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Today we’re going to talk about two tools of the trade: index cards and questions.
We are in an exploratory phase, at the beginning of writing a book. Even if you are using this course to return to a draft and especially if you are just imagining writing a book and not even sure what it’s about, let this starting time feel open and full of possibility. You are creating, and anything could happen. Kenneth Atchity calls this phase of a project “expansion.”
In A Writer’s Time, his marvelous guide to structuring your creative output, Atchity suggests that you get a big stack of index cards and then wander, taking notes as you go. Peruse the stacks of your local library. Take walks and peek in windows as you walk by. Be alert for what you might stumble upon, what might cross your path unexpectedly or even unnoticed were you not paying particular attention. And on those index cards, write down any ideas, images, details, that occur to you.
If you go through the next ten weeks taking notes on index cards—either real or virtual index cards—you will come out of this process with stepping stones to get you across the rushing river of writing each day during November and December. Let’s say that you are going to write a book that is 80,000 words long, or about 250 – 325 manuscript pages. If you can write 500 index cards, you’ll have two cards for each page you write. Two stepping-stones. In order to gather 500 cards, you’d need to take 13 notes a day each weekday for the next eight weeks. Make it 15, and you’ll have some leeway to toss some of the cards.
Write on your cards (or other note-taking tools) your observations, images, ideas, thoughts, scenes, lines of dialog, character notes, memories and questions.
Years ago, I heard Barbara Kingsolver read at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. She said that before she begins a novel, she has in mind a question whose answer she does not know. She writes the book to discover the answer. For example, with her wonderful book Animal Dreams, she had the question, How can two people grow up in the same home and yet turn out entirely differently? For example, one might be a peace activist while the other designs nuclear weapons. In the process of writing the book, she learned this answer: No two people do grow up in the same home.
This is a wonderful method of working, and from it, I’ve developed an exercise that always produces astonishing story material. What are your questions, real questions that matter to you but whose answers you genuinely do not know?
Make a list of them.
In fact, you might want to keep a running list in a journal or on your desktop, so that as new questions occur to you, you can jot them down. When you say, in exasperation, “Why do people always do that?” take a moment to see if this is a real question of yours. Maybe it is. When you are struck with awe at some act of generosity or struck dumb by an act of stupidity, make a note. When you are staring out the window musing, pencil those questions onto your list. Pay attention to your questions.