Shrink the Doorway

Nothing in the phrase tells a writer’s hands what to do first when she sits down to “work on the book.” It names a place, and a writer who sits down in front of a place with no task in it is correctly paralyzed. The more the Work matters, the larger it can loom, and the more the next step can seem to require having understood everything at once.

Anne Lamott tells in Bird by Bird about her older brother at ten, close to tears, with a report on birds due the next day that he had had three months to write. Their father, as she tells it, told the boy to take it bird by bird. The story is told so often that it has become a slogan, which hides what was actually done. The father did not tell the boy to be calm, or to believe in himself. He changed the unit from a report on birds, which is a subject and a looming, to one bird, which is an afternoon.

Small enough to start means the unit has a visible first act. Substantial enough to matter means that when the session ends, the Work is different in a way someone could check. A session spent retitling the folder is small, and it is also nothing. Setting out to do the whole second act in one sitting picks something substantial that cannot be started.

When Lamott is overwhelmed, she limits herself to what she could see through a one-inch picture frame: describe the main character the first time we meet her, when she walks out the front door and onto the porch, in a single paragraph, and leave the expression on her face when she notices the blind dog in the car for later. A paragraph can be good or bad, and a book cannot be, yet, so the frame gives her a unit complete enough to judge.

Ernest Hemingway, in his 1958 Paris Review interview, describes building the next day’s doorway at the end of the last one. He writes in the morning, rereads, and always stops when he knows what is going to happen next, so he can go on from there.

The explanation is the authors’, and Lamott claims neither part of it. A bounded task can be held in mind whole, which leaves attention for the task instead of for dread of the surrounding mass. It also gives the session an end that is neither exhaustion nor giving up, and that makes coming back easier (see Practice 1). A planner’s outline is a doorway-making device, and so is a discovery writer’s habit of stopping mid-scene.

A researcher with three hundred boxes cannot start on “the archive.” The doorway is box 14, folder 3: read it, list every claim about the strike, mark which ones have a second source. A memoirist cannot start on “my father.” She can start on the sound of his car in the driveway.

Some of the Work needs the whole. Lamott herself passes along E. L. Doctorow’s remark that writing a novel is like driving at night: you see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. That is true of drafting. It is less true of a day spent deciding where the road goes, and such days are legitimate, because synthesis, reframing, and deciding what the book is actually about cannot be done through a one-inch frame. A writer who only ever works at paragraph scale can end up with well-made paragraphs and no book. What separates planning from staring at the whole is a bounded task for the wide-angle session, such as a reverse outline (see Practice 28) or a one-page statement of what the Work now promises.

Practice. Take the phrase you use for your current Work, probably some form of “work on the book,” and replace it with one physical action that has a verb, an object, a place, and an end: open the file for chapter 6 and write the first paragraph of the kitchen scene; transcribe the first nine minutes of the interview and underline every date. Do that action and nothing else, for one hour at most. Afterward, answer one question in writing: what is different on the page or in the notes that was not different an hour ago? Nothing you can point to means the doorway was too small; not starting means it was too big. Adjust one notch and go again tomorrow.