A story should be a circle.
Causality. Everything is connected.
Keep it a secret, like a gestation.
Writing is essentially a private task, and for it to flourish, it must remain that way.
The story is not the string, and it is not the knot. It is the undoing of the knot.
When I find myself with an unsolvable problem, I sit and gloat for two days. It is in the working out of these problems, the building up to their solution, that the story comes into being.
The control of ideas is only possible through language. And by practice we learn to use the subconscious so that it feeds into the conscious mind at the proper level. This is true of life as well as literature. Our symbols grow spontaneously, not by taking thought.
We are all caught in the web of language. We cannot change it. All we can do is learn to understand and use it. It is a marvellous trap, of course. But we cannot escape it.
The poet, when he uses a word, is conscious of its complete history, all the places where it has been used before, and uses it with all this in mind, then puts his own spin on it. The prose writer must also be aware of the tradition of his language. The principal word in a paragraph explains that paragraph and provides its context, just as the paragraph provides the context for the word.
I think sometimes writers do better under pressure, stress. Not in the early stages of work. One can't stay in the air that long. But as we work we bring it all together, we need great effort, great concentration, as if we were preparing to pilot a suicide plane. We want to consume everything that's in us at the time, in one great flash.
Use the link below to read about the life and work of Canadian-born North American crime novelist ROSS MACDONALD (pen name of KENNETH MILLAR):
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/kenmillar.html
Special thanks to STUART COUPE for loaning me the book from which this material was extracted.
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