A Writer's Space

by Eric Maisel

  You might think, “Maybe I could explore why I am so (happy, sad, excited, bored, restless, thrilled, despairing, ecstatic) when I visit this place.” Or: “Maybe I can get at my thoughts about (culture, spirituality, history, my family, my childhood) using this place as a metaphor or container.” Or: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to explore the profound subject of (evolution, race relations, postmodern vacuum) using this place as a backdrop?” These excellent intentions produce fascinating settings.

  Let your rendering of place follow your intentions. If your intention is to communicate your ideas about contemporary culture set against the backdrop of Paris, you use Paris differently than if your intention is to tell the story of two lovers in the Marais, or a homeless family in Belleville, or a jewel heist in the Place Vendôme. In each case we will see a different Paris, one drawn from the real and from the imagined and designed to serve your intentions.

  Setting is not just the place where things happen: it helps define what can happen. It is part of the very idea. These imagined spaces, fashioned from reality but no more real than the settings in dreams, do not exist for any reason except to serve an author’s intentions.

  LESSON 23

  Hold setting as a big idea, as big as character, plot, theme, or any aspect of the writer’s craft.

  To Do

  1. You’ve been given a freelance assignment to write about an imaginary city. The city is presented to you in an odd way, fact by fact. Take each fact as it’s presented and see what thoughts and feelings arise in you.

  • It is a city of three million people.

  • The city’s main industry is the manufacture of toys.

  • The city’s history goes back two thousand years.

  • A river runs through the middle of the city.

  • Its buildings are made of wood.

  • They are painted bright colors.

  • Every building in the city sports a crest.

  • The people of this city communicate by gesturing with their left hand.

  • It is a tourist destination, but only for tourists who are charmed by people who gesture but do not speak.

  Build an imaginary place, fact by fact, that serves one of your writing intentions.

  2. Answer the following question: How does “place” work in a piece of nonfiction where there is no apparent setting?

  3. Pick a place that interests you or that you are considering using in some way. Then do the following:

  • Name ten things you find surprising or unique about your place.

  • Describe ten specific sights there.

  • Describe ten local characters or character types.

  • Name ten interesting ideas that you would like to examine using your place as a vehicle or backdrop.

  4. Dream up a themed collection of essays held together by setting.

  CHAPTER 24

  Sitting on Keats’s Bench

  Hampstead is a posh North London village-feeling neighborhood that boasts Hampstead Heath, fine churches, finer mansions, offbeat theater, the requisite upscale restaurants, pubs, markets, and boutiques, and, on Keats Place, Keats’s idyllic house, in actuality two Regency cottages combined into one well-visited tourist destination.

  I’ve spent some time in Hampstead, once three full weeks, walking the few miles down the Finchley Road into central London, chatting with the engaging fellow who runs the little Italian inn on the high street and who makes an excellent cup of coffee, sipping beer with my daughter on the terrace of an ancient pub, and sitting on the bench in front of Keats House daydreaming and writing.

  When you sit on the bench there on a sunny summer day, facing the becalmed street in front of you and surrounded by trees, flowers, and that special quiet that descends in leafy upscale urban neighborhoods, a quiet of serious money, whispering nannies, and hushed sprinklers, you enter (if you’re not stewing about questions of privilege) a particular kind of space, the space of the creator’s daydream.

  It is a space in which whole novels appear, maybe great ones, maybe mediocre ones, but entirely vivid and fully realized ones. In this serene sanctuary your nattering monkey mind is sedated and there is nothing left for your brain to do but spin out creation. It is a space in which you get to imagine—just as you get to imagine wherever you happen to find yourself, of course, but more easily here in the dappled light and surrounded by skittering finches.

  This is a spot where you can imagine your novel from beginning to end: if, that is, you will let the spot work its magic. The perfection of this place amounts to absolutely nothing if you prevent yourself from daydreaming creations into existence. If you have the bad habit of populating pregnant places with your commonest thoughts, if you can’t make the switch from busy mind to silence, if you haven’t cultivated the habit of creating-at-will in the world, then you won’t last three minutes on this bench. Your hopping mind will hop you right up.

  The typical tourist ensconced on this bench smiles at the natural beauty surrounding him. The writer is obliged to ignore and transcend that beauty. It is one thing if he is also a visual artist: then it’s proper for him to train his eye on this leafy paradise in a hunt for subject matter. But if he’s a writer, then he mustn’t be a flower cataloguer and a bird watcher. His job is to get lost in a timeless, weightless, sightless daydream that arises because his neurons have relaxed themselves in the modest warmth of a London summer day and, relaxed now, have gathered to make art.

  It’s a matter of good habits versus bad habits. It may be the case that you have cultivated the good habit of fruitfully daydreaming the second you hear the lap of waves, the singing of jays, or the click of your study door closing. Or you may have cultivated the bad habit of always distracting yourself from your art. That, sad to say, is what happens too often. Writers and would-be writers get in the bad habit, sometimes the lifelong bad habit, of filling every space, even the most sunlit and auspicious ones, with pennyweight, sandpapery thoughts designed to keep their imagination at bay.

  Here is what you might do while sitting on Keats’s bench if you are the victim of this bad habit:

  • You could internally object to the price of admission to Keats House, which is about $7, and go on to complain not only about that travesty but about the price of everything in London, from tube rides to take-out food (fish-and-chips at $18? My god!).

  • You could recite Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale,” written here during the period 1818–1820, and marvel at their lyricism, vigor, and so on, thus making sure to keep your head filled with other people’s words.

  • You could enter into conversation with a passing docent and learn in which room Keats wrote what, which tea he preferred, whether he wrote in the morning or at night, and thirty or forty other facts whose lack of importance can’t be overestimated.

  • You could remind yourself that you are a mere two blocks from Heath Street, where, when you strolled here, you passed a boutique body shop with luscious scents, a charming greengrocer’s sporting perfect summer peaches and plums, and a closet-sized bookstore with impressive antique maps. You could be on Heath Street in two minutes flat. . . .

  • You could tsk-tsk at the arriving schoolchildren who, yes, are making some noise; you could remind yourself that on your flight home you have a middle seat and will probably die from the constriction and boredom; you could plan your evening (drinks, dinner and a show?); you could worry about your lover, who, by choosing not to make this trip, probably announced a philandering intention; you could . . . well, you could keep your poor brain as busy as a beehive struck by a stick, if that is your unfortunate habit.

  If you have this bad habit of constantly stifling your imagination, you might try the following.

  1. Set aside some imagining time, maybe twenty minutes or even an hour.

  2. Smile a little, by way of alerting yourself to the fact that you mean to get dreamy and visit faraway places.

  3. Slowly silence your busy thoughts.
Imagine that you have a knob, like the knob on a tuner, that you can turn to lower the sound. Lower the sound on your thoughts until they are extinguished.

  4. Keep smiling, even though the ensuing silence is a little unnerving.

  5. Wait, holding the heartfelt intention that you will keep the door to your imagination open for as long as it takes, until blue elephants, space settlements, or your new novel strolls right in.

  6. Wait, smiling, as if the moment to open presents was rapidly approaching.

  7. Keep waiting. The longer you wait, the stronger the muscle you’ll build, the one you flex when you want to imagine.

  Try this same tactic when you arrive at the bench in your town square, your neighborhood park, your outdoor mall, your own backyard, or your business complex. You can completely prevent yourself from fruitfully daydreaming by keeping yourself busy and distracted, or you can mindfully make an opening for your dreams and ideas to enter. What’s your preference?

  This opening to imagination doesn’t happen automatically, anymore than do openings to other dimensions. You have to separate the folds of warped space in order to time-travel; you have to silence your everyday mind in order to imagine. Accept that you will need to practice. It is a funny kind of practice, practicing right silence and dreamy readiness, but a necessary one.

  LESSON 24

  You get to use your imagination only if you allow yourself to use your imagination. Like an omnipotent evil elf, you have the power to completely cut yourself off from your imagination. Enlist your good elf self, the part of you that wants to bring new worlds into existence.

  To Do

  1. Buy a garden bench. Put it anywhere, either indoors or outdoors. Practice the seven-step imagination routine outlined above.

  2. Forget the garden bench. Get a folding chair. Let’s get started!

  3. Buy your imagination a present. What would it like?

  4. Open your imagination.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Richly Imagined Paragraph

  There are two ways (at least) to use the space that the opening paragraph of a piece of prose provides. One is to produce a paragraph that offers up no particular clues as to where you are going. The other is to produce a road map in a nutshell. In the first instance the reader “can’t imagine” where this journey will take him and in the second instance not only can he, but he is primed to begin spinning out his own fascinating scenarios.

  You can create a road map right in that first paragraph without, at the same time, providing a reader with too much—without, that is, killing off suspense or telegraphing your highlights. Each writing unit—the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the chapter—can hold your rich imaginings in a complete way: you don’t have to reserve those riches for a big scene in the middle or for a plot twist near the end.

  A paragraph is its own space to be decorated, maybe as small a space as that tiny guest bedroom in the back of your house but just as valuable. It deserves your full, wide-open imagination. It isn’t just a marker, an empty shoe bin, another 120 words getting you from here to there. It is a world—or can be. It can do what the following first paragraphs do, taken from a hypothetical collection of essays linked by their London setting.

  LOVING LONDON

  “London is no more representative of England than Paris is representative of France or Manhattan is representative of the United States. When Lenin comes to England to study, he doesn’t settle in the Cotswolds: he comes to London. When Freud flees from the Nazis, he doesn’t settle in Newcastle: he comes to London. London is a world city and the world arrives, to study, to hide out, to write, to begin a new life. Of the total population of the United Kingdom’s ethnic minorities, half live in London. It is that kind of place, a place that tugs at the heart not because it is quaint but because it is rich with humanity in all its diversity.”

  HIGH SCHOOL READING

  “You probably first encountered England, that faraway land, in something you read in high school. Maybe it was Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Return of the Native, Oliver Twist, or some Chaucer or Shakespeare. An England began to take shape in your mind, an England of conniving kings, country parsons, Cockney accents, and carriages rattling on cobblestones. Given that you grew up on storybook England, what are you going to make of the real thing? For this is twenty-first century London, with its wine bars and terrorist threats, and not some Dickensian postcard.”

  THE ENORMITY OF IT ALL

  “London is huge—or tiny, depending on which London you mean. The City of London is a mere ripple in the pond of Greater London, which is a mind-boggling 874 square miles in size, the equivalent of twenty San Franciscos and double the size of that other unholy-sized city, Los Angeles. One morning, all-day bus pass in hand, I embark on the grand tour of this monstrosity, London from Ealing (in the west) to West Ham (in the east), from Southgate (in the north) to Norbury (in the south), taking in the sights that do not interest tourists but that feed writers: the graffiti, the queues, the curving streets, the pub that looks just right to write in.”

  BLOOMSBURY YESTERDAY AND TODAY

  “In certain circles it is not unusual to find that Jane, although married to Joe, and even in some sense happily married, is also sleeping with Janet. Those circles are the urban ones, where the pieties of the culture-at-large get punctured with splendid regularity. You will find Janes of this sort in Berlin, in Paris, in Los Angeles . . . and of course in Bloomsbury, that London neighborhood and state of mind, where Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West made love and legends.”

  FOOD FROM THE COLONIES

  “I used to make Indian food from scratch, toasting the cumin seeds, whirring the onion paste, and occasionally simmering a vat of our all-time favorite, tomato chutney with slivered almonds and several whole heads (not cloves) of garlic. Then the children came; goodbye tomato chutney, hello take-out pizza. I am reminded of my savory days by London’s scadillion Indian restaurants, its Bengal Lancer and Chutney Mary and Cinnamon Club, each of which raises the poignant question: what does a colonial history do to the colonized—and to the colonizer?”

  FREUD IN LONDON

  “Freud, that man of ideas, was also a materialist, a sensualist, and something else, something to which his famous couch attests. That couch, residing in the London house to which Freud fled after the Nazi annexation of Austria, is covered with an Iranian rug, piled high with chenille cushions, and surrounded by Tabriz rugs. We are reminded of Sherlock Holmes, the aristocratic use of heroin and cocaine, and Freud’s own addictions. So it is really not so surprising, looking around this room, to suddenly realize that Freud was an addict who created a treatment regimen designed, like a cigarette with additives, to addict the patient to his psychoanalyst.”

  If you’d like to create a road map right at the beginning of the piece you’re intending to write, try the following. Quiet your mind, open up to possibility, and let an idea come forward, maybe in the form of a phrase: say, “Freud in London.” Do not stop there but travel in your mind’s eye along the length of your unwritten and hitherto unimagined piece, writing it, as it were, in thin air, writing the whole 1,500-word essay (if that’s what it turns out to be) in five or ten seconds flat.

  You’ll find that you’ve returned from your imaginings with images, sentences, an arc, a sense of having traveled, and the way to create your opening paragraph. Write that paragraph. Give the piece a title—the title is right there, waiting for you. Then make the journey a second time and write the concluding paragraph. Haven’t you just accomplished something very interesting?

  You might repeat the process, keeping in the back of your mind the phrase “themed collection,” and within the hour have the titles, opening paragraphs, and concluding paragraphs of several pieces for a collection—a collection that was available to you all along but that needed exactly this invitation.

  LESSON 25

  Use your powers of imagination so regularly and so naturally that every inch of your writing feels rich
ly imagined, whether it’s the first moody sentence or the heart-pounding conclusion.

  To Do

  1. Create a world in a sentence.

  2. Create a world in a paragraph.

  3. Create a world in a page.

  4. Imagine a piece of writing from beginning to end and “come back” with its first paragraph, one that captures something rich about the journey you just took. Then title the piece. Then write its last paragraph. Then celebrate a little, perhaps by repeating the process or by completing the piece in one sitting.

  Part VII

  Public Space

  CHAPTER 26

  Saying Something

  I’ve seen some good movies lately: the Australian movie Somersault, the Spanish movie Nobody’s Life, the American movie Winter Passing, and the German movie Head On, by the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin. In each, the director chose “difficult material” to explore and was willing to say what was on his or her mind. They had opinions; they were not neutral; their first objective was not to sell at all costs. I am currently working with a well-known documentary filmmaker on her first feature film and we, too, are in this territory: the territory of trying to really say something.

  Consider the following. It is a few years ago. One Saturday morning in Paris I step out from the apartment building where I am staying onto the rue Saint Gilles. Across the street is “some-thing”— now, how shall I describe that something? I could say “on the other side of the street a father and his three children are approaching.” How little that description would capture of what I feel to be true about those figures! If I wrote such a phrase and left the matter at that, it would only be because I wanted to keep vague what these people signify to me. I would be playing it safe. It would also bore you to tears. “On the other side of the street a father and his three children are approaching.” How nothing! How nothing on purpose.