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There’s a great artist called Bobby Fingers whose YouTube channel documents him making insanely detailed sculptures of celebrities, taking the viewer on a journey through his creative process as he does so. In one of his videos—where he’s taken it upon himself to make an enormous fiberglass rowing boat in the shape of Jeff Bezos’ face, because reasons—he says: “This took quite some time, but I’m not gonna complain, because nobody asked me to do any of this.”
This resonated with me.
Any value or meaning your creative work will ever have begins with your determination to actually do it. Nobody wants it, nobody asked for it, and along the way, you’ll have to constantly convince yourself that what you’re doing matters, because that’s the first step on the road to it actually, really existing, and mattering, out there in reality, the most unforgiving arena of all.
This situation—being tasked, by yourself, with bringing into existence something no one wants, but which has to matter to other people, but which you’ll only ever know matters if you finish it, but which you haven’t started, because it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t exist—is both an utterly intolerable and absolutely unavoidable part of the process.
Unsurprisingly, writers have developed a myriad of strategies and tricks to push through this awkward stage.
My own trick is very simple. When I begin writing something new, I break out a clean, spotless notebook, and announce, to myself, that this is where the book will take shape.
I then proceed to fuck it up.
The fucking-up of the notebook, I have found, is absolutely vital. In order to write a book, it’s very helpful for me to maintain this parallel continuum, a Dr Jekyll-space of the subconscious, where the only mistake one can make is to leave a page blank. This contract then frees me, within the pages of the notebook, to do anything—to write or draw, or paint, to whine and complain, to plot and scheme—to fail or succeed without fear.
To do whatever I want, basically.
Within days, I start to see what works and what doesn’t. At some point, a restrained, respectable version of these heartfelt scrawls will make their way, in a more formal, scrubbed-up version, into a finished novel, but this cauldron of ideas is where they are born, and where they must fight for their existence or die.
What I like about this approach is that it breeds serendipity, randomness, and the chance to have the material surprise me. As I continue, the notebooks seem to ingest everything—all the things I’m thinking about, everything relevant that comes my way—and it’s here that all of that is distilled. The notebook’s appetite grows with the process, and it soon starts to require other things beyond mere words. Articles, images, stray clippings, as well as my own painting and drawing end up filling the pages, often conflicting and complementing each other. It’s also here where I work out character details, maps, chronologies—anything, in fact, that helps the novel to exist.
By this point, of course, the notebook will look utterly, utterly insane—but only if I’m doing it correctly.
The importance of the physicality of the notebook as an object can’t be underestimated either. When I first started writing I had an office job during the day, and in the evenings my body would rebel, after eight hours sitting at a desk, at the prospect of coming home and spending yet more hours sitting at yet another desk. In a similar fashion, I find the prospect of plotting out a novel on yet another app or Word document, on yet another screen, fills me with dread.
The notebook is a refuge from the digital world. I love the fact that it can be wrestled with, torn, glued, fixed, burnt, chewed, left out in the rain, bleached in the sunshine. I have covered pages in paint, print, collage, scrawl, mud, even blood. The notebook for Solace House is filled with—among many other things—cut-up remnants of Clue cards, a handwritten housekeeping ledger from 1901, sepia photographs from the 1890s, handwritten notes, old wallpaper, Edwardian stamps, and most delightfully, three pressed flower petals which fell like confetti from a dusty old book from 1807 I found mouldering in a bookshop basement, a sentimental souvenir of a sunny day over two hundred years ago. The minute my focus began to tighten to the things I was really interested in, the more these things seemed to come my way. For instance, many of the images in the Solace House notebook—and therefore, ultimately, in the novel itself—arrived courtesy of a rain-soaked auction catalogue of Victorian art which one of my neighbors left out on their garden wall, intending to throw out.
In addition to all of the scrawl, certain ritual habits of mine have emerged, and now recur in all the notebooks I keep. For instance, there’s always two pages given over to DOUBTS, and labelled as such, and it’s here where I record all the inner voices whose job is to sabotage me. I like to create a little paddock for these voices. Sometimes, their concerns are legitimate. More often, they’re just noise, but it helps to write them down, seal them off, and never think about them again, if that can be helped.
I also like to draw or paint a putative cover for the book, as this feels like a magical act—the act of making my hopes concrete, putting my money where my mouth is. What if it was all real? What if it all paid off, all that effort? What if all of this nonsense became something I could hold in my hand, see in a bookshop? What if?
All of which is to say, these notebooks are also—for me at least—the antidote to the odd kind of conformity that settles on us when we all seem to be using the same software, the same resources, the same social media sites, making the same connections. It represents a different way of thinking, where solutions and fresh perspectives do not have to come through the dry, almost masochistic monasticism of the keyboard and the screen. The notebook hearkens back to the most primal creative impulses we have, simply making our mark on a surface. I also love how naïve—childish, even—they can look. This is entirely appropriate for spaces where everything is allowed.
It’s important to remember that this process is how all art, no matter how grand or lauded, comes into being. Not every writer needs a notebook where this process is so obviously concretized and preserved, but I can guarantee that this process exists in some form or another for all creatives, as we undergo this act of deceptive self-persuasion, every single damn time, making something, once more, that nobody asked for.
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Solace House by Will Maclean is available via Grove Atlantic.