Yesterday I took several weeks of notes for my new novel and tossed them. It felt great. Very liberating. Admittedly, I’m the sort of person who enjoys rampaging through the family closets and bagging clothes for Goodwill, along with old toys nobody plays with. “Hey, I needed that broken plastic thing with no wheels that I haven’t played with in three years!” I like nothing better than recycling newspapers and magazines. “But that’s today’s paper!”

It’s already 10 a.m. You should have read it already.

You get the idea–I’m the opposite of a pack rat.

So I have no compunctions about throwing out my own work when I feel it’s not useful. I’ve cut hundreds of pages from early drafts of novels, and tossed short stories I’ve worked on for weeks. Yesterday I looked at my research notes and my charts for my new book and I just didn’t think they were good enough, interesting enough, or necessary enough. Time to go back to the drawing board.

If you cringe at the thought of admitting you’ve wasted that much time–I really recommend trying it. You’ll love it. You’ll feel light and free. Your imagination will breathe a sigh of relief and start looking around eagerly for new material

Ourit, one of my Facebook readers posted an interesting response to my report of negative progress:

“It’s almost unsettling, to hear this from an author. It almost makes the destiny of the book seem shaky. Except it somehow ends up doing the opposite….”

In truth there is something a bit unnerving about jettisoning so much work. That’s why it’s fun. Scary fun. But I never worry about jinxing my next book.

The first thing I’d say is that I am confident my next idea will be better than the last and that there will always be new ideas coming. This confidence comes with age. The first time I tossed this much material I was upset and didn’t know if I could dream up something new. Now after seven books, I take a breath and call this wholescale bonfire of the vanities my “writing process.” This makes me feel a whole lot better.

My second response to Ourit: I guess I don’t really believe in destiny, and my ideas about composition are rather fluid. My model of creativity has more to do with natural selection than with fate. There will be ideas and projects that fall by the wayside as I develop my new novel. I’m used to that. I embrace failure because I learn from it. Sometimes you need to persevere and overcome obstacles. At other times it’s better to push the eject button and start over. As the song goes: You have to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.

But HOW do you know? you ask.

Ahhh. Now you’re getting to the crux of the matter. But you can’t expect me to answer that all at once in one little blog posting before breakfast, can you? I’ve got to recycle “The New York Times” and any stray homework I find on the floor (just kidding).

Seriously, I’ll talk about how you know in my next post. Stay tuned.

My eight year old daughter is much aggrieved as she writes out her birthday thank you notes by hand in marker on actual note cards.

Few write letters any more, but written thank you notes remain a rite of passage.

I like thank you cards because they take a lot of time. I like paper envelopes. I like that the whole thing takes forever. I think that if you’re truly thankful, then you’ll want to put pen to paper and sign your name. You’ll want to write: sincerely instead of clicking “send.”

Under protest, my daughter wrote three notes tonight. Just 12 more to go. I am a mean and archaic mother. Oh well. It’s kinda fun to be the bad guy. And she should know what a stamp is.

We fiction writers have some occupational hazards.
1. It’s hard to lose yourself in a novel, or even movies! You keep thinking about how you’d have done it differently.
2. People ask you if X is really you. Or they assume that Y is really you. Or, most difficult, they assume that Z is really them!
3. We get cranky when work is going badly. This is actually common to all workers, not just fiction writers, but we assume we’re a special case because . . .
4. We’re a bit self centered
5. We get discouraged by rejection. This is true of all workers, but
6. We take everything personally.
7. We get spacey when work is going well.

I’ve always loved the stories of Robin Hood.  I read many versions as a child, went to the classic movie with Errol Flynn, and listened to a record of Robin Hood over and over again.

Now I hear there’s a new movie of Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchet.  Alas, I’ve just read the review in “Entertainment Weekly” and I am not at all moved to run out and buy tickets.  The reviewer says that this origin story about Robin is so deadly serious and dark and murky that it’s no fun at all.

What is it about these origin stories?  Batman.  Superman.  Even James Bond.  All these earnest attempts to show how our superheros got that way.   Writers and marketers want to capitalize on the familiar without repeating it.   In a therapeutic age, motivation passes for plot.  Past trauma substitutes for character.

Remember Tim Burton’s version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”?  It was all about how poor Willy Wonka had a nasty dentist for a father.  Thus his later obsession with candy.  Burton and his writers didn’t trust Roald Dahl’s storytelling, so they added a belabored back story of their own.  How sad, because Dahl’s book is rich with the history of post war Britain and rationing and poverty and prosperity and technology.  Dahl’s classic has quite a subtext if you know where to look, but the beauty of his work is that subtext remains subtext, auxiliary to the story.

Why not trust the classics and the children who read them?  The adults making movies seem to forget that for every generation, Robin Hood is new.

I’ve been writing notes for my new book.   Scribbles to myself, messy charts with arrows, lists of potential scenes.  Lots of questions.

It’s a lot like expecting a baby.  You ask yourself–do I like this name for my protagonist, or that one?  You come up with a title and then decide five minutes later it’s terrible–and after all, you have to wait and see what the book will look like first!

An early novel outline is a lot like a grainy ultrasound picture.  You can barely tell which end is up, but you see the heart beating and you feel such hope.   New work.  New life.

Recently I went to see a broadcast of the London production of Alan Bennett’s witty play, “The Habit of Art.” The play is about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten and more generally about art and inspiration. As so often in works of art which are also about making art the play had many layers. As soon as it was over, I wanted to see it again.

New art, particularly good art, demands more than one viewing–or listening! First you take it in quickly and then you need to return and puzzle through it more carefully. It’s frustrating when you can’t return to a performance immediately afterward. Poetry, fiction and paintings do provide that satisfaction, however. You can return as often as you like and stage your own performance at your own pace.

When you get really stuck, take a break and read.   After trudging so far, why not let someone else carry the bags?

Too often, I think, writers feel like they’re only working when they are actually setting words down.  Reading is a crucial part of writing.   Writers need to read in order to learn.    Listen to the sound of great poetry.   Watch how someone like Peter Carey or Mark Twain or Charles Dickens or Kazuo Ishiguro casts a spell.  Study Henry James as he spins his web.

Return to your own work humbled and refreshed.

Try writing by hand. Computers are so distracting. You can’t help checking email, Facebook, getting your news fix.

When you write by hand you’re away from your screen. You can work under a tree. You don’t have to worry about low battery. You don’t know how many words you’ve written. After a while, you don’t care. Often you’ll find it easier to think when you’re using a pen. No blinking cursor. No blank screen. You can draw pictures. You can rip off a page, crumple, and toss into the recycling bin. Crumpling and tossing. Old fashioned but incredibly satisfying.