You Start Where You Start

The mooc continues.

Zadie Smith, in a wonderful essay called “That Crafty Feeling,” talks about what she sees as two camps of writers, calling them “the Macro Planners” and “the Micro Managers.”

You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskins he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot, and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page. Because of this structural security, he has a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices. I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for each other, who take characters out and put them back in, reverse the order of chapters, and perform frequent—for me, unthinkable—radical surgery on their novels: moving the setting of a book from London to Berlin, for example, or changing the title. I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying.

Personally, I’m a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose between three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea what the ending is until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels. Macro Planners have their houses basically built from day one and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen, and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers like me build a house floor by floor, discreetly and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.

In my writing group, two of us are Micro Managers, two Macro Planners. It would never occur to Nathan to write a book sequentially. He works opportunistically, whenever some new idea has opened a different perspective onto a room not yet built. I, like Ms. Smith, discover exactly what’s two inches in front of my nose.

I’ve read one of our members’ work so far this week, created at blinding pace. As I was reading it, I thought to myself, this writer is creating the melody, by way of significant plot points. The harmonies (subplots and secondary characters, the backstory) will come later. The rhythm section (precision in the sound of language) will come later. The instrumentation (voices and attitudes) will come later. The repeated themes will make themselves evident later.

The thing is, every composer starts from a different place, and operates from different constraints. Some composers start with a hook that they know will be repeated, and then build the opportunities to repeat it. Some composers start with instrumentation, knowing beforehand that they’re writing a piano quartet or jazz with a horn section, and figure out ways for that voice to be most vivid. James Brown basically invented the genre of funk through his regular admonition “Every instrument a drum.” You always recognize James Brown through his sharp syncopation, the “hit-it-and-quit-it” precision.

You, too, can start anywhere. You can start with a genre and a plot. You can start with a compelling character with a specific problem. You can start with a landscape, or an object, that seems crucial to a way of life. You can start like a poet, with the way words sound. You will eventually build out the others, but you start with what’s compelling to you. That’s the truth of your writing.

I know where I start. But unlike a true believer, I’m agnostic as to where YOU start. You start where you start.