put the Christmas decorations away this weekend, and Dave helped me get the tree down. The holidays are officially over around here, and it's time to get back to work --which means it's time to put all my plot work into play--which means it's time to start writing the chapters comprising the whole book -- which means I'm terrified. Because what if I've got it wrong? What if I made a wrong decision -- sent a character around the wrong corner or killed off the character who's supposed to solve the murder? So I read this quote from P.D. James, who's written many amazing plots, with great relief.

I put a lot of trust in my characters, trust that they will tell me what happened when I'm not sure. After all, I wasn't in the room, but they were. And P. D. James agrees with me:

"It feels, indeed, as if the characters and everything that happens to them exists in some limbo of the imagination, so that what I am doing is not inventing them but getting in touch with them and putting their story down in black and white, a process of revelation, not of creation."

Once in a writers' meeting at a coffee shop, Zoe mentioned that she just wrote down what the voice in her head told her to. The rest of us nodded knowingly, but people outside the group started edging away, their coffee slopping unnoticed out of their cups. Writers and psychotics have much in common -- we both hear voices. And I'm grateful for that. It means all I have to do is listen and observe carefully. The heat's off.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird calls it "listening to your broccoli". I love that because putting words on a page in a certain order is often inexplicable. People have asked me how I come up with the stuff I write about or why I put sentences together the way I do. Darned if I know. I just do. Writing is more fun and productive when I let it remain a mystery. It's when I prod my characters to stand up straight and stop talking in line that the voices in my head dry up and I start to panic.

I don't have my book plotted out so minutely that it will write itself, and I can relax about that. It's exciting to see what pops up on the page, to keep discovering details and clues as I write. I've done enough creating to let the revealing begin.