Dana the Spy

“The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people." -Graham Greene, English novelist

I'm a writer; I'm a spy. I listen in on conversations, even those I'm not a part of, and I write down the things that you've said. I watch as you tap your wedding ring on the dining table, run your finger around the rim of your wineglass, ogle the woman with Sarah Jessica Parker hair sitting across the room. Everything you do, everything you say, every gesture you make--I capture them all. Thanks for the inspiration.

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I wrote the paragraph above during one of my morning writing sessions a couple of months ago, and I often think about it. I love the idea of being a spy. As a child, two of my favorite books were Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. Harriet knew everything, and I wanted to be her. I would lurk around corners, hide in closets, listen to conversations with my ear to the wall... And I would write down what I heard and saw: tidbits of information, flashes of dialogue, descriptions of the colorful personalities I came across each day. These real-life details helped me in my early attempts at writing; they brought life to my stories.

As I grew older, I continued to spy on people, although I was no longer a lurker. Instead I spied out in the open, usually at restaurants or while waiting in lines. When I first moved to New York a few years ago, my then-boyfriend and I went out to dinner, and I think he was a little annoyed with me because I continually shushed him so that I could hear (and write down) the conversations around me. I remember remarking that our waiter looked just like my main character's best friend, and then I took out my purse-size notebook so I could record all the details.

I still spy today.

I love being a writer, and I think to be a writer, you do need to spy. You need to pay attention to the people and places around you and use what you learn to help make your characters real: three-dimensional rather than flat and one-dimensional. The details count, and what better place to find them than in "real" life?

What I'm trying not to do

When I plan a story, I tend to get bogged down in the details. I panic if I don't know things like the names and ages of all the characters, their hair and eye colors, their backgrounds, their jobs, the kinds of cars they drive, where they live, whether they like Chinese food or Italian, if they favor their right or left hands... You get the picture. Often, by the time I've sorted out the details and sat down to write the story, I discover that I'm frustrated or bored or no longer interested in pursuing the idea. I've set aside quite a few projects because I'd allowed myself to get so wrapped up in the small things that I completely lost my desire to write the story; my inner perfectionist had taken all the fun out of the process, egged on by my inner critic and my inner procrastinator, both of whom tend to work hand in hand to keep me from writing.

Now, details are important, there's no doubt about that, but I don't feel they're as important in a first draft--despite what my nefarious inner mob would have me believe. So with my current project, my plan is not to plan. I mentioned in a previous post that I have the beginning of my story, know what happens through much of the middle, and have an idea where I want it to end. That's it--and that's considerably less than what I usually have at this point in the process. I'm not even entirely sure right now what my main character's name will be. I have an idea of course, and also a vague notion of what she'll look like, but I've decided not to let myself stress about having every little detail set in stone before I begin writing. I'm not even going to outline this time, which is something I normally do. This project will be an experiment in which I attempt to free my mind and write organically, to just let the story spill out as it wants to rather than force it into being what it's not. It's the first draft, and first drafts can always be fixed; telling the story is the most important part at this stage in the process. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

What's your writing process? How do you handle the details?