About Creativity

Welcome to the second half of this two-part interview with writer Daniel Handler. If you haven’t already read Part One, be sure to check it out to hear about making the switch from poetry to prose and why Handler loves it when things are going badly.

The plot for A Series of Unfortunate Events is incredibly rich. How did you approach plotting the series and how much of the plot was worked out before the first book was published?

Some of it was planned. And then more and more of it was planned the more I wrote. I’m a big outliner and note-taker, so I had a bunch of things [worked out in advance], but I also left myself room to improvise. I didn’t want A Series of Unfortunate Events to feel like a coloring book that I had to fill in for the next few years.

So I would think, “Well, the twelfth book is going to take place in a hotel, and it’s going to have this kind of revelation and this kind of action,” and then I would say, “Okay, that’s enough that you know. That’s five books ahead or four books ahead.” Every so often I would make a note of something specific that I wanted to put there. But I tried to discipline myself to be undisciplined. I wanted to get there and feel like there were all these vistas to explore, and not that it was a specific path that I’d already assigned myself.

Reading the last book in the series, which deals in part with the trade-offs between security and personal freedom, I wondered if what’s been going on in the real world was informing that?

Well, I would think it would have to…. But then also, while I was writing the books I went from my late twenties to my mid-thirties, and I got married and had a kid. And I think all that also makes you think of the world in different terms, and it’s impossible to separate that from what’s happening in the world…. You have a baby, and then you have this delicate creature and you spend at least the first year of their life sort of brainstorming about things in your home and things around town that can harm this child, even if you’re not a particularly paranoid parent, which I don’t think I am. And that’s most certainly going to color any work you do, no matter what work is….

It wasn’t as if I was shrieking about it, but I would just often think, “OK there’s a vase there, and we’re in the house of an uptight person, and that vase definitely can’t break, so what is the strategy there?” And certainly, I didn’t think that when I was twenty-two and I walked into the room. I basically thought, “Where’s the gin?”

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Photo credit: Meredith Heuer 2006.

Do you remember the first thing that you wrote that you felt, “Well, that’s something”?

By the time I was in college, I was writing a lot of poetry that was being published in tiny journals and was winning little student prizes and things like that. And I think that was probably the first time that I began to think of myself as a writer who was producing work that was of merit, at least for the age that I was.

I actually visited my high school literary magazine yesterday — I grew up in San Francisco. And they had found some of my old poetry on file and given it to me. And it was pretty interesting to read. It was lousy of course. But I felt like it still had some respectability to it.

It was two poems that I had written shortly after I had started having sex, and so they’re both about love and sex. And so of course they’re mortifying. But they have an air of detachment, I guess, and one of them rhymes. And it’s interesting to me that I was already trying to find an acceptable format for perhaps embarrassing ideas.

Do you still write poetry?

I still do sometimes. I don’t do anything with it. When I was in college, my poems started getting longer and longer and more and more narrative. And I have a very clear memory of talking to a poetry professor of mine who finally said to me very gently that there was actually a tradition of long, non-line-based narrative poetry called “prose” [laughter]. And it was like he just took me across the hallway or something [and said] “There is this thing you can do in which you don’t have to worry that your sentences are long and that you seem to be telling a story.”

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Photo credit: Terry Lorant Photography.

There are a lot of writers in a collateral branch of my family — John Gregory Dunne is a cousin of mine, and his brother Dominick Dunne. And my father was Irish, and of course there’s a tradition there. And I put out a neighborhood newspaper when I was nine. In high school I worked for the literary magazine and the annual and the newspaper, writing for all of them. And I was sort of the all-purpose go-to guy for captions and intros and all of that stuff that needs doing and nobody else wanted to do. And I loved doing it. I still love doing it.

Here’s a story: When I got to the Chronicle, I was nineteen and I was working on a section that no longer exists called “This World,” which was sort of a news round-up section…. The first day I was there, I was given assignments, and the idea was, you’d turn it in and they’d give you another. And I did six stories. And an old hand came over and told me to slow down, that I was making the rest of them look bad, and that I should know that my quota was around three. So I took it to heart. I didn’t want to piss anybody off. So I did the three.

When you moved into column writing, was that a relatively easy transition?

Well, there was a whole period in between where I was a magazine editor. I wrote only occasionally, and once again [it was] captions, headlines, an editor’s note, things like that. And I was always looking for a chance to write. It’s just that in 1970 there was money in magazine editing and not a lot of money in freelance writing, and I couldn’t get a staff job on a magazine; there weren’t many staff jobs on magazines.

Then when I got back to the Chronicle and was asked if I could provide samples for a column, it seemed to me like I had a million ideas and there was just stuff all over happening, none of which I’d been able to write about. So that was pretty easy. There’s an A. J. Liebling quote that “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” And that’s sort of the way I feel about myself.

And it’s entirely a gift; it’s nothing that I trained for or worked for or planned for. I’ve tried to nurture it and husband it when it became obvious that that might be a good idea. But it’s just something that I know how to do, and it’s the only thing I know how to do at the level that I’m doing it. So it’s a good thing that I got a job doing it.

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Are there any habits or tactics that you use to help feed your creativity?

I’m a poet, I guess, because the tempo of a poem fits into my life. If I had a different kind of discipline, I’m sure I would write infinitely long novels. Poems ride along on the tip of your eyelash and can come and go in a blink. It’s important that you be there when they want to happen. And the way to be there is to give yourself time to percolate; you can read, you can walk, you can sit there and dream.

The other part is to be ready when they are. Which is to say, a notebook and a writing implement are your passport. I love writing in darkened theaters and at art museums. But it’s also important to have [these tools] beside your bed so no dream gets lost.

What do you do when you’re feeling creatively dry?

I read. There are a few marvelous exercises I love. I studied with Kenneth Koch at Columbia, so I’m in love with imitations — writing imitations of the greats who came before you. Finding out your own tastes as a poet, creating your own lineage is part of the job.

The thing to remember about a poem is that it is not made of emotions. It’s not made of wisdom. It’s not made of your most secret interior life being vomited out on a page. It’s made out of words. So start with words — what word is working for you right now? And put that down.

If you need a word, I also suggest going to the bookshelf and saying, well whose word do I need? I find myself often needing a John Ashbery word, so I just go to Ashbery, and I open him up, and I find a word in there that’s going to work. All poets’ vocabularies are distinct, so what kind of word do you need? If you need a Wanda Coleman word, you’re going to go to Wanda. Translating experience into words, all you need to do is open your eyes to the silence like John Cage did, and the poem’s right in front of you.

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