Part 2 — Material, purpose, and form

A writer can have a shoebox of index cards, six pages of research notes, and a sentence written on a Sunday about why the project matters, and still not know whether the project is a poem, an essay, or a screenplay. Nothing is missing, exactly. The material exists, the reason exists, and a container of some kind is waiting. They have just never been introduced.

The first part of this book was about arriving at the desk often enough that arriving stops being an event. This part starts with what you do once you are there. Where does material come from, and what should happen to it? What is the piece about, as distinct from what it describes? What has the reader been promised, and what shape will carry it? And once the Work has a point, how does the point get in without taking over?

Treat every answer here as provisional. The sentence you write for Practice 15 may well be wrong by the third draft, and the promise you write for Practice 16 may be rewritten when the first reader reports what she actually felt. Something definite to be wrong about beats a vague confidence that the Work will announce itself. None of this assumes a method. A planner meets these questions before the outline exists, often in a document titled “premise” or “pitch.” A discovery writer may meet them at page forty, or after a complete draft, and a hybrid writer may meet them repeatedly, at different scales (Chapter 4 describes these patterns, and the practices in Part 3 return to them). Whoever meets them, the person asking should have the authority to change the answer.

If you are beginning something, read the practices in order, because it is hard to choose a form for a work whose reader you haven’t imagined. If you are in the middle of something, go by symptom. Practice 11 is for keeping fragments alive before they know what they are for, and a notebook too full to use needs 13. A draft that is competent and inert needs 12, on the particular, and then 15, on the subject beneath the topic. A project that cannot say what it is for should start with 16 and then go to 15. A piece that feels like the wrong size or the wrong species needs 17 and 18. A story that has begun to prove a point, or an essay that pretends to discover what it already knows, needs 19 and 20.

Named writers appear because something they did can be examined. Where they disagree, as Orwell’s earned conviction and Montaigne’s cultivated doubt disagree about how much a writer should know before beginning, the disagreement is part of the instruction.