Make a plan to love me sometime soon

To in some ways extend and in other ways ignore the topic of my last post, I'd like to once again point out that however deeply immersed I am in the world of English literature, I myself will likely not contribute to its ever-growing body of creative work. In fact, I don't even know how one would go about writing, say, a sci-fi genre novel, much less some avant-garde work that interrogates the assumption that "people are knowable". Much of the joy and amazement I get from reading actually derives from this sense of mystery, this gaping lack of insight into the creative process. I visualize it to myself in the form of a canyon: I see me with the rest of the human race standing on one ledge--normal people with normal intelligence with whatever limited creative abilities we are endowed. On the other ledge are the books, all the works of English language fiction, with their magical abilities to communicate and to touch and to make alive with phrases and plots and characters which in their aptness and utter perfection seem as though they couldn't have been crafted by mortal hands. I stare across the void and wonder, in short, how do authors do it? How is it possible for people, presumably not terribly different from myself, to create something so unimaginably great when it seems such an impossibility for me to do the same?

Oddly enough, only recently has the actual writing process actually come up in my classes in any real form. Still rocking from the wake of New Criticism, I imagine, teaches and professors tend to bypass the lives of authors in favor of a more untainted study of their works. But this semester, I've gotten a few specific glimpses into my canyon:

- The Romantic poets tended to rely on opiate-induced stupors for inspiration. Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed "Kubla Kahn" in a hallucinogenic cloud, a direct result of taking so much opium that (according to my professor) if he was a first-time user it would have killed him several dozen times over.
- As was symptomatic of the 1800s, Tolstoy published Anna Karenina in a long series of installments in a local publication. Though he had a general (or perhaps a specific) conception of the plot from the beginning, Tolstoy definitely wrote as he went along, publishing earlier installments while the last installments were still only brain children. Critics know this, among other reasons, because Tolstoy ended Anna Karenina with allusions to the Balkan War, which at the time of the first installments hadn't occurred yet.
- Virginia Woolf labored over her novels terribly, writing and rewriting drafts in this or that style, working on a latter section and then a beginning one with the overall concept in mind, but with little concern for writing it in the order in which the actual plot unfolds. After her books were published, she still anguished and wondered about alterations she could or should have made.

This both does and does not lend much insight into the creative writing process, and frankly I'm a little relieved. Obviously writing would not be a unanimously standard process, or else everyone would be an author, but even these few instances of literary greatness defy generalization. Tolstoy chose to work linearly, writing from beginning to end and publishing as he goes, a process which presumably would have driven Woolf to an even earlier death. And while it seems like mind-altering substances are a little more popular among poets than prose-writers, at the very least we can glean that someone willing to write about whatever hallucinogenic images pass before his eyes probably doesn't have the same motivational processes as a moralistic writer like Tolstoy.

Basically, in my lack of creative writing abilities I am compensatory imbued with a sense of wonder for fiction. My total lack of comprehension about how manuscripts get to be manuscripts allows me to read, analyze, criticize, and fall in love with works themselves without getting distracted by trying to figure out the semantics in that area. Knowing me, if I were a writer I'd split my attention when reading, trying to visualize the author at work (which is what I do when I look at drawings), and to figure out the technique. I feel like my time is somewhat better spent in my ignorance, with my full attention on what is to me a finished product of manifest destiny.

On a side note, in an essay Woolf expressed that she hated what "the cinema" was doing to literature, and was completely offended by the fact that filmmakers presumed themselves either worthy or capable of bringing the full-bodied and nuanced titans of literature to the screen.
...Who wants to watch The Hours with me?