There's an interesting interview with novelist Michael Ondaatje ("The English Patient") in an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail. His way of working is very different from some of the others I've mentioned on this blog. He's said he begins a book with a single image. For "The English Patient" it was a plane crash. The interviewer asked what it was for his newest novel, "Divisadero." His reply:
"We were in California, I was teaching a semester at Stanford. A friend who has a farm said I could work there. I heard a story about a wild horse that attacked someone in a barn. I wrote that scene very quickly, with no plan of knowing where the book was going to go."
The interviewer noted that writing this way this is a major leap of faith. Ondaatji replied:
"It is scary. There are writers who plan everything beforehand and know what the last sentence is going to be. I'm so envious of them [laughs]. Even five days before the end, I'm not quite sure if this thing is going to click together. It's why one has to do this in the privacy of one's own home. The story begins very small and I see what's there. I was interested in the idea of a family that splinters — people who grow up in a very tight universe, and then something happens and they go out over the whole world. You grow up with people till the age of 15 or 20, and then you go off and live such different lives. How are you connected any more? So that allowed me a very open form. Then I crawl down that road."
Not surprisingly, this method of working requires a lot of rewriting and takes several years.