On Writing, Music and Creativity

(CALGARY, Alberta) - Most writers take years to become themselves; to transform their preconceived notions, idiosyncrasies, preoccupations, attitudes and mannerisms into a personal style. For Franz Kafka, who was an exception to so many rules of life and literature, it only took a single night.

On Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, the day after Yom Kippur, the 29-year-old Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote “The Judgment,” his first masterpiece, in one all-night session. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he exulted, “only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.” Good writers do the same, except generally over a much longer time.

Guy Murchie set out with grandiose and unrealistic expectations. In 1961 he began The Seven Mysteries of Life, thinking it would take two or three years, five or six at the most. It was finally finished in 1978—17 years later. “The pitiable fact is thus revealed that I’ve averaged less than one finished sentence a day during all this time…”

Then there was Will Durant, who began his monumental Story of Civilization in 1929, with the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, coming out in 1935. The 11th volume, The Age of Napoleon, was published in 1975. Over 46 years, we could say he averaged about half a page—less than 250 words a day.

Arthur Hailey, author of the original Airport novel (and nine other novels), took about three years per book, from starting research, to writing the last sentence. When he sat down to actually write, however, his wife Sheila says:

It sounds pedantic—but because he is such a slow writer, Arthur really does count the finished words. His target is 600 a day, and as each paragraph is completed he deducts the number of words it contains from that target. Occasionally, on a bad day when progress is slow, he will go back to his study after dinner to make up those 600 words.

I began to write—or rather, to print—one word after another on a yellow pad until I finished what I hoped would be a readable sentence and a tiny leap forward toward the completion of my book. I had been involved with this book for four years. Even when taking into account the systematically slow and exacting process by which I have always produced prose, a virtual Stone Age method that I regrettably discovered to be my most natural mode, I could not be contented with the paltry number of pages that I had turned out between 1995 and 1999. During this period, to be precise, I had accumulated fifty-four and a half typed pages….I always linger over a sentence until I conclude that I lack the will or skill to improve upon it, whereupon I move on to the next sentence, and then to the next. Ultimately—it could take days, an entire week—I have hand-printed enough sentences to form a paragraph, and enough paragraphs to fill three or four pages of the yellow pad. This is when I usually put down my pencil and move to the keyboard…and begin transcribing what I have composed by hand.

The British playwright and novelist W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage) wrote using a specially designed fountain pen, with a thick collar for a better grip, on San Remo pads he bought from The Times bookshop; fitting on each page about 250 words. He thought himself to be the last professional writer to write by hand. Mark Twain had used a typewriter and Leo Tolstoy dictated to his niece who used a typewriter.

But in 2009, Lord Jeffrey Archer still writes everything by hand and has no idea how to use a computer. (As an aside, Niels Bohr, the principle theorist of quantum physics wrote very little himself, most of his writing being dictated to others. His master’s thesis, for example, was handwritten by his mother.)

Sentenced to prison for four years in 2001 for a 1987 perjury, Archer wrote three volumes of A Prison Diary and basically had the pages discretely taken out. By the 104th day of his imprisonment, he had written 250,000 words—an average of 2,400+/day.

Archer had an interesting start as a writer. He lost an investment of £350,000 of borrowed money in 1974 and was on the verge of being declared a bankrupt. He immediately sat down and began to write a novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less which, first released in the U.S., became an immediate best seller in 1976 and Archer avoided bankruptcy.

I’ve read one of his books, As the Crow Flies, several times and continue to enjoy it (re-reading it every two or three years, on a whim). But Archer himself, seems to have led one of the sleaziest lives I’ve ever run across.

Writers write at different rates in different ways. There is no fixed standard. I mention the writers above not in attempting to establish a rule, but to simply point out that, no matter how slowly or quickly a writer may write, writing a book is generally a long drawn out process.

I say generally, because there are exceptions. Isaac Asimov, was an extremely prolific writer with a lifetime book output of 451 books. He would usually work on several book projects simultaneously, so that when he got tired or stuck on one, he would go to another and back and forth. He once wrote a story for The Saturday Evening Post and "they replied in wonder that I could have written the story in just one day. I said nothing to that. I wouldn't have done any good to tell them I had written the story in just one hour. People don't understand what it means to be prolific."

Asimov was a tightly wound bundle of neurotic insecurities. When he got his first IBM Selectric he didn't retire his previous typewriter, but set it up in a second room as a spare, in case the Selectric broke down. "That was a besetting fear of mine—that something might go wrong with a typewriter and that days and weeks and months might pass before I got it fixed."

Nonetheless, he produced. In 1955 he “did some calculating from my records and found that in 17 years of writing, I had sold about 1,250,000 words of fiction. That was roughly 75,000 words a year, which wasn’t bad, considering that in those years I had to work in the [family] candy store, in the Navy Yard [WW 2], in med school, get my degrees, serve in the Army, and have a wife and two children.” Comparing this number to the others, this meant that he was publishing about 200 words/day. (Just for interest, since I started writing for Salem-News.comlast March, I’ve published, including this piece, about 435 words/day).

He was more prolific with nonfiction. “No book I have ever written proved as easy to write as Realm of Numbers. I had all the facts in my head and in the right order, and I had only to put them down. The whole thing—first draft, final copy, and all—took me thirteen days. By June 28, I was finished and I had a thirty-three-thousand-word book all done.

Another obsessed, workaholic writer was my mentor, Peter C. Newman, who specialized in Canadian business and political books. A lesser man would probably not have physically survived. Three of his marriages didn’t. He was editor of Maclean’s magazine from 1971 to 1982, transforming it during his tenure from a monthly to a weekly.

“Editing Maclean’s and keeping up the steady stream of books tested my stamina. To save time, I used my electric shaver while driving to the office; instead of answering my magazine mail daily, my secretary bunched the letters by subject and they were answered in three marathon dictating sessions every week; I set my wristwatch wake-up alarm during the day at fifteen-minute intervals, so that I had an excuse to cut off overlong interviews, claiming other appointments, which was usually the case; I seldom took a phone call at home or in the office without at the same time reading a manuscript or book excerpt; even on summer weekends aboard my sailboat (where I had desk, chair, typewriter and eventually a portable fax machine) I seldom stopped beavering away at my projects”.

“On my own I found out that what had started out as a vague idea had become an obsession. I wrote six books dissecting Canada’s Establishment and spent more than a decade pursuing its adherents. Holding down demanding full-time jobs during the research and writing of these books, I found myself in a frenzied decade of incessant work. I had always woken up early and done my best writing in the early mornings, when my mind was fresh and the phones didn’t ring, but now I had to regiment my time, start promptly at 4:00 a.m., and write until I was due in the office at 9:30. The books (coming in at more than 200,000 words each) were topical and had to be written in a frenzy over eight months between January and August) prior to fall publication. Eventually I became so exhausted that I could get myself up in the morning only by wearing two wrist alarms, set fifteen minutes apart: the first to jar me out of my deep sleep, the second to get me up.”

“It was a stupid, debilitating life. But the honours poured in, motivating me to ever-tighter schedules .”

“One bibliography (almost certainly incomplete) lists sixty-eight books. The first, German Social Democracy, was published in 1896, when Queen Victoria still had five years to live; his posthumous Essays in Analysis (1973) [sic] came out the year Nixon resigned. In between he published works on geometry, philosophy, mathematics, justice, social reconstruction, political ideas, mysticism, logic, Bolshevism, China, the brain, industry, the ABC of atoms (this was in 1923; thirty-six years later came a book on nuclear warfare), science, relativity, education, skepticism, marriage, happiness, morals, idleness, religion, international affairs, history, power, truth, knowledge, authority, citizenship, ethics, biography, atheism, wisdom, the future, disarmament, peace, war crimes and other topics. To these should be added a huge output of newspaper and magazine articles embracing every conceivable theme, not excluding The Use of Lipstick, The Manners of Tourists, Choosing Cigars and Wife-Beating.”

“I was involved in the desperate business of trying to wrest a living out of free-lance fiction for magazines. The first story, written while overseas, had sold to Whit Burnett for Storymagazine. During those first four months of effort, I wrote about 800,000 words of unsalable manuscript, all in short story form. That is the equivalent of ten average novels. Writing is the classic example of learning by doing. Had I done a novel a year, it would have taken me ten years to acquire the precision and facility I acquired in four months. I could guess that I spent 70 hours a week at the typewriter. I kept twenty-five to thirty stories in the mails at all times, sending each of them out to an average of ten potential markets before retiring them.”

“In the fifth month, in February of 1946, I sold my second story. For forty dollars. It brought my lifetime earnings from writing up to a total of sixty-five dollars. I had a wife, a son, two cats—and almost one thousand form letters of rejection.”

In my teens, I knew I was going to be a writer. To be a writer, I also knew I would have to know how to type. I was one of only a handful of boys in my high school typing class. I have no idea why the others were there.

I used several typewriters over the years, beginning with a portable I bought in 1965 and used for about ten years. Then I bought a small electric typewriter which significantly increased my productivity. What I really wanted, though, was an IBM Selectric—then a state of the art machine. I could not afford to buy an IBM outright, and could not lease one because, as a freelance writer with unreliable income, I had unreliable credit. Then I was hired as a reporter for The Airdrie Echo, a weekly newspaper. I told the publisher that if he would lease a Selectric for me, I would make the payments and, at the end of the lease, I would own it. He agreed and it duly arrived. I then took it home (where I did my real writing) and took the old electric into the office to use there.

Five years later I bought my first computer to use as a word processor. I took it home and left it on my desk, still in its box, savoring the idea of setting it up and using it later. My wife, son and I went out for the evening and, getting home about ten pm, I set it up and turned it on. Nothing. It was dead. I had to wait until the morning to call the computer store. They told me to bring it in and they would give me another, which they did.

This first computer—an Apple IIe clone—had 64k of RAM, which is what I jokingly say is about what’s in a digital wristwatch today. With the computer, the salesman supplied me with a pirated copy of WordStar. I had to buy a separate book to learn how to use it. (When I upgraded computers a couple of years later, I bought an official copy and stayed with updates for a few years, as well, before switching to Ami Pro then MS Word in the late 1990s)

With this first computer, I was still psychologically wedded to writing and editing on paper for the first while. I would write a page or several pages, print them, and edit the hard copy. Then I would return to the document on screen and make the changes. I only did this for a few weeks, however, as I became increasingly tired of the back and forth, and increasingly comfortable with seeing text on a screen as equivalent to what was on a white page.

Conservative pundit and founder of The National Review William F. Buckley, on the other hand, stayed with WordStar until his dying day, having it reinstalled over the years on increasingly powerful computers. It was, said his son Christopher, “like F-22 fighter jets with the controls of a Sopwith Camel.”

In July 2007, Buckley had been out of the hospital a few weeks and, suffering from emphysema, he could barely breathe, barely stand, or barely speak. Bored, he announced to his son Christopher that he was going to finish his Goldwater memoir.

“What amazed me, and still does now, was how fluent it was. Rereading the final chapter in the recently published book, it’s remarkable how little changed it is from what issued from Pup’s oxygen-deprived blue lips that rainy morning in his study. His mind was a still brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body. He made hardly any self-corrections as he spoke. The words came out punctuated and paragraphed. And fast. My fingers scuttled across the keyboard like crabs. In less than 10 minutes, we were on the last paragraph of the last book he would complete.”

In the movie Throw Momma From the Train, Billy Crystal teaches creative writing, and his basic advice to his students is, “a writer writes, always.” which is probably the basic philosophy of the movie’s actual screen writer Stu Silver. As Isaac Asimov describes the process:

“For one thing, I don't write only when I am writing. Whenever I'm away from my typewriter—eating, falling asleep, performing my ablutions—my mind keeps working. On occasion, I can hear bits of dialog running through my thoughts, or passages of exposition. Usually, it deals with whatever I am writing or am about to write. Even when I don't hear the actual words, I know that my mind is working on it unconsciously.

“One reason for my self-assurance, perhaps, is that I see a story or an article or a book as a pattern and not just as a succession of words. I know exactly how to fit each item in the piece into the pattern, so that it is never necessary for me to work from an outline. Even the most complicated plot, or the most intricate exposition, comes out properly, with everything in the right order.”

Diana Athill is a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who, over 50 years in publishing until her retirement in 1993 at age 75, worked with some of the most important and celebrated writers of the 20th century like Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Mordecai Richler, Simone de Beauvoir, and V.S. Naipaul. She published a collection of short stories in 1962, a novel in 1967, then became increasingly influential in publishing after her retirement when she started publishing memoirs. In one of her latest books, Somewhere Towards the End (2008) she described her writing:

“It was an extraordinary experience. The actual writing was extraordinary because, although I was longing all day to get back to the office and sit down to it, I never knew (and this literally true) what the next paragraph I was going to write was going to be. I would quickly read the last two or three pages from the day before, and on it would instantly go; and yet, in spite of this absolute lack of method, the finished books appears to be a carefully structured work. (It struck me then, and I am sure this is true, that a great deal of that sort of work must go on in one’s sleep.) And the final result was extraordinary too, in that once the book was done the sense of failure had vanished for good and I was happier than I had ever been in my life. I was also sure that writing was what I liked doing best, and hoped that more of it would come to me.”

Stephen King is best known for his horror writing, and it is as creative as any other. The book his long-time readers apparently like the best is The Stand, written in the late 1970s. He says he spent about 16 months on the first draft of about 500 pages and could go no further.

"There came a point when I couldn't write any longer because I didn't know what to write." If the draft had been shorter, he says, he probably would have dropped it and started another project. But he had too much invested in it, and started taking long walks where he was "bored and [thought] about my gigantic boondoggle of a manuscript." For weeks he got nowhere "and then one day when I was thinking of nothing much at all, the answer came to me. It arrived whole and complete—gift-wrapped you could say—in a single bright flash."

Then there’s the other side. In 1987 King was at the height of his drug and alcohol addictions. It was during this period, he says, “there’s this novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all….I liked that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.”

Could that be described as a form of automatic writing (writing that does not come from the consciousness of the writer)? If a person has no consciousness of writing it, as King would not have had for at least parts of the manuscript, you could argue that point. B. F. Skinner, the 20th century psychologist described his own experience (which is interesting, considering that as a behaviourist Skinner did not believe in “the mind”)

“In a single day, scarcely leaving my room in Carnegie Hall, I wrote a three-act play. I had not planned to do so, nor had I been speculating about the theme. I simply came back from breakfast one day and began to write—in pencil on unlined paper. A few parts of the third act are merely sketched in—I was running out of steam—but otherwise it is complete. It is a blend of Ibsen and Shaw, on the theme of the clever wife who promotes an affair between her husband and an old school friend who has come to visit her; it is done for the sake of her husband but only the friend is aware of what is happening. It was very close to automatic writing, and I was not to experience anything like it again for many years.”

New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg describes writing as reticence. “It is about saying one thing at a time, not everything at once. The trick isn't learning how to manage information. It's learning how to think.” And, aphorizes Newman, good writing is “clear thinking made visible.” Maugham echoes this thought.

“People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to write clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You would have thought that men who passed their lives in the greater masters of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write, if not beautifully, at least with perspicuity. Yet you will find in their works sentence after sentence that you must read twice in order to discover the sense. Often you can only guess at it, for the writers have evidently not said what they intended.”

As the social world increasingly overlaps with the business world, our communication skills through language are deteriorating. Don Watson, (who has written three books on language), is offended by the language of the business world which, he expects ''to continue on its present depressing course''. People seem to be impotent against the march of mission statements, values, outcomes, synergies, platforms, leverages, targets, drivers, product and deliverables that prevents comprehensive and comprehensible English from appearing.

As a result of the managerial revolution of the 1980s, he says, "people who couldn't write, suddenly found they had to write. They had to learn, which was a difficult thing: you have to keep remembering that writing's hard. You don't always know what you're going to say. It's like a postcard—you can write the simple things or write something else. There's that choice all the time: do something with language or make it dull.”

Another effect of the 1980s was the appearance of the personal computer. Before that, people had to use a typewriter, or write by hand and have someone transcribe it to the printed page. Writing was physically hard and time consuming—not even allowing for content. With the word-processor words could easily be printed on paper—regardless of the meaning or sense of the words.

Watson believes in finding the tone, or cadences, of writing. “I think you can test this theory if you're writing away and you put on Dizzy Gillespie; you will write in a certain way. If you put on Erik Satie you'll write in another way. Or Mahler. We're terribly susceptible to these things. Which is why it's such a loss when you create a language which is not susceptible to any kind of influence. It's like cement.”

In this way, music is the essence of Peter C. Newman’s writing. “Writers of creative non-fiction must also pay attention to cadence, the sequence of words that appeal to the reader’s inner ear—writing that possesses lilt and symmetry, a sense of rhythm, its own melody. Proper cadence makes prose so accessible that it can almost be sung.”

“I never write anything without jazz pulsating through my earphones. While I jam on my computer, I am accompanied by the cannonade of Stan Kenton’s nineteen-piece orchestra. his Artistry of Rhythm, supplying the energy I need and the cadence I want. It’s an impossible process to define. All I know is that this music transforms the task of writing into bursts of energy: hours sweep by like minutes, paragraphs flow, not from thoughts or even feelings, but from the entrancing, almost hypnotizing sounds that I groove to.”

The reason he was so gripped by Kenton, he says, “was that Kenton seldom used standard jazz time signatures (4/4 or 3/4 time), moving his music into such unheard cadences as alternating 7/4 and 14/8 time, or 5/4 mixed with a 20/16 tempo. That scoring produced a dramatic imbalance that kept his listeners (and musicians) constantly on the edge of about-to-be-fulfilled promises, which is exactly what I seek in creative non-fiction.”

My own writing draws from these different ways. I can’t put music on because it distracts me and I find myself listening to the music and not writing. Like Asimov, I see patterns and I know just where to put the ideas. The main thing I need to see clearly is the ending. It’s like traveling to a city. If I know where it is, I just go there, almost on automatic like Skinner. And I don’t get the great inspirations like King, but I regularly, almost daily, get little inspirations out of the blue.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary.

He has been writing exclusively for Salem-News.com since March 2009 and continues to work on a creative non-fiction book which he began in 1998. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com