AN UNUSUAL NOVEL REQUIRES UNUSUAL
GESTATION, UNUSUAL CONCEPTION.
February 1988
Make of this what you will:
In January of ’87, I booked myself into the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for the month of June. I figured it was high time I wrote a novel, which I hadn’t done since completing When the Sacred Ginmill Closes in March of ’85. I had not been altogether idle in the interval; I had traveled around the country conducting writing seminars, had written and self-published Write for Your Life as a seminar in book form, had written the ultimately unpublished novelization of a film, and had collaborated with a friend on his life story. But I had not written a novel of my own in two years, and that is what I do, and it was about time for me to do it.
It had become clear to me that there was a reason why I was taking an uncharacteristically long time between novels, and that reason was that I didn’t know what I was going to write next. It seemed to me, though, that it ought to be something rather different from what I had been doing. In recent years my writing had centered almost exclusively on two series characters, Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, and I felt I had said what I had to say about those characters. I was ready for something new, but it hadn’t yet taken shape for me.
In February my wife, Lynne, and I traveled to West Africa with a group studying spiritual healing and traditional African medicine. In Togo we met several times with the shaman Durchback Akuete, and several of us not only participated in tribal rites but underwent private ceremonies with him. In my ceremony, Akuete installed a spirit in me designed to assist me in moving to new levels with my writing.
A month or so later back in the States I had a tarot reading with a woman in Florida who told me I was going through a great shift in consciousness which would result, among other things, in a quantum leap in my work. Some of the things she said resonated in such a way as to move me to consult a trance medium friend on my next trip to New York, where I received a similar message.
This was exciting news, but it was also a little unsettling, because I had not the slightest idea what I was supposed to write. I did have ideas for two Bernie Rhodenbarr—Burglar mysteries. While I knew neither could possibly represent the sea change in my writing that seemed to loom on the horizon, I figured one or the other of them might serve me in my month in Virginia. It was, after all, the middle of May when I returned from New York. In less than two weeks I would be holed up at VCCA, typing away, and I couldn’t expect to be struck by inspiration in time. I would go with what I had, and the Major New Work would have to wait until it revealed itself to me.
Well, go figure these things.
Perhaps ten days before the end of May, I was sitting in my living room reading something. (Poppy, by Barbara Larriva, as it happens; I wrote a column about it a few months ago.) A couple of chapters in, I set the book down for a moment, and the idea came to me of a group of people walking across the country. I let myself think about this, and, the more I thought about it, the more I thought about it.
Ideas began flooding in. Characters, situations, the overall shape of a plot. And, in the next several days, I kept thinking about the book. I didn’t decide to think about it. I would be watching a ballgame, or reading something, or driving around, and thoughts would come unbidden. The book, it was clear, was going to be a long one, peopled with a large cast of characters and sprawling across a vast amount of real estate. The plot would be complex, and full of incident, and while I was thinking about it a great deal and getting any number of bits and pieces, I did not by any means know where the book was going or which imagined incidents and characters would actually appear in it.
So it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to start writing it in a matter of days. There was much sifting of thoughts that would have to be done first, and much research. But I had enough of a hold on it so that I knew I wouldn’t lose it. I would go off to VCCA, write a Burglar mystery, and perhaps sometime in the fall I would get started on Random Walk. (I had by this point thought of the title.)
As the days dribbled away, I came to see that I wasn’t going to be able to go off and write a Burglar book. Random Walk was all that was on my mind. If I were to write anything, that was what it would have to be.
So I went to the barber and got my head shaved.
Why? I don’t know why. So that the thoughts could get in more easily? Seems unlikely. As a way of letting go of the past and opening up to what was coming up next? That seems a little more reasonable, albeit barely so. On a conscious level, all I can report is that I experienced a strong urge to take this uncharacteristic action, and that it somehow felt appropriate to act on urges of this nature. But that’s just what was operating consciously, and the whole point of this report is that there is more involved in the process of literary creation than meets the conscious mind.
Four days before the end of the month, I loaded the car and set out for Virginia. It’s a two-day drive, but I wanted to give myself extra time. The pre-book isolation would start as soon as I departed, and I wanted several days of it before I arrived there and went to work.
I had a 30-day fellowship at VCCA, and I hoped I’d be able to average five pages a day of Random Walk, which would give me a fourth to a third of the book by the time I left. I got there early in the afternoon of the appointed day, unpacked my clothes in my sleeping room in the residence hall, set up my typewriter and supplies and research material in my studio a quarter-mile up the hill.
In the morning I rose early, went to my studio, and had 20 pages written by the day’s end. And I did that every day, seven days a week, until the book was finished several days before my month was up.
It was the most extraordinary writing experience I have ever had. In one sense it was magically easy, in that whatever I needed for the book was always at hand. My mind was ever able to supply the character or incident or bit of plot business that I needed when I needed it. At the same time, I don’t think I have ever been so completely taken over by a piece of writing. The book was very demanding. It was on my mind all the time. Typically, I rose somewhere between 5 and 6 and went to the studio. I would proofread the previous day’s pages and start writing, breaking around 8 for breakfast. Somewhere around noon I would collect my lunch pail from in front of the studio door, wolf a sandwich at my desk, and keep going; somewhere between 3 and 5 I would be done for the day. For all of that time I was either at the typewriter or staring at maps, figuring out where my characters were going next and what they’d see and do there.
Before I left Florida, I had sensed that the book would have two chief story lines. One would consist of this curious pilgrimage of people walking east from Oregon. The other would follow a man around the Central Plains states as he stalked and killed women. One thing that struck me, from the moment of inspiration all through the writing of the book, was the evident incompatibility of the two stories. It was not only that they seemed quite unrelated, but that they didn’t belong in the same book, that they were of two different kinds of books. Here we had this group of seekers, caught up in some New Age energy, walking out of their lives and into unknown territory and undergoing some miraculous transformational experiences in the process. And over here we had this middle-class monster, snuffing out attractive young women one after the other, without an apparent qualm of conscience and, worse the luck, taking enormous satisfaction from it all. The first story looked to be part of some spiritual manifesto; the second skirted perilously close to the pornography of violence.
Throughout the writing, I kept wondering at the appropriateness of my dual story line. I did not know how the two plots were going to mesh, or if they could coexist in the same book. It struck me that a lot of people would very likely be put off by what I was doing, and that it was possible no one would much like it. I went ahead anyway, deciding to trust whatever seemed to be directing me in the writing of the book.
Because it is abundantly clear to me that I was being guided. While it has been the norm for me to write rapidly, especially under conditions of isolation such as VCCA supplied, this was something altogether different from my past experiences. Two weeks before I started work, I had not had a single thought related to the book. All of the characters and incidents had emerged as I needed them. I was being somehow inspired, and I was willing to trust the source of that inspiration.
And what might that source have been?
I don’t think it was something outside myself. There have been a number of channeled manuscripts in the past few years, the most prominent of which is probably A Course in Miracles, which was dictated to a woman over a period of months by a disembodied voice. I never had the sense that I was taking down celestial dictation, or that some external entity or personality was expressing itself on my Smith-Corona. On the contrary, it’s easy for me to see myself as Random Walk’s source; the book’s ideas are ones that have concerned me in recent years, and the characters and plot elements all derived in discernible ways from my own life experience.
Nor did I just have to write down sentences that spoke themselves within my mind. I thought of scenes, worked them out in my mind, then constructed them on the page. The book was no less an exercise of craft than anything else I’ve written.
And yet it came to me, it was given to me. It was as if all the book’s elements were arranged on a shelf somewhere outside of my field of vision, and all I had to do was reach back and my hand would fill with whatever it was I needed.
What seems most probable to me is that Random Walk was a channeled work, but that I channeled my own subconscious mind. Somehow or other the book had taken form there; when I was ready to write it, I tapped into that subterranean pool and struck oil.
My whole stay at VCCA was spent in a sort of altered state. The book, as I’ve said, was on my mind all the time. After each day’s work I would return to the room, shower, meditate, and sit around in a stupor until dinnertime. After dinner I would become catatonic until it was time to go to bed, and after five or six hours of sleep I would wake up before the alarm and go do it all over again.
And, when the book was done, so was I. I hadn’t meditated regularly for ages before beginning the book, and I got so much out of it I vowed to continue after the book’s completion. The day after I finished the book I had difficulty getting into my meditation, and the following day I gave it up altogether. It was evidently something I needed to do while I was working on the book, and something to let go of afterward.
The same was true of a breathing exercise I performed each morning upon arising. Once the book was done, I was done with it.
Ah, I see some of you are waving your hands in the air, while others are frowning and scratching their unshaven heads. Yes, Rachel?
Sir, does this mean you think we all ought to go to Africa and get infested with spirits? And go to mediums and card readers? And shave our heads?
Only if that’s the particular path where your own inner voices lead you, Rachel. Perhaps you’ll be guided to watch The New Newlywed Game and listen to all your old Beach Boys albums. Yes, Mimi?
Do you think the things you did before and during the writing of the book were an actual help to you?
First of all, I think it helped that I did them. By following my inner promptings, I was demonstrating my willingness to do anything that would help the book to grow. I was telling myself and the universe that I really wanted to write on a more significant level, and that I would make sacrifices toward that end. Was I in fact guided by the tarot reader and the trance medium, or empowered by the African ceremony? My belief is that I was, but that guidance and empowerment was probably secondary to what my own willingness gave me. That same willingness allowed me to trust the story line of Random Walk as it took shape, and without that trust I’m sure I would have choked off the flow of inspiration and stifled the book.
And is that the chief lesson here, sir?
I’m not sure, Rachel. One lesson, surely, is that much of the writer’s work is done on a level far removed from the conscious one, that books take shape in inner chambers of the mind, and that the process of literary creation is always mysterious and perhaps ultimately unfathomable. It’s quite clear to me, for instance, that the two years prior to the writing of Random Walk constituted a gestation period for the book. The fact that I had no conscious notion what I was working on during those years, or that I was working on anything, does nothing to lessen their importance.
Another lesson, for me, is that I always come out ahead when I heed the still small voice within. This is no less true when other outside voices disagree. My publishers at Arbor House wanted changes in Random Walk that struck me as violations of the book’s spirit. I instructed my agent to retrieve the manuscript and try it elsewhere, and I’m delighted to report that Tor Books will bring out the book in October, with every hope of making a bestseller of it.
Yes, Arnold?
Sir, I see that your hair has grown back.
That’s very perceptive of you, Arnold.
I think I speak for the entire class when I say that we like you better this way, sir.
Why, thank you, Arnold. So does my mother.