On Concentrated Effort and Divine Inspiration in the Creative Process

I've just finished Andre Dubus' The Habit of Writing and Joyce Carol Oates' Reading as a Writer, and have noticed that there is a huge distinction between their creative processes that may lead young and even aged writers down a path of apathy and failure if they don't receive some proper guidance.

Andre Dubus is clearly pushing the Divine Inspiration method of writing, or what might be more accurately referred to as the Spaghetti method. This process involves writing without thinking, he says, with extra emphasis on the not thinking component. Don't bother placing genuine meaning or effort in the story, just write.

You might be asking yourself, what are the chances I can create a truly moving or meaningful piece of art by simply 'winging it'? Close to zilch; but remember, I said close to. Perhaps you're familiar with the ancient proverb about a thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years. The same holds true for a single human being. Let him punch away at the keys for a lifetime and he'll create the great American novel, maybe. This seems to be the point of The Habit of Writing. You just write, anything and everything, until it looks like a story. Then you start all over again. Keep repeating until you finally achieve something of at least the lowest publishing quality. Congratulations, you have your first story, stamped "Inspired by God", because where else could the story come from if you didn't concentrate any effort in its creation?

The Divine Inspiration method is also known as the Spaghetti method in some circles due to its similarity to the process of cooking spaghetti. For those unfamiliar, cooking spaghetti usually involves two steps. The first is simple: Add pasta to boiling water. The second step is trickier. Remove pasta from boiling water. Not difficult in itself with a proper strainer, the real challenge is knowing when to remove the pasta. How can you tell if its been thoroughly cooked? Here's the advice any master chef will give you. Throw one of the spaghetti noodles at the wall. If it falls, the pasta needs more time. If it sticks, then you know the noodle has been divinely inspired to stick and is ready for consumption.

Andre Dubus is a proponent of the Spaghetti method of writing. Just keep throwing stories at the wall and wait for one to stick.

I don't mean to be overly critical of this method, I'm sure many writers use it and have had a fair amount of success with it, but if you're thinking about attempting this method for the first time, you might want to consider some famous writers who were popular users. Here's a list:




























Andre Dubus




















Right now you're either wondering who Andre Dubus is, or you're wondering why there's only one name on this list. Its because Dubus doesn't cite any other writers who use his method in his essay other than himself. He does briefly cite a piece by Hemingway, along with Joseph Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus as examples, but upon reading, you'll find neither one has anything to do with his process of writing.

Contrast this with Joyce Carol Oates' Reading as a Writer, which suggests that writing is a process that begins with intense study and thought, the complete opposite of Dubus' theory. In her essay, she suggests that our own writing is not merely the influence of the works we've read, but the result of our study into the works we've read. She has plenty of evidence to support her ideas as well, citing the diaries of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath, just a few of the writers who were so meticulous and consumed with improving their own writing ability that they not only kept strict record of their ideas for their work, but they actually copied word for word the works of other famous writers in an attempt to learn their style.

Everyone has probably heard someone ask the question before, do writers really mean to put so many ideas and so much depth into their work? The answer is YES, they absolutely do. At least the big names do, the ones with an impressive publishing record, not the spaghetti writers who found their story that stuck. Just a glance at their notes will confirm what every writer suspects, that writing is a labored, intellectual process.

Even the title of Oates' essay, Reading as a Writer, suggests study and concentration in the creative process. Compare this to Dubus' The Habit of Writing, a title that makes it sound like the author has a problem that will require a twelve-step program to solve.

For anyone still on the fence about the Divine Inspiration versus Personal Inspiration debate, let me leave you with a list of writers Oates cites as masters of "consciously wrought prose". Remember, the difference between writers and non-writers is the knowledge that "despite romantic notions of divine inspiration, no story writes itself".

Emily Dickenson
Franz Kafka
Jack Kerouac
Herman Melville
D.H. Lawrence
Robert Frost
Thomas Hardy
Flannery O'Connor
Ernest Hemingway
William Faulkner
James Joyce
Gustave Flaubert
Joseph Conrad
Mark Twain
Sherwood Anderson
Virginia Woolf
Anton Chekhov
Richard Wright
Ralph Ellison
Eudora Welty
Henry James
Sarah Orne Jewett
Sylvia Plath
John Updike
John Gardner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Raymond Carver
T.S. Eliot
Joanna Scott
Paul West
Cynthia Ozick
Maxine Kumin
Maureen Howard
Bradford Morrow
Robert Creely
and many others not specifically referenced in her essay...