“My working methods, I suspect, are too peculiar and old-fashioned to be instructive. Nevertheless, I don’t make outlines. I don’t do drafts—or not intentionally—not as such. I just obey the emotional impulse, always emotional, toward a novel or an essay and start writing (on a legal pad, then typing on an old Hermes 3000) with the expectation that diligence and fear will see me through to the discovery and prosecution of my duty. And with the result that I will find myself, more often in the process than I’d like, completely baffled, sort of gazing over the cliff with no idea how I arrived or where to go. For which there’s nothing but some quiet time in the evening and a bottle of triple stout. A glass of wine is too complacent and polite. It can’t go frothy, like the ocean or the weather, and return you to the earth the way a good strong stout will do. Then in the morning, should I find the path I’ve taken back to truth seems maybe a little too elaborate or contrived, there is a test. A universal test for narrative or expository truth—or, more precisely, for its absence. All you do is read aloud the passage in question in the voice of Rod Serling introducing an episode of The Twilight Zone. Practice. It’s not hard. And if it fits, if it sounds right like that, you’re screwed. Back up the cliff. Another day. Another bottle.”
—David Searcy, author of Shame and Wonder (Random House, 2016)