A few miles from my home lies a 175-acre garden cemetery full of hills and glens, groves and clearings, fountains and ponds and winding footpaths. The layout is such that no matter how often I go walking there, the place remains capable of bewildering me. Suddenly I’ll come around a curve to experience the pleasure of finding myself somewhere other than where I’d expected.
Occasionally I’m able to slip my bearings altogether and for whole seconds turn in place before recalling in which direction the entrance lies. How fatly the birds trill then, how sharp the air tastes. In these moments before reorienting myself, the world reveals itself as giddily, lavishly alive.
Can anything compare to the wonder of being lost? * Some years ago I sat in the back of a packed lecture hall where a well-known novelist read from her latest work. Responding to an audience question about how she constructed her plots, she revealed that she never wrote so much as a single word of a book until she’d mapped its complete outline. , I thought.
. I’ve never been one for making outlines. It’s not that I’m resistant—well, scratch that: I am, I’m highly resistant.
But I have tried, despite my resistance, to determine from the outset the course a book should take. I just seem incapable of working that way. * There’s an exercise I do with creative writing students.
I call it Paper Bag. Everyone gets a brown paper lunch sack with an object inside. The idea is to reach in (no peeking) and.
