The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (37 page)

THE QUESTION I GET ASKED MOST OFTEN

This was a talk, first given for Portland Arts and Lectures in October 2000, then for Seattle Arts and Lectures in April 2002. I have revised it slightly for publication. It has not been published before, though bits of it can be found in my book
Steering the Craft
and elsewhere in my writings about writing. As a talk, it was called “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”—but in my previous collection of talks and essays
, The Language of the Night,
there’s a different essay with that title (there being many answers to the question). So I have retitled it.

The question fiction writers get asked most often is: Where do you get your ideas from? Harlan Ellison has been saying for years that he gets ideas for his stories from a mail-order house in Schenectady.

When people ask “Where do you get your ideas from?” what some of them really want to know is the e-mail address of that company in Schenectady.

That is: they want to be writers, because they know writers are rich and famous; and they know that there are secrets that writers know; and they know if they can just learn those secrets, that mystical address in Schenectady, they will be Stephen King.

Writers, as I know them, are poor, they are infamous, and they couldn’t keep a secret if they had one. Writers are wordy people. They talk, they blab, they yadder. They whine all the time to each other
about what they’re writing and how hard it is, they teach writing workshops and write writing books and give talks about writing, like this. Writers tell all. If they could tell beginners where to get ideas from, they would. In fact they do, all the time. Some of them actually get somewhat rich and famous by doing it.

What do the how-to-write writers say about getting ideas? They say stuff like: Listen to conversations, note down interesting things you hear or read about, keep a journal, describe a character, imagine a dresser drawer and describe what’s in it—Yeah, yeah, but that’s all
work
. Anybody can do
work
. I wanna be a writer. What’s the address in Schenectady?

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

So why did I want to try to answer this foolish question, Where do you get your ideas from? Because underneath the foolishness is a real question, which people really yearn to have answered—a big question.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential, durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it’s visible? That is a real question.

One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought of his tunes, and he said, “The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.”

Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery.

And a true one. A true mystery. That’s what it is. For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Then you have to be able to let it tell itself.

First you have to be able to wait. To wait in silence. Wait in silence, and listen. Listen for the tune, the vision, the story. Not grabbing, not
pushing, just waiting, listening, being ready for it when it comes. This is an act of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the world. The artist says, the world will give me what I need and I will be able to use it rightly.

Readiness—not grabbiness, not greed—readiness: willingness to hear, to listen, listen carefully, to see clearly, see accurately—to let the words be right. Not almost right. Right. To know how to make something out of the vision, that’s the craft: that’s what practice is for. Because being ready doesn’t mean just sitting around, even if it looks like that’s what writers mostly do. Artists practice their art continually, and writing is an art that involves a lot of sitting. Scales and finger exercises, pencil sketches, endless unfinished and rejected stories. . . . The artist who practices knows the difference between practice and performance, and the essential connection between them. The gift of those seemingly wasted hours and years is patience and readiness, a good ear, a keen eye, and a skilled hand, a rich vocabulary and grammar. The Lord knows where talent comes from, but craft comes from practice.

With those tools, those instruments, with that hard-earned mastery, that craftiness, artists do their best to let the “idea”—the tune, the vision, the story—come through clear and undistorted. Clear of ineptitude, awkwardness, amateurishness. Undistorted by convention, fashion, opinion.

This is a very radical job, this dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and craft is what I like to talk about when I talk about writing, and I could happily go on and on about it. But I’m trying to talk about where the vision, the stuff you work on, the “idea” comes from. So:

The air is full of tunes.

A piece of rock is full of statues.

The earth is full of visions.

The world is full of stories.

As an artist, you trust that. You trust that that is so. You know
it is so. You know that whatever your experience, it will give you the material, the “ideas” for your work. (From here on I’ll leave out music and fine arts and stick to storytelling, which is the only thing I truly know anything about, though I do think all the arts are one at the root.)

All right, these “ideas”—what does that word mean? “Idea” is a shorthand way of saying: the material, the subject, subjects, the matter of a story. What the story is about. What the story
is.

Idea
is a strange word for an imagined matter, not abstract but intensely concrete, not intellectual but embodied. However,
idea
is the word we’re stuck with. And it’s not wholly off center, because the imagination is a rational faculty.

“I got the idea for that story from a dream I had. . . .” “I haven’t had a good story idea all year. . . .” “Here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. . . .”

That last sentence was written in 1926 by Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a writer friend; and I will come back in the end to it, because what she says about rhythm goes deeper than anything I have ever thought or read about where art comes from. But before I can talk about rhythm I have to talk about experience and imagination.

Where do writers get their ideas from? From experience. That’s obvious.

And from imagination. That’s less obvious.

Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent—to tell us a story.

Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, continually, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story go mad. Or, like infants or (perhaps) animals, they live in a world that has no history, no time but now.

The minds of animals are a great, sacred, present mystery. I do think animals have languages, but they are entirely truthful languages.
It seems that we are the only animals who can
lie
. We can think and say what is not so and never was so, or what has never been, yet might be. We can invent; we can suppose; we can imagine. All that gets mixed in with memory. And so we’re the only animals who tell stories.

An ape can remember and extrapolate from her experience: once I stuck a stick in that ant hill and the ants crawled on it, so if I put this stick in that ant hill again, maybe the ants will crawl on it again, and I can lick them off again, yum. But only we human beings can imagine—can tell the story about the ape who stuck a stick in an anthill and it came out covered with gold dust and a prospector saw it and that was the beginning of the great gold rush of 1877 in Rhodesia.

That story is not true. It is fiction. Its only relation to reality is the fact that some apes do stick sticks in anthills and there was a place once called Rhodesia. But there was no gold rush in 1877 in Rhodesia. I made it up. I am human, therefore I lie. All human beings are liars; that is true; you must believe me.

Fiction: imagination working on experience. A great deal of what we consider our experience, our memory, our hard-earned knowledge, our history, is in fact fiction. But never mind that. I’m talking about real fiction—stories, novels. They all come from the writer’s experience of reality worked upon, changed, filtered, distorted, clarified, transfigured, by imagination.

“Ideas” come from the world through the head.

The interesting part of this process to me is the passage through the head, the action of the imagination on the raw material. But that’s the part of the process that a great many people disapprove of.

I wrote a piece years ago called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” In it I talked about how so many Americans distrust and despise not only the obviously imaginative kind of fiction we call fantasy, but all fiction, often rationalising their fear and contempt with financial or religious arguments: reading novels is a waste of valuable
time, the only true book is the Bible, and so on. I said that many Americans have been taught “to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful. They have learned to fear [the imagination]. But they have never learned to discipline it at all.”

I wrote that in 1974. The millennium has come and gone and we still fear dragons.

If you fear something you may try to diminish it. You infantilise it. Fantasy is for children—kiddylit—can’t take it seriously. But fantasy also has shown that it can make money. Gotta take
that
seriously. So when the first Harry Potter book, which combined two very familiar conventions, the British school story and the orphan-child-of-great-gifts, hit the big time, many reviewers praised it lavishly for its originality. By which they showed their absolute ignorance of both traditions the book follows—the small one of the school story, and the great one, a tradition that descends from the
Mahabharata
and the
Ramayana
, the
Thousand and One Nights
and
Beowulf
and the Tale of Monkey and medieval romance and Renaissance epic, through Lewis Carroll and Kipling to Tolkien, to Borges and Calvino and Rushdie and the rest of us: a tradition, a form of literature which really cannot be dismissed as “entertainment,” “great fun for the kiddies,” or “well at least they’re reading
something
.”

Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it—because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. “Oh those awful Orcs,” they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is. And they’re too damned lazy to do it.