the creative process: the novel

North Carolina Office of Archives and History

The Creative Process: The NovelAuthor(s): Reynolds PriceSource: The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April, 1979), pp. 206-208Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23534834 .

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The Creative Process: The Novel

By Reynolds Price*

If I persisted in telling you what I had planned to tell you, at least for the first half of my remarks, you would hear a repeat, though a considerably less graceful

repeat, of what Betty Adcock has just told you. I don't think it's possible to dis

cuss the process of literary creation with any certifiable intelligence. The process of creation—despite the attempts of numerous psychologists, psychoanalysts, etc., to analyze it—has proved a fruitless subject for investigation. As Betty sug gests, any creator—and I rather hate that word, but what else shall we call it

tonight?—any creator would say, "Why, it's undiscussable!"; and that's because artistic creation is an almost entirely unconscious process.

If I am a novelist—don't deny me at this late date—I'm a novelist primarily by gift. I possess certain needs and certain skills which were handed to me through my genetic heritage and through the environment of my early life over which I had precious little control. If I'm a novelist by gift, and if I have subjected that

gift—as I've tried to do through long years—to training and continued years of

discipline, then what more can I tell you? I can tell you, for instance, that in my own particular case—and I'm delighted to find that Betty Adcock seems to

duplicate it in a quite different form, the form of a poem—I can tell you that all

my novels and all my short stories have come to me entirely spontaneously with no conscious desire or search, at least, for that particular story. I mean I started

out telling people I was going to be a writer when I was in about the fifth grade; but I can never really remember sitting down in a room and saying, "Now I want to write a story"—except, that is, for the one writing class I took, when I was a senior at Duke, under Professor William Blackburn. Otherwise, all the narratives I've written have arrived simply as gifts; and they've arrived generally when I least expected them, while I was doing some very unlikely things indeed.

The first impulse for the first novel I wrote, a novel called A Long and Happy Life, arrived while I was sitting in a cold and extremely unattractive sitting room in east Oxford, England, in the weeks before Christmas, 1956.1 was reading the letters to Santa Claus in the Warren Record, a newspaper which I commend to all of you who do not presently know it. The same issue of the paper carried my all-time favorite headline, which I won't keep from you tonight. It said, "Woman Bites Off Paramour's Thumb, Swallows It"—I think it's a triumph of the

*Mr. Price participated in a panel discussion on the subject of "The Creative Process" at the even ing meeting of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. These remarks were delivered from notes, recorded and transcribed by Mrs. Henri T. Dawkins of the Historical Publications staff, and later edited by Mr. Price. Mr. Price is James B. Duke Professor of English, Duke University, Durham; at the 1976 meeting of the association he received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for his novel The Surface of Earth (New York: Atheneum, 1975).

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW



Papers from the Literary and Historical Association 207

human will that I thought of a novel after reading that headline; maybe I had

nothing left to do. It was either that or walk out and surrender myself to Oxford

traffic, and Oxford is literally the Detroit of England (Morris cars are made

there). The stories have arrived, the novels have arrived then as sudden visual pic

tures. I'm not claiming I've had visions. I don't mean to imply some mystical,

quasi-religious process. It's not that. It's a simple matter of reverie, a sudden

daydream; a color-slide drops down back of one's eyes and one sees—at least, my method is that I suddenly see a character or one or two, two or three characters

doing something. Some sort of interesting physical gesture, a series of gestures, some interesting transaction; and I find myself sitting there for a few seconds

saying, "Who is that?" and "What are they doing?" And—very frequently, I

would say, in over 90 percent of the cases with me—the picture which I've got

spontaneously, which has been thrown up into my conscious mind from the un

conscious, that picture will be a picture from very late in the story. It's frequent

ly the last scene of the story. I don't know why. Then I'm left with the problem of

inventing backward from that picture the torso or feet of the story. The inven

tion of the remainder of the story becomes also an act of creation. That becomes

the hard part. Betty, I think it was Paul Valéry who said that every poem has

une ligne donnée—has one given line—and we have to make the rest, manufac

ture the rest of the poem. I would maintain that in a good, a natural writer, the

rest of the poem or story is not merely manufactured but is also created. The

creation of the rest becomes the great problem—what we build onto the given, how we execute the given.

If I can't discuss creation (and I have just spent five minutes telling you I

couldn't), I think I can discuss my own discoveries, my own personal discoveries

about the process of execution—how I execute a spontaneously offered, an un

consciously arrived-at idea. It's the one thing that no one ever helped me do—in

relation to my writing, at least. The one writing teacher I ever had was one of the

most famous of all American writing teachers, William Blackburn, whom many of you knew. He never offered his students a word of help on this subject. I don't

think he knew the problem existed; he was not himself a writer. No other writer who ever encouraged me in my early years of writing—and I was encouraged by some very fine writers indeed, among them Eudora Welty and W. H. Auden, who

might have told me but didn't. The problem is, how you go on once you have

been given the given. What do you do with it? You jot it down glowingly on its

page in your notebook, and then you sort of begin to come unstuck. You have a

nervous breakdown waiting for the rest of it to arrive by the same process. It

won't. I'm sure that's why so many American lyric poets have had such dis

astrous and tragic lives within recent memory. I think the difficulty of trying to

live as a permanent lightning rod, a permanently waiting lightning rod, is ob

viously enormously destructive; we have a good deal of evidence to suggest that

this assertion is true. I've discovered for myself—and I've noticed now that I've

discovered it for myself—that every novelist in history discovered the same thing

independently because all biographers and novelists tell us the same thing.

They've discovered that the execution occurs in more or less the same way from

writer to writer. Scott Fitzgerald said rather late in his life in one of his letters, "I

VOLUME LVI, NUMBER 2, APRIL, 1979



208 Reynolds Price

often think that in every great novelist there is something of the peasant." He

didn't expound but I think I know what he meant. I know I know what he meant.

He meant that in a good novelist—he said great; I'll say good—in any serious

novelist, there is a day-laborer, a hod carrier, a hoe carrier, a hoe swinger. I execute the givens by going to work every morning as soon as I finish

breakfast and by sitting at my desk—nobody else's; my desk is magic for me,

although I can work almost anywhere. I mean I can work in O'Hare Airport— which is probably another triumph of the human will—but preferably I work at

my own desk with all my own little magic toys around me; and I sit there and fill

up lined legal pads, like Mr. Nixon writing his speeches, until I have written the

day's quota. The day's quota for me is twenty-seven lines on a legal pad.

Twenty-seven lines because twenty-seven lines add up to one typed page. I write with pen and ink, and I type it all up at the end of the week. I can't think about

my writing if I am listening to the noise of the typewriter, and I'm consoled by the fact that Shakespeare wasn't a very good typist either. I'm not allowed to go to bed that night until I have finished the twenty-seven-line quota for the day. And I do that six days a week until the novel or story is finished.

In the case of my most recent novel, The Surface of Earth, it took me almost

exactly three years working six days a week, to produce a manuscript of some 800

pages which was printed as a book of some 500 pages. The normal period of time in which I've written a novel has been about two years. I'm presently about a third of the way into a new novel, and I'm continuing at about that speed. If it seems slow, remember that there are 365 days in a year; you knock off 52 Sun

days, that's 313, and sometimes you take off a couple of weeks for vacation. You can produce about 300 pages a year, if you're lucky. But I find that luck isn't

terribly necessary, provided you execute your own duty, which is to get in there and do the work. Some of you have heard me quote a remark by a very good friend, who is a fine American novelist, when he made similar assertions about the primacy of the unconscious mind in the creation of fiction but the necessity also for routine in execution. He said, "The unconscious is like children and

dogs. It loves routine and hates surprises." I find that to be extremely true of my own creative faculties. If I will get the proper sleep, the proper nourishment, if I will remain in the proper physical training and physical health, if I will get out of bed and have my breakfast and go to my desk, the mind will have taken care of the day's work during the previous night.

That's as much as I can truthfully say about the creative process, and I am not

being mysterious, and I am not holding out on you. It's all I know. Whatever else there may be was given to me by powers and sources over which I don't have any conscious control.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW



the creative process: the novel

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