Ask ten writers how they pursue this ancient and often bewildering craft of ours, and you’ll get ten different answers. I recall, for example, reading an interview with Lee Child where he said that eating any bite of food during his workday entirely stops his flow of words, and so he fasts every day at his desk, living on black coffee, until dinnertime. I myself once had a fan at a signing—a grown-up, sober-looking person—ask me if I write my books in a bathtub. I have, as an aside, written eight books, four for adults and four for children, and you are reading this essay because I have now added a ninth, a picture book about a fish. Which I suppose, in a roundabout way, brings us back to bathtubs.
“Sounds wet,” I said to this fan, at a loss. I am never witty at book signings.
“No no,” said the fan. “I didn’t mean a tub with water. Just a tub.”
I suppose, in retrospect, that a pleasantly dry bathtub, lined with cushions, is not the worst place to attempt to write a masterpiece, and certainly I am sure that there have been many writers, over the long, strange history of this profession, who wrote their texts in stranger places. I told my reader as much, probably incoherently, and signed their book.
Being a writer is a contradictory sort of job; not least because one must somehow combine the need for free-flowing creativity with such uncreative things as email, deadlines, contracts, word counts, marketability and on and on, a long list of ever-more-dismal nouns. I cannot speak to the techniques my colleagues have employed, to stay true to both the artistic side and the responsible, professional side of our profession, although I am sure a survey would be fascinating. It would include, I am sure, fasting and locked bathroom doors, right through to the people who only write in airports or hotels or in the back of Ubers—the latter of which is how Harlen Coben, in another interview, insisted he finished his latest crime thriller.
That is to say, every last one of us is making her job up as she goes
I sometimes wish I had a confounding writing habit, to astonish readers at signings, so that they don’t notice that I am tongue-tied and not witty. The closest I come is my insistence on drafting with a fountain pen (pilot custom 823) in emerald or amethyst ink that sparkles faintly (Jacques Herbin, a French brand) in a Clairefontaine notebook.
Actually, when I look at all that written down, it is a little odd to be doing it in the year 2024, although I am never going to beat Harlen Coben for brilliant eccentricity, racking up miles in his Ubers.
My pens and my notebooks, as a matter of fact, are the reason the world contains my small book about a fish; every morning, when I sit down at my desk (having eaten breakfast, if you’re wondering) I crack a notebook labeled Ideas (the current one is teal) and I spend half an hour brainstorming. No idea is too weird for this notebook; coherence is not required, no one but me will ever look into any of my idea notebooks.
One day, I scribbled a piece about a fish.
It was a bit different from the usual run of notions in idea notebook; it made a complete story, for one, which they don’t often do. It was also, very obviously, a story for small children, which I had never attempted before. I let it sit for a few weeks, and then, in a spirit of curiosity, I took the text and typed it into Word. For me, typing a handwritten text is quite momentous. It takes my words from private, safe, aesthetically pleasing in their sparkly ink, and above all allowed to be terrible because only I will ever read them, to something much more official looking. Something an agent, an editor, a stranger might read. Even my dad, eek.
But I decided to give it a try, so I typed and printed the fish story and let it sit some more. Texts, like steaks, have to rest.
Then I read it again. Said hm, and decided to chase down a test audience.
My test audience was a pair of my second cousins, four and six, and I bribed them with chocolate chips. It is possible the chocolate chips influenced their good opinion, but they gave it, and I decided that my fish book wanted to exist in the world outside of me.
Eventually it did. Does. I am so very lucky that it could.
Now, I am laughing as I write this because my fish story, The Strangest Fish is actually shorter than this essay. Writing, after all, is a very strange profession.
Katherine Arden is the NYT-bestselling author of the Winternight Trilogy
and the middle-grade series Small Spaces. She won the 2020 Vermont Golden Dome Book Award and was a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Series. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2011, where she obtained her degree in Russian and French.
Zahra Marwan is a children’s book author-illustrator and the 2022 recipient of the Dilys Evans Founder’s Award. Her first picture book, Where Butterflies Fill the Sky, was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2022 and a NYT Best Illustrated Children’s Book. Originally from Kuwait, Zahra now lives in New Mexico.