Novelist as a Vocation(22)

This reminds me of an anecdote I’m fond of. When Paul Valéry was interviewing Albert Einstein, he asked the great scientist, “Do you carry a notebook around to record your ideas?” Einstein was an unflappable man, but this question clearly unnerved him. “No,” he answered. “There’s no need for that. You see I rarely have new ideas.”

Come to think of it, there have been very few situations when I wished I had a notepad on me. Something truly important is not that easy to forget once you’ve entrusted it to your memory.



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Your mental chest of drawers is a great asset when you set to work on a novel. Neatly put-together arguments and value judgments aren’t much use for those of us who write fiction. More often than not, they impede us by blocking the natural flow of the story. If you have stockpiled your chest with a rich variety of unrelated details, however, you will be amazed to see how naturally they pop up when the need arises, full of life and ready to be fit into the narrative.

So what sorts of details am I talking about?

Let me think. Okay, let’s say you know someone who for no apparent reason starts sneezing when they get really angry. Once the sneezing fit begins, it goes on and on. Now, I don’t know anyone like that, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you do. What, you wonder, explains this pattern? One approach would be to try to come up with a tentative theory—physiological, perhaps, or psychological—to analyze their behavior. My brain, however, doesn’t work that way. I think, “Wow, people like that exist,” and leave it at that. Instead of drawing an inference, I take it as an example of the variety of things in the world, filing it away as an undifferentiated lump. The drawers of my mental chest are full of disjointed memories of this sort that I have collected and stored.

James Joyce put it most succinctly when he said, “Imagination is memory.” I tend to agree with him. In fact, I think he was spot-on. What we call the imagination consists of fragments of memory that lack any clear connection with one another. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but when we bring such fragments together our intuition is sparked, and we sense what the future may hold in store. It is from their interaction that a novel’s true power emanates.

We are—or at least I am—equipped with this expansive mental chest of drawers. Each drawer is packed with memories, or information. There are big drawers and small ones. A few have secret compartments, where information can be hidden. When I am writing, I can open them, extract the material I need, and add it to my story. Their numbers are countless, but when I am focused on my writing I know without thinking exactly which drawer holds what and can immediately put my hands on what I am looking for. Memories I could never recall otherwise come naturally to me. It’s a great feeling to enter into this elastic, unrestrained state, as if my imagination had pulled free from my thinking mind to function as an autonomous, independent entity. Needless to say, for a novelist like me the information stored in my chest is a rich and irreplaceable resource.

In Steven Soderbergh’s film Kafka, Jeremy Irons, in the lead role, sneaks into a creepy castle (based, of course, on The Castle) through a cabinet filled with rows of drawers. When I saw that scene, it struck me that it looked like a spatial representation of my own brain. It’s a really interesting film, so check out that scene if you get the chance. My brain isn’t quite that creepy, but the structure may be similar.



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Although I compose essays as well as works of fiction, unless circumstances dictate otherwise I avoid working on anything else when I am writing a novel. That’s because if I am turning out a series of essays and I dip into one of my memory drawers, I may extract material that I need later. That may mean I open a drawer to get something for my novel only to discover that it has already appeared somewhere else. If I want to include the story of someone who starts sneezing whenever they get angry, for example, but have already published it in a weekly journal, it can be a real disappointment. Of course, there is no rule that says that the same material can’t be used in an essay and a story, but I have found that doubling up like that somehow weakens my fiction. My advice, then, is to hang a sign on your chest of drawers that says For Fiction Only when you are in the process of writing. You never know what you are going to need later, so it pays to be miserly. This is one piece of wisdom I have picked up in the course of my long career.

When you emerge from the novel-writing process, you can dip into the unopened drawers, take the unused material (what might be called “surplus goods”) stored there, and use it in your essays. In my case, though, essays are no more than a sideline, like the cans of oolong tea marketed by beer companies. If something is really tasty, I save it for my main job—my next novel. Once a critical mass of such material has accumulated, my desire to launch a new book naturally kicks in. This is why I guard my chest of drawers so carefully.

Remember the scene in Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. where E.T. assembles a transmitting device from the junk he pulls out of the garage? There’s an umbrella, a floor lamp, pots and pans, a record player—it’s been a long time since I saw the movie, so I can’t recall everything, but he manages to throw all those household items together in such a way that the contraption works well enough to communicate with his home planet thousands of light years away. I got a big kick out of that scene when I saw it in the movie theater, but it strikes me now that putting together a good novel is much the same thing. The key component is not the quality of the materials—what’s needed is magic. If that magic is present, the most basic daily matters and the plainest language can be turned into a device of surprising sophistication.