Escaping Into the Open by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1999-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

PLOT

There are two kinds of writers, those who start with a plot and those who end up with one. I am one of the latter.

It just doesn’t work for me to try to plot a novel. The few times I tried, it was as though the book rebelled—it went another way entirely, and then all those notes I’d taken to follow that ever-so-neat sequence of events I’d planned were in vain.

For me, part of the joy in writing fiction is the surprise of it, the discovery of things I hadn’t known were in me or that I wanted to say, or, more likely, the way those things chose to be said.

When I write a novel, I start with a feeling. It’s a strong feeling, but that’s all it is. There’s something I very much want to say and/or understand, and I need a novel to help me do it. In the case of Durable Goods, my first novel, I wanted to understand how it is that you can strongly love someone you’re very much afraid of; and I wanted to bring compassion to a character many might find hard to forgive. In exploring those things, a plot emerged, of how a young girl transcends a childhood full of sorrow and pain and ends up full of hope.

But that plot only emerged because I started writing in the narrator’s voice. I didn’t know where she was going. But I let her lead anyway. (And for those of you who fret over beginnings, thinking they must be miniature masterpieces, consider that the first line in Durable Goods is the narrator saying, “Well, I have broken the toilet.”)

I find almost nothing more enjoyable than to be working on a novel and wake up not having any idea what’s going to happen that day. It keeps me interested. It keeps me excited. And I hope it keeps my readers interested, too. If I had to write what the plot told me was “up” next, I’d be bored—it would feel too much like homework.

That’s not to say I don’t keep notes when I’m writing a novel. I begin with a slim folder that ends up being crammed full of things written on napkins, on grocery lists, on backs of envelopes. Maybe I’ll see a story in the newspaper that inspires me, that seems in some way to fit in with the story I’m writing, and I’ll cut that out and throw it in the folder, too. Maybe I’ll find a penny on the sidewalk on a day I’m taking a walk and thinking about the novel—that penny can get taped to the front of the folder. I might get a particular fortune in a cookie that I “need”; I might find a photograph in a magazine that looks exactly the way I imagine a character’s bathtub looks. All these things get kept until they are used in the story—and sometimes they are kept after that.

After I start writing in earnest and I have a good

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