Joan Didion's Craft | Research

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I think until I arrange the words on the page and see what I have said.

Sentences

I learned to write by typing out Hemingway’s sentences. I was a teenager. I could see how the sentences worked once I started typing them. It’s a way to get rhythms into your head.

The rhythms.

All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. This is what I know about grammar.

The Picture

The picture tells you everything. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The arrangement of the words matters. The picture tells me the arrangement.

I had a picture in my mind. There was a woman walking through an airport parking lot. She was carrying a leather bag. The bag had been given to her husband as a favor at a Las Vegas casino. The woman was not young. Her hair was blond but her skin was tired. I called her Maria. I didn’t know then what she had done. I knew only that the picture dictated the words.

First Sentences

What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how you know you got it right.

The Shimmer

There are pictures that shimmer. You can’t think too much about them. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You stay very quiet. You empty yourself and wait for the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t miss it. But you have to be watching.

Repetition

I repeat details. Almost like a phrase that recurs in a symphony.

Why?

I do it to remind the reader to make certain connections. Technically it’s almost a chant. You could read it as an attempt to cast a spell.

The night he died. The ordinary instant. The night he died. I needed to discuss this with John. The night he died. The way the mind keeps circling back. The repetition is the circling. The circling is the grief.

Fragmentation

The center was not holding. The essay fragments because the world fragments. I jump between scenes with little connective tissue. The time and the place do the work. The structure mirrors the breakdown.

This is what it was like.

The Work

When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. At the end of each day, I mark up the pages all the way back to page one. It gets me past that blank terror.

I spend most of the day working on a piece not actually putting anything on paper. Just sitting there. Trying to form a coherent idea. Maybe something will come to me about five in the afternoon. A couple of hours of work. Three or four sentences. Maybe a paragraph.

Writing

In many ways writing is the act of saying I. Of imposing oneself upon other people. Of saying listen to me. See it my way. Change your mind.

It’s an aggressive act. It’s a hostile act.

You don’t want to know this but it’s true.

What to Read

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — the fragmented portrait
“The White Album” — the masterclass
“Goodbye to All That” — place and loss
“On Self-Respect” — character over personality
“The Year of Magical Thinking” — all the techniques at once

A writer is a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper.

That’s all.

That’s everything.