If you're sitting down to begin something new, your fingers hovering over the keyboard, or pen poised in your hand like a maestro before a symphony orchestra, if you are thinking: I'm going to write a story about race and class in the American South, told in two voices, and one voice will be in the first person, present tense, and the other will be in the third person, past tense, and I will explore themes of longing and regret, oppression and denial, you're in trouble. These are ideas. They're the babbling of a writer in the delusional grip of a fantasy that she is in control.
I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing. I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue-of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I'm on the wrong track. When I think I know what I'm doing-when I have a big idea-I tend to start talking about it. First, I might bring it up to my husband: I'm thinking of writing a novel that moves backward in time. Or, having clipped a newspaper article, I think there's a good story here about the juror who forced a mistrial. Instead of sitting with a thought, I release my tension by blabbing about it. No good will come of this. The point is best made by Frederick Nietzsche: "That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." I keep Nietzsche's words on an index card tacked to a bulletin board above my desk as a reminder, a warning, that it isn't usually useful to talk about or to over-think what you haven't yet written. After all, if we write out of the tension of the unexpressed, where does the tension go once we've expressed it?
Let go of every should or shouldn't running through your mind when you start. Be willing to stand at the base of a new mountain, and with humility and grace, bow to it. Allow yourself to understand that it's bigger than you, or anything you can possibly imagine. You're not sure of the path. You're not even sure where the next step will take you. When you begin, whisper to yourself: I don't know.
