The Mysteries of Writing

Last month in The New York Review of Books, Talk Talk Talk fave Michael Chabon recalled his first halting steps into the realm of writing novels as he began work on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He described the process of deciding what kind of material he wanted to write--and what is a novel, anyway?

What kind of novel would I write? Had the time come to leave my current writing self behind?

The truth was that I had come to a rough patch in my understanding of what I wanted my writing to be. I was in a state of confusion. Over the past four years I had been struggling to find a way to accommodate my taste for the genre fiction I had been reading with the greatest pleasure for the better part of my life--fantasy, horror, crime, and science fiction--to the way that I had come to feel about the English language, which was that it and I seemed to have something going.

It's also interesting to read his description of the writing space he set up for himself and the almost prehistoric computer on which he started his first novel. But most intriguing is the serendipity he discovered in other novels that suddenly seemed vital to his pursuits, in this case, rereading The Great Gatsby and reading Goodbye, Columbus for the first time. Starting a new writing project is always an endeavor of self-discovery and a step into the unknown. I often find the experience of other writers in this position to be quite inspiring, and Chabon's essay is no exception.