People suggested a variety of things — that she call the police, kick the door in, report him to the landlord, and so on. “Get a flashlight,” I told her, “and go down to the basement and find the fuse box and remove the fuse for his apartment. Just turn him off altogether. Pull the plug on the clown.”
I don’t know if she did this. That’s her problem, not mine. But after the conversation shifted, I was left to think about the basic problem and let my mind wander with it. That I’d thought of the fuse box ploy was not inconsistent with my choosing burglars and such types as viewpoint characters; I’m blessed or cursed, as you prefer, with that type of mind. I thought of that, and I thought that my burglar hero, Bernie Rhodenbarr, would certainly offer the same suggestion if a friend called him in the middle of the night with that particular problem.
And then, because I’ve learned not to walk away from thoughts along these lines, I asked myself what Bernie would do if, for some reason or other, his friend couldn’t pull the fuse, or get access to the fuse box, or whatever. Some fuse boxes in New York apartments are located within the individual apartment, for instance. Suppose Bernie’s sidekick Carolyn Kaiser called him because of this blaring radio, and suppose Bernie was obliging enough to trot over with his burglar’s tools, and suppose he did what he does best, letting himself into the offending apartment just to turn off the radio, and suppose there was a dead body spread out on the living room rug, and suppose...
I may or may not use it. But a few minutes of rumination had provided me with the opening for a novel. It’s not a plot. It’s not enough for me to sit down and start writing. I’m not ready to write another book about Bernie just now and won’t be for six or eight months. By then, if I remember who I am and what I’m looking for, I’ll very likely have picked up other stray facts and thoughts and bits and pieces, and I’ll have played with them and tried fitting them together, and if two and two makes five I may have a book to write.
Stay awake. I heard very early on that a writer works twenty-four hours a day, that the mind is busy sifting notions and possibilities during every waking hour and, in a less demonstrable manner, while the writer sleeps as well. I liked the sound of this from the start — it was a nice rejoinder to my then wife if she said anything about my putting in only two hours a day at the typewriter, or skipping work altogether and going to the friendly neighborhood pool hall for the afternoon. But I’m not sure I believed it.
I believe it now, but with one qualification. I believe we can be on the job twenty-four hours a day. I believe we can also choose not to, and those of us who make this choice severely limit ourselves.
A great many writers use alcohol and drugs, ostensibly to stimulate their creativity. This very often seems to work in the beginning; the mind, jarred out of its usual channels by this unaccustomed chemical onslaught, may respond by digging new channels for itself. Similarly, some artists early in their careers find hangovers a creative if hardly comfortable time. The process of withdrawal from the drug evidently has a stimulating effect.
Eventually, these same writers commonly use alcohol and drugs to unwind, to turn off the spinning brain after the day’s work is finished. The process is not true relaxation, of course, but anesthesia. One systematically shuts off the thinking and feeling apparatus for the night. For those who ultimately become drug- or alcohol-dependent — and a disheartening proportion of the members of our profession wind up in this category — the results are devastating. One reaches a stage wherein work is impossible without the drug or the drink, and this stage is in turn succeeded by one in which work is impossible with or without the substance. Alcoholism and drug dependency have ended too many successful careers prematurely, while they’ve nipped no end of promising careers in the bud.
It’s hardly revolutionary to advise an alcoholic writer not to drink, anymore than it’s a controversial stance to urge diabetics not to binge on sugar. But I’d suggest further that heavy drinking or drug use is severely detrimental even to the writer who does not become alcoholic or drug-dependent, simply because it shuts off his mind.
For years I drank when my day’s work was done, convinced that it helped me relax. One thing it indisputably did was take my mind off my work. This, to be sure, was one of the things I wanted it to do; I felt I ought to be able to leave the work behind when I left the typewriter.
But writing, and especially novel writing, just doesn’t work that way. Writing the novel is an ongoing organic process, and we carry the book with us wherever we go. It’s during the period between one day’s work and the next that our minds play, both consciously and subconsciously, with the ideas that will enable us to perform creatively when we resume writing. We may rest the mind during these times but we hurt ourselves creatively if we shut our minds off completely. Later on we’ll talk about the value of daily writing. It’s similarly related to the notion of keeping oneself present in one’s book, day in and day out. Extended breaks in the writing interrupt this continuity, and so do those interruptions of consciousness or attentiveness or awareness caused by heavy drinking and drug use.
More recently, marijuana has been touted as a creative stimulant, presumably nonaddictive, harmless, etc. Its addictive properties and harmlessness aside, I have found that its potential for creative stimulation is largely illusory. The common marijuana experience consists of making marvelous seminal mental breakthroughs which, hard to grasp as the smoke itself, are gone the next morning. If only one could remember, if only one could hold onto those fantastic inspired insights....
Well, one can. The story’s been told of the fellow who kept paper and pencil at the ready, determined to write down his brilliant insights before they were lost. He awoke the following morning, recollected that he’d had a fantastic insight and that for once he’d managed to write it down. He wasn’t sure that it contained the absolute secret of the universe, but he knew it was dynamite.
He looked, and there on the bedside table was his pad of paper, and on it he had written, “This room smells funny.”
Whether to smoke or drink or pop pills is an individual decision, as is the extent to which you may care to employ these substances. I would suggest, though, that if you do elect to drink or drug heavily, you do so between novels, not during them. And recognize that whatever excellence your work has is in spite of the substances that you’re using, not because of them.
Stay hungry. Some time ago a friend of mine was on a television talk show with several other mystery writers, Mickey Spillane among them. After the program ended, Spillane announced that they’d neglected to talk about the most important topic. “We didn’t say anything about money,” he said.
He went on to explain that he’d spent several years on an offshore island in South Carolina, where he did nothing too much more taxing than swim and sunbathe and walk the beach for hours at a time. “Every once in a while it would come to me that it’d be fun to get started on a book,” he said. “I thought I’d keep my mind in shape and I’d enjoy doing it. But I could never get a single idea for a story. I’d sit and sit, I’d walk for miles, but I couldn’t get an idea.
“Then one day I got a call from my accountant to say that the money was starting to get low. Nothing serious, but I should start thinking about ways to bring in some dough. And boy, did I get ideas for books!”