Private Excitements of the Mind

A book has its origins in the private excitements of the writer’s mind. The excitements are private because they’re in communicable unless they’re rendered, given extension, and resolved as a book. - E.L. Doctrow

After writing his powerful, political novel, The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctrow was having a hard time getting back to writing. One day, as he sat in his study staring at the wall, he decided to write about the wall. Hee was living at the time in a Victorian house with an interesting history so he wrote about the wall and then about the room, and then about the whole house itself. He wrote about the street that the house sat on and began thinking about the people who had built the house and what their lives had been like and what was going on in their town and in their county and in their state when those people were living in his house with the wall in front of him. He let his mind expand and wrote and wrote and wrote. When he finished writing he had written Ragtime, his most acclaimed novel to date. All because he was staring at a wall.

I love that story and I understand it. Almost all the stories in the book I am now awaiting from the press, My Last Romance and other passions began that way. I was coming out of the New Bedford Whaling Museum one rainy day when the door of the Seaman’s Haven across the street opened and a tall, tough-looking older man with salt and pepper curly hair and a navy peacoat came out of the door. He winked at me and clicked his tongue like naughty men do as he passed me and, in that second, “The Haven” was born.

I was having sangria on the veranda of the Hotel Galvez in Galveston with my friends one steamy summer afternoon. A blues band was playing Stardust and I saw a couple a few tables away - older but very well-groomed and attractive the way people in the Forties and Fifties always were. He took her hand and kissed her fingers and “My Last Romance” began.

I was wandering through a cemetery outside of Lafayette, Louisiana and stopped to read a headstone. I’ve forgotten the names but it was a husband and wife, side by side. Their dates of birth were very close, only a couple years apart, but their dates of death stunned me. He died at the age of 25. She died at the age of 83. She lived sixty years without him before returning to his side. I began writing “Asa”.

Writers have a gift — the gift of turning those little mysteries that happen in life, those little private excitements of the mind, into something fully alive and fascinating — at least to the writer! As a romantic girl I was tantalized by a tavern near the waterfront in Erie, Pennsylvania near the pier where my uncle sometimes took me for ice cream. I liked the picture of the mermaid on the sign that hung out into the street. I never forgot that mermaid and all the intriguing mystery of the tavern she represented. At this time I have written close to 130,000 words in the novel that grew out of that. What an exciting “excitement”.

I guess other people have the same experiences but, if they don’t write about them, I wonder what they do. Maybe they paint or just daydream. Or maybe they shrug their shoulders and forget about it. That’s the difference with writers — we don’t seem able to just forget the things that excite our minds.

Last night I was driving home from having a late dinner with Jane. It was a warm, beautiful night and I had the top down. While waiting at a light, a guy pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and asked a question. He was a heart throb, that one. Big and muscular and bearded with a killer smile — and young enough to be my son. We chatted a minute and then the light changed. I said, “Enjoy the evening.” He grinned and winked at me. I think there’s a story in that.

Thanks for reading.