The man was James McNeill Whistler, and he went on to bigger things. But today those little figure studies show how a creative mind constantly works.

  You never know when you’ll encounter the remarkable idea, image, remark. The other day I was walking past a construction site where several bricklayers were working on scaffolding while a hod carrier hurried to supply them all with fresh mortar. It looked like a terrible job, running buckets of wet mortar up and down ladders. To show his appreciation, one mason shouted, “Dude, I love the way you keep the mud alive!”

  Okay, that wasn’t just the other day, it was eleven years ago. But that’s how a wonderful sentence can stick in a writer’s mind. It’s poetry, the way the vowels and consonants repeat with such symmetry. Especially the v’s that occur at each end. It’s standard practice for writers to keep an “everyday book” in which to jot down ideas or useful trivia, but the best stuff sticks in your brain until you find a place to showcase it.

  “Dude, I love the way you keep the mud alive.” Now it’s found a home.

  At an event for National Public Radio in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the funny, charming producer told me about dinner with the stoic family of a WASP friend. She silently mimed using a knife and fork to demonstrate how they ate the whole meal without speaking. In summation, she dubbed them, “New Englanders, God’s frozen people.”

  How could I forget that? How could I not use it? Whenever I suffer through a silent, stultifying meal, I elbow a friend and say, “God’s frozen people.” Now that wonderful quip, too, has found a home.

  For years I wrote back and forth with the writer Ira Levin. He endorsed my book Diary, and I was stunned to be in contact with the author of Rosemary’s Baby and every other great book, plus the play Deathtrap. When I asked about his writing methods he wrote back, telling me a parable about a man with a very long beard. Once someone asked the man if he slept with his beard on top of or beneath the blankets, and he couldn’t say. He’d never given it any thought. That night he tried sleeping with his beard under the covers but couldn’t. Then he tried with his beard above the blankets, but couldn’t. And after that the man never fell asleep ever again.

  Ira Levin’s point being: don’t overthink your creative process.

  But if you were my student, and you asked, here’s what I’d tell you. First, I work best in boring places with little stimulation but with other people present. These places include airports. Car dealerships. Hospital emergency room waiting areas. While I still worked at Freightliner Trucks my earliest ideas were scribbled inside notebooks, sandwiched between the torque specifications, fastener sizes, and part numbers of whatever mechanical project I was assigned. Just as Whistler’s sketches appeared on maps during his daytime job.

  I think of myself as a conduit. I am the disposable thing trying to identify the eternal thing. Experience enters and product exits.

  I acknowledge my mechanistic leaning. Years on the Freightliner truck assembly line color my process. Subassemblies are completed and feed into the main assembly line. These might be short stories that depict the major plot points. Each is an experiment to develop the book’s voice. It’s akin to collage.

  An aside: Years ago I was taught that book tours were intended to drum up local media in large markets. Those were the bygone days of daily newspapers and local daytime television. Such media is all but gone. Today’s writers will more likely be asked to produce a series of short essays that websites or magazines can use as content. In the United Kingdom that’s long been the case. Instead of sleeping, a writer on tour in London will find herself spending the night in the hotel’s business center, hammering out a dozen last-minute pieces about her favorite horror story, historical figure, and cure for writer’s block. To avoid this pitfall, build your novel with a number of scenes or chapters that can stand alone as short stories. Magazines and websites can excerpt these, and they make a much better advertisement for your book. Plan for the fact that every medium wants free content.

  Back to process…To begin a book or story, I collect the necessary parts by brain-mapping notes longhand in a notebook. I carry the book everywhere and jot any ideas or images or wordings that seem ideal for the scene or story. Once I have several pages I keyboard these notes into a file, cutting and pasting them to see how they work juxtaposed in different ways.

  At this stage I print the full draft of the incomplete mess. I bind the pages and carry them everywhere, reading and editing them whenever I get a quiet moment. When next at my computer I key the changes into the file and print a new draft to bind and carry and continue editing.

  A painter once told me that any artist must manage her life to create large blocks of time for creative work. By making ongoing notes throughout my day, when I finally do sit down to “write” I have a pile of ideas. I’m not wasting any of my valuable creative time by starting from zero.

  I’ll be continually bouncing ideas off friends and fellow writers in workshop. To see how readily people engage with the topic, and if people suggest new avenues or recognize patterns that hadn’t occurred to me. And to make sure the idea hasn’t already been used in popular culture recently.

  When the story works somewhat, I look for holes where something extra is needed, like a beat of time or a smoother transition. An on-the-body moment or a telling gesture. Or where further research might help. Once the holes are filled, I’ve got a story that will eventually become a plot point in the future book.

  In this way I create a few key scenes. Maybe depicting the character’s job. How the romance begins, the “meet cute.” Or the inauthentic way in which the character gets his emotional needs met, i.e., how he fools people into loving him. Each of these must stand alone as a short story. First so I can read them in workshop and test their effect, then garner feedback for revisions. Second so I can read them publicly and test where the energy lags or where hidden laughs occur. True story: When I read the story “Romance” on tour people always laughed at the line, “And we pitched my tent…” The characters were camping at a music festival, why was that funny? On tour someone explained that “pitching a tent” is the new euphemism for getting an erection. Go figure.

  Self-contained, the story can also be sold to a magazine, for extra money and to assure some future book publisher that the topic has already been embraced by other editors.

  These short stories accumulate. Each helps establish the verbal gimmicks of the narrator, and subsequent stories riff on those same devices. By now I’m printing all of the stories, binding them and carrying the collected work everywhere. By shuffling their order I can test the pacing, looking for places where an aside or flashback will help sustain tension or distract the reader before the surprise of a resolution.

  This arduous process of creating a complete first draft, Tom calls it “shitting out the lump of coal.” As in, “Relax, you’re still shitting out your lump of coal.”

  Over time I’m carrying a full draft of the book. The most important plot points, the original stories, are done. The main structure of the fictional house is built and more or less watertight. What’s left to do is to tweak the pace and try different endings.

  The benefit to this method is that, initially, each story gives me a sense of satisfaction. I’m not carrying around the mess of an incomplete novel. As each story is finished and sold, I’m free to begin a fresh story. I know each subassembly works because it’s being published or it’s been applauded by an audience.

  If I were your teacher I’d admit this sounds pretty artless. But if you hold a full-time job, have a family, and have to juggle every other duty in life, this scene-by-scene experimentation will keep you sane.

  Process: Crowd Seeding

  Another Freightliner story. In cold weather feral cats would come to live in the truck assembly plant, despite the constant roar of pneumatic tools and the mist of oil and paint that hung in the air. People would feed them from lunch boxes, and we’d glimpse them running between the shelter of one crate and the next. On occasion we’d open a carton to find a nest of newborn kittens, pink and mewing, and management policy required that any kittens be immediately dumped into the shredder. There they’d be instantly pulverized like so much cardboard or packing material. Policy or not, no one was that heartless. Even at the risk of our jobs we’d keep the kittens a secret, hiding them and feeding them until spring arrived and they could venture outside.

  Every job is its own world. On my first day in that same plant my foreman sent me to another work station to retrieve some tool called a Squeegee Sharpener. The foreman at the next station sent me to another foreman who sent me to a fourth station in the line, but not before each foreman cursed me. By shift’s end I’d been to every station in the plant, from rough cab buildup to offline, and met every foreman, and they’d all cursed me and spat on me. There was no such tool as a Squeegee Sharpener, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that I’d learned the layout of the place and had introduced myself to every boss I might ever be assigned to work for.

  And the point of me telling you this story is that years later I told it at a party and everyone present almost leapt forward for the chance to tell almost the exact same story from his or her life. Someone who’d worked at Red Robin said on her first day she was sent around to find the Banana Peeler. Someone said that at Target he’d been sent to find the Shelf Stretchers.

  You see, a good story might leave everyone in awed silence. But a great story evokes similar stories and unites people. It creates community by reminding us that our lives are more similar than they are different.

  In fact a friendly competition begins. A man who’d worked in a brick factory in Toronto said he’d been told to fetch a bucket of hot steam. His co-workers had taught him how to cup a bucket over a steam tap, then run with the metal bucket upside down. He’d never questioned the task, but had spent his first day dashing around with blistered hands, trying to deliver steam where it was needed.

  Another man said that television stations used to make the new hire wash the lighting gels. These are thin sheets of colored plastic used to tint the lights on set. They’re called gels because the originals were thin sheets of incredibly fragile gelatin. On your first day in television a station manager will give you a few sheets and tell you to wash them. If you scratch or tear them, you’re told you’ll be fired. You’re sent into a janitor’s closet with a sink and told to use the hottest water possible. Of course they give you the old type made of gelatin, and the moment the water touches them the sheets melt and vanish down the drain. The man telling me this, he’d spent the rest of his first day in television hiding from his boss, certain he’d be canned.

  A pediatric surgeon said how during his residency he’d been paged one night. This was late, long after midnight, during a rotation that hadn’t allowed for much sleep or food. He’d been napping on a gurney when the public address system had announced a Code Red and summoned him to a distant room on a seldom-used floor of the hospital. There, he’d stepped off the elevator hearing screams from the room in question, and as he entered he saw a naked woman in bed, covered with blood and holding a baby. The woman screams, “You! You killed him, you sonofabitch! You killed my baby!” She throws the dead infant, and he catches it without thinking. The blood is sticky and smells foul. The baby, heavy and limp. The room is oddly lit, with lights shining nightmarishly from under the bed and multiple partitions and drapes pulled halfway closed.

  The reason for the drapes is because the entire surgical staff is hiding, watching. The woman in bed is a nurse. The dead baby feels so real because it’s the doll used to teach artificial respiration. And the blood feels and smells real because it’s real blood that’s passed its expiration date. Everyone is crowded into this shadowy room because they want to see what was done to them…done to you.

  These stories. Hazing stories. I’d tell the best ones, and strangers would try to beat them with true stories from their own lives. The culmination was in Paris. A man in a suit, wearing beautifully shined shoes, took me aside and gave me his business card. He was a veterinarian, and explained that becoming a vet in France was not an easy process. He’d applied to the academy seven times before being accepted. In celebration his advisers and instructors had thrown a party in his honor in one of the laboratories.

  They’d drunk wine, and the group had congratulated him roundly on his entry into the program. And at some point someone had given him a glass of wine doctored with a sedative. Because this is the tradition. He’d fallen asleep, and they’d removed his clothes and trundled his naked, sleeping body into a fetal position. Then they’d carefully, meticulously tucked him and stitched him into the gutted belly of a newly dead horse.

  “When you wake,” he told me, “you have no idea where you are at.” Your head pounds from the sedative. You’re shivering with cold. It’s dark and stinks so horribly you can’t take a deep breath. You’re compressed so tightly you can’t move, and you want to vomit but there’s not even space for that. Still, you can hear voices. Beyond this dark, cramped space your professors and advisers are still having their party, and the moment they see you move inside the tight skin of the horse they begin to shout.

  “So, you think it’s so easy to be one of us!” they shout. They taunt, “You can’t just fill out some papers and become a veterinarian!” From all around you, unseen, they shout, “You’ve got to fight to join our profession!”

  As they demand you fight, calling, “Fight! Fight!” you begin to struggle and push against whatever is binding you. And as you claw a hole in the tough, dead hide you feel someone press a glass of wine into your bloody hand.

  Slowly, you’re forced to birth yourself, naked and bloody, from this dead animal. And once you’re out your companions cheer you and accept you with genuine warmth, and you continue, naked and bloody, to celebrate, having earned your place in their ranks.

  This man in Paris, with his business card and shined shoes, explained why the tradition exists. This grotesque, age-old ritual. Because it creates a shared baseline experience that will someday be a comfort. In the future, no matter how many beautiful little puppies or kittens die under your care, no matter how heart wrenching your job might feel, it will never feel as horrible as waking up inside a cold, dead horse.

  The best stories evoke stories. I call this “crowd seeding.” Like the practice of cloud seeding, which produces rain, crowd seeding is a way to take a common, personal experience and test it, and develop it. None of us live such atypical lives that others can’t relate.

  Note: Cole Porter was famous not for inventing his catchy lyrical hooks, but for overhearing them. He’d listen in public places, and he’d choose the most popular slang terms and build songs around them. People were already saying, “you’re the top” and “anything goes,” and that made it all the easier to sell his work. Similarly, John Steinbeck’s method was to listen at the fringes. To study how people spoke and to learn the details of their lives. He panicked once he became famous. As the center of attention he could no longer gather what he needed.

  Crowd seeding works in so many ways.

  First, crowd seeding allows you to see whether a story engages people. Does it instantly hook them and resonate with their lives? Does it call to mind anecdotes they’d all but forgotten? And does it give them permission to relate stories they’d never dared?

  That’s important. Often people will withhold themselves out of fear of offending or being judged. But if you take the risk and make the first move, you give them permission to risk sharing. A small fish catches a bigger fish.

  “Guts” continues to give people permission to tell similar true stories. One woman, a woman my age, told me how when she was in second grade she’d been a Brownie. This is a precursor to becoming a Girl Scout. She was seven years old, and got a stomachache, and her mother had put her to bed facedown on a vibrating, electric heating pad. “It must’ve slipped down between my legs,” she told me, “because I woke up with such a feeling!”

  She’d never experienced anything so glorious. She had no idea what had happened, but the next time she was to host the Brownie troop she’d said, “Brownies, you’ve got to try this heating pad!” They did, and after that every troop meeting was at her house.

  “It was like Sex and the City for seven-year-old girls,” she said. “For the first time I was the most popular girl in school.” She beamed proudly. “And everyone wanted to be my best friend.”

  That’s until the day her mother came home from work early and caught them all with the heating pad. Her mother sent the other girls home. “She yanked the cord of the pad from the socket in the wall,” the woman told me, “and she beat me and beat me with it. The whole time demanding, ‘What kind of a dirty whore did I raise?’ and ‘How dare you do such a filthy thing?’”

  The woman confided, “I haven’t had an orgasm since second grade…but if you can stand up and tell your story about jerking off with a carrot in your ass, then maybe I can go back to my mother and talk about the heating pad…maybe I can use that story instead of being used by it.”

  I wanted to correct her. “Hey, lady, the ‘Guts’ story didn’t happen to me!” But who cares? Writing isn’t about looking good. The point is to give people permission to tell their own stories and exhaust their emotional attachment and reaction.

  Beyond testing a story’s appeal and resonance, crowd seeding provides you with bigger and better examples that illustrate the same dynamic. Remember, Minimalism means saying the same thing a hundred different ways. My Squeegee Sharpener memory is cute, but it was the bait that attracted the steam bucket story, the gelatin story, the surgeon’s story, and ultimately the French veterinarian’s dead horse story.