David Galef
NO SURPRISE FOR THE WRITER? WHAT A RELIEF FOR ME.  

Robert Frost’s famous line of writing advice, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” comes not from a poem but from his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.” A lot of writers love this idea. They find it liberating. If authors start a project knowing exactly where they want to go, that’s exactly how it’ll read: planned out, executed without inspiration, showing the blueprint underlying the writing. So, they reason, how can writers evoke a sense of wonder in their work unless they also work in a state of unknowing? Multitudes have embraced this “no surprise” view, trusting in divine uncertainty, hoping to preserve freshness that way.

That’s not the way I work, and I’m tired of apologizing for it. I’ve never been a spontaneous type, to the annoyance of friends who call me at 8:00 in the evening asking me to head out with them at 9:00. I need time to plan my days. I need time to plan out my writing too, whose effects come from—I admit—something resembling a diagram. Often, the snazziest parts—like the scene where my protagonist, ghosted by her girlfriend, Natalie, dresses up as a ghost and knocks on Natalie’s door—come from slow script‑boarding. Only when I’ve finished outlining the sequence do I start putting together sentences. Full confession: I sometimes even write poetry that way.

I do at times feel bad that my process resembles bricklaying more than picking flowers. But I blame the Romantics, who believed in spontaneity and fresh air, and the idea that the  wellspring of a poem must be in the heart, which isn’t a thinking organ; that a poem must represent a fountain, not a well-measured amount. Yet Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions,” has a codicil: “recollected in tranquillity.” In my youth, the cocktail napkins that I scrawled upon with heartfelt emotion rarely stood up to the sober light of day.

Take a look at Keats’s “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—.” But that state is just a precondition for brainstorming. After that, logic and order must set in. Existence is messy; art is designed. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.”

Let’s put it another way: A lot of us are afraid of the blank page. That’s why I usually start with an outline. To trust in making art on the spot is to spend hours staring at something in woeful incompletion, embarking on a paragraph only to delete it, having a remarkable run one day but running aground the next. Yet writers will return to this mode of composition week after week, convinced that this is the way to put together a piece of art. They’re not building boxes, after all. They’re creating. Some of these writers are my friends. We talk about something else when we meet up.

I don’t want to be smug about this, and I know that different writers work differently, but I’ve noticed over and over: those who are most productive arrive at their desks—not under a tree—with an outline, a summary of what comes next. The more complete the plan, the more successful the writing session, which should be self-evident were it not for the multitudes who rebel against it, who want something for nothing. They want to turn disorganization into a virtue. Here’s an observation: at the artists’ colony Yaddo, where I’ve done time, the unhappiest residents were those who arrived with little but a few pages and an idea.

The chaotic approach to writing can work, but it certainly isn’t efficient, as many professional authors know. William Faulkner planned A Fable on the walls of his study in Rowan Oak, and the outline is still visible. John Grisham has noted that he comes up with a two‑page summary of each chapter in his novel before getting down to the real writing. Vladimir Nabokov used a system of index cards, each with a bit of the work, as did P. G. Wodehouse. That way, neither had to produce the phrasing, the character business, and the scene details all at the same time—the balancing act that brings many of us (me!) to a standstill—and could work out of chapter‑sequence if they liked. Later, you can change what you’ve planned out, but at least you have a plan. One of my friends calls this procedure “horribly deliberate.” He’s been trying to jump‑start a novel for years.

The quest for spontaneity is related to the holy grail of inspiration, the lightning bolt that comes from nowhere and which illuminates an idea. People think they must wait for it, that trying to force it or planning it out won’t help. But for me, deliberation is preferable to uncertainty. In fact, I’ve started gathering quotations in support of my practice. Here’s Igor Stravinsky: “Inspiration is like a baby: you have to sit it on the pot every morning.” Here’s Peter De Vries: “I make it my rule to be inspired every morning at nine.” Eventually, planning can become second nature, so that you can continue day after day, regardless. As Norman Mailer once noted, “Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.” And Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Preparation will not make your writing turgid because if done right, it disappears in the work. Yeats wrote out a prose précis before every poem he wrote. Can you detect that in his poems? James Merrill was known to retreat to his room after entertaining guests and come down after a while with the draft of a poem he’d composed. Once, when he read one aloud, a friend suggested that it lacked passion. Merrill smacked his head. “Of course! Forgot the passion!” He trudged back upstairs and came down an hour later, having inserted the necessary element. Everyone agreed it read perfectly heartfelt this time.

After hearing the Merrill anecdote, I typed it out and tacked it on my writing wall.

Yet the advocates for the opposition are legion, even regarding whole books. They like to quote E. L. Doctorow’s description: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.” William Styron went further, claiming that the process was more like driving backwards in the dark. But even if— to update the metaphor—you can text while driving, it can lead to a dangerous crash. I like a map or an outline, even if that sounds to others like a terribly dull way to create. For me—and I suspect many others if they’d give it a try—the more detailed the plan, the easier the writing will go. If you’re good, when others read your work, no one will be able to tell—to switch metaphors again—that you used a protractor for the subtle angles in your point of view. They won’t discern that the thrilling climax was engineered.

So, I will continue to map out the whole way before starting my voyage, even when I do have an unexpected impulse for wanderlust. Why not know all the territory before setting foot on what might be unstable ground? What have you got to lose except not getting lost?

Did I plan out this essay? What do you think?

David Galef has published over a dozen books in two dozen directions. His latest is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. He’s a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University, as well as the editor in chief at Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine on the planet. See his website.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Craft Essays.