Fan Mail (and Art) (and Oysters)

Before I begin, I should distinguish between fan mail and fan art: my first fan art was this excellent paper sculpture of Ear-with-Legs, shown here with the sculptor himself, a gentleman named Lincoln H. who lives in Chapel Hill—

But over the Christmas break I received my first fan letter! Griffin W., a fifth grader at The Williams School in Auburndale, MA, wrote to let me know he enjoyed reading Knight. No, really! Here’s photographic proof—

Griffin also had some questions for me, including one that I’ve heard other authors grumble about: “where do your ideas come from?” I’m not sure why that question dismays some writers—at a guess, I think maybe they feel it implies that they receive their ideas through the mail, as if they’d ordered them from the Spiegel catalogue. But I think the question stems, like all good, honest questions, from simple ignorance. I have no idea how a lawyer could possibly walk into a courtroom with any confidence. I have even less of an idea of how a car salesman could possibly convince someone to part with several thousand dollars, no matter the quality of the car they sold. And I could see myself asking, “where do you get your confidence?” or “where do you get your arguments?” and getting an eye-roll in return—because they can’t imagine how anyone could not know the answer, and so assume that I’m putting them on.

In short, I don’t think anyone with a natural inclination toward something can be entirely aware of how un-natural their inclination can seem to other people. And if there’s anything that distinguishes writers of fiction from those who have pursued other lines of work, it’s that we’re willing to risk more—more time, more ink cartridges, more mental energy, more cups of coffee (or tea)—on an idea for a story. We get our ideas from the same places everyone else does. It’s just that for some reason we’re more willing to stick with an idea and really check out its potential before we throw it on the scrap heap.

Reading helps with this, of course. One bit of wisdom I live by comes from Saul Bellow, who said, “A writer is a reader moved to emulation.” Writers do tend to read a lot, and I think for that reason, when an idea comes out of left field, we’re more likely to say: “Really? A laborer and a marine mammal teaming up to swindle lunch out of some unsuspecting passers-by? Not bad. Not bad at all. In fact, I’ve seen someone make that work.”

Anyway, here’s what I told Griffin:

You ask how I get my ideas. The only thing I can say is that I get them from the same places that everyone else gets their ideas—from everything I know, from everything I’ve seen and done, from everything I’ve read and learned. As far as I can tell, our brains are like a great big pot of alphabet soup: we dump in a bunch of random bits and pieces and let them cook together, and then as we take things out, spoonful by spoonful, we usually get total nonsense. But sometimes we’ll end up with letters in our spoon that make some sort of sense, a word here and there. And if we pay attention and start stringing words together, and follow where they lead, we eventually discover that there was this big fully-formed idea in the pot that we would never have seen if we hadn’t kept looking for it.

Feel free to write and let me know what you think.