By John Ramsey Miller
I am a writer, but sometimes I fantasize about other occupations. This happens usually when I’m having a hard time with an idea for a book, or when I’m sure the books aren’t doing what the publisher or seller expected them to do. What else would I do? I’m a decent carpenter. I can paint a wall. I can run pipes and put in a bathroom from scratch. I can wire outlets. With a few hours of instruction I could probably do brain surgery. What I can’t be is a salesman. When I was in high school, I sold books to parents in rural West Virginia for their children. I’d be in people’s living rooms where the parents were worried about getting enough food for their kids to fill their stomachs and there I was trying to sell them books for kids to read while their bellies growled. I had learned to close wives before their husbands came home and freaked out that they’d given me the twenty-dollar deposit. It broke my heart and made me feel like I had the social conscience of Darth Vader. I decided it was a bad thing to take advantage of people with a prepared pitch cleverly designed so they couldn’t refuse without feeling like they were the worst parents since Ma Barker. I lasted two weeks.
I know I could probably make more money painting walls, and certainly if I performed a few brain surgeries if I could understand the instruction. But here’s the thing. The other day I wrote from eight AM until after five PM without taking more than 30 minutes away from the computer. I was outlining three chapters ahead as I wrote. It is days like that that keep me at this trade or craft or folly or whatever the hell it is. When I can walk into my book and feel the characters and the story I forget about the real world. It’s better than being on a vacation at the beach and it more than makes up for all those days when I can’t decide where I should go next or what I’ll do when I get there.
We authors talk a lot about being in the Zone, but getting there is illusive, and the bitch is that you can spend a day zooming and wake up the next day and fight to get back in again, and not be able to do it. It can’t be taught, it just happens. Or maybe all craftsmen can find that zone. Today I know I can’t get back into it because I have to go to the dentist, then meet a friend who’s coming by and I know it will be tomorrow before I can be alone to attempt to climb into the story again, find hopefully find the sweet spot and enter the Zone. We all know it’s better than any drug. How often are you writing and find yourself getting emotional, choking up, as the words hit the screen? How much higher than that can you get? What can be more rewarding? Okay, your wedding day, maybe watching a child come into the world, take their first steps, coming out of gibberish and calling you Daddy for the first time, or seeing your first book on a shelf in a store, or having a doctor tell you your spouse is cancer free is a better high. Yes, but short of that life-altering experience, …nothing.
So how often do you find yourself in the Zone? Can you make it happen by force of will, or does it just happen?
“Can you make it happen by force of will, or does it just happen?”
For me, forcing it creates crap. It has to happen on its own, and when it does, it’s unlike anything else. Emerging from the zone fills me with confidence and energy. Then I start to pray it happens again tomorrow as the writer’s rush wares off.
That’s a great question, John. I think getting into the Zone is a happy little surprise that flows out of discipline. I’m firmly with Peter De Vries who once said, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.” When you do that, the Zone seems to come with more frequency.
It can’t be controlled, though. Not even Tiger Woods is always in the Zone. But because of his work ethic and mental discipline, he’s there more often than anyone. I do use soundtracks to help set the mood. Most of the time that means a Hitchcock score, or something like The Road to Perdition. (I don’t know that it’s possible to write suspense while listening to, say, the Tijuana Brass).
For me it tends to happen when the book I’m working on is in the final third or so. By then it’s taken on its own internal logic. I know the characters really well, and sometimes I feel almost as if I’m simply taking dictation from the story and the characters.
That’s also when surprises can happen. I don’t outline because I like to follow the story where it leads. In Flight of the Hornbill, my book that came out last year, it led, inexorably to one character killing another that I hadn’t planned on. I then had to change the whole end of the book, but the momentum the story had taken on by that point carried me through and it was a better book for it.
I don’t always outline everything on paper, as I was discussing in the post it was mental outlining. I like to know where the story is going before I arrive there and I don’t always need to outline in any detail. But the action choreography always has to be carefully thought out beforehand. In my final action sequence I’m working on I have eight good guys, and ten on the other side, and the action is taking place on the site of a Civil War battlefield where a reenactment is about to take place in a few hours. So I have a lot of ground, buildings and 250 innocent bystanders, not to mention thirty horses to deal with. I had to draw the fictionalized farm where the skirmish is taking place with a mind to what the characters will be doing during the three or four minutes of action. If I didn’t outline that in detail it wouldn’t work nearly as well.
Outlines force you to think things out, and you can change the story if something better occurs to you. That’s the process at work. All of us do the outline differently, but a Thriller needs to be tight and not have characters wandering or walking around without jobs to do, else they can’t be in my book. I am not a follower of characters I invent––they dance to my tune–– staying within (their) character of course.
But we all do things differently.
I find it very illusive but usually it happens when I have made myself really knuckle down for days on end – forcing myself to focus. At first it’s painful and everything I write is crap and then suddenly the flow seems to grip me (usually at midnight or some unseemly hour) and then I enter the zone – it can usually sustain me for a few days but the trick for me is to bite the bullet in the first place and totally immerse myself in ‘book world’.
I agree with James that discipline and habit enforces one’s ability to get into a good writing zone. When I don’t stick to my daily routine of writing in the morning, there is no Zone. I can go Zone-less for several days, or even weeks, if I let life’s pressures distract me from keeping to my writing schedule. Every day, I must write at the same time, same place. Then I pray for the god of Zone to smile on me! Sometimes an offering of a fresh No 2 pencil helps, grin.
When it comes to other lines of work, I think of a line that was once said by a Famous Writer. When asked what he would have been had he not been a successful writer, he replied, “An unsuccessful writer.” I believe we all need that kind of inner compass.
The Zone cannot be forced. It is a gift from The Muse, which she bestows when she damn well pleases. Of course, as Stephen King said, it’s a lot easier for your muse to find you if she knows where to look. You can’t get into The Zone unless you’re writing. It’s not like nausea, where you feel it coming and hope you get a chance to deal with appropriately.