A teacher hovered over me, a frown on her face as her eyes scanned the doodles decorating my paper. My hand drifted to hide them to focus her attention on my notes.
D. K. Wall:But it was too late. She chastised me. I needed to focus and not let my mind wander aimlessly.
D. K. Wall:Fortunately, I ignored her advice. I am a lifelong doodler and proud of it. The evidence stretches back decades. My high school textbooks were returned each June with margins full of spaceships.
D. K. Wall:Church programs came home from Sunday service decorated with something that may have been a horse or maybe a dog, a cat, or even a chicken. Every legal pad in this office has a spiral inked into a corner, drawn while my mind floated a thousand feet overhead.
D. K. Wall:I have never once known what I was drawing before I started. Half the time, I don't know after I've finished. I am no artist. I can't draw.
D. K. Wall:My house looks like a second grader scrawled it with crayons, complete with crooked windows and smoke curling out of a leaning chimney. Animals resemble failed balloon art. My faces would make Picasso feel like a realist.
D. K. Wall:I have described before how the genesis of my stories always involves a pad of paper and a black wing pencil. But that implies those early drafts are words.
D. K. Wall:Sometimes, but not necessarily. Often, they are those doodles, barely recognizable to anyone else, but an early attempt at shaping the clay of an idea.
D. K. Wall:To explain, allow me to take you on a little journey down the twisty mind of a writer and the weird places stories come from.
D. K. Wall:Some begin with a character. Some build from a situation. Some, believe it or not, start at the end.
D. K. Wall:And some, like my novella, The Hitman, rise as a place. In fact, the whole first chapter is setting. Doodles made it come to life.
D. K. Wall:This may sound like a shameless plug. I confess I am partial to the occasional meal, so I won't refuse if you choose to buy a copy.
D. K. Wall:But you don't have to. The opening chapters are free on my website as they are for all my books, and the opening chapter is all I'm going to talk about.
D. K. Wall:Fair warning before I start. Describing a process always makes it sound tidier than it is. There was no method or destination when I started that tale. There was a pencil, a legal pad, and a man letting his mind wander.
D. K. Wall:As the old joke begins, a man walks into a bar. Not much of an opening, but it tickled my imagination. Enough to make me wonder what that bar was like.
D. K. Wall:Dingy for sure. The reek of stale cigarettes ground in the floorboards over decades. A dying neon Budweiser sign buzzing in the window. Once the door slams shut, that sign is the loudest thing in a room quieter than most libraries.
D. K. Wall:A fan behind the bar drifting side to side, moving the fetid air in the slightest breeze. Boots peeling off a sticky floor, a stool teetering until a couple of beer coasters shim it flat.
D. K. Wall:Now maybe you like my description. Maybe you don't. Either answer is fair. My point is how I imagined it barstool by barstool right down to the disgusted grimace of the barkeep when my protagonist walked in.
D. K. Wall:Not with a keyboard and words appearing on a glowing screen, but on sheets of paper. The opening took its first wretched breath as a doodle, just like back when that teacher scowled at me,
D. K. Wall:Which I suspect is the whole trick. A sentence can be wrong. Put down the bar was dingy, and some editor in the back of my skull immediately wants to know whether dingy is the right word, whether the sentence ought to be shorter, whether it ought to exist at all.
D. K. Wall:A rectangle can't be wrong. It's just a rectangle. Nobody grades it. The part of my brain that argues about word choice has nothing to debate, so it slinks off to pick a fight with some hoodlums in an alley. The room quietly assembles itself while that critic is gone.
D. K. Wall:I sketched a narrow bar. Step off the litter strewn sidewalk through a heavy door. A single table sits beside a dirty window. Booths line one wall. The bar stretches down the other. Walk past the dartboard to enter the bathrooms in the back.
D. K. Wall:Along the edge of that sketch were phrases, descriptions. A few made it to the draft. Others had lines through them. One was totally blacked out. I guess I really didn't like it.
D. K. Wall:One that survived said simply quieter than a library. Four words in the margin of a drawing of a room.
D. K. Wall:It took me three more tries to work out that the buzzing sign in the window had to be the loudest thing in the place and one more to realize that was the whole bar in a single sentence.
D. K. Wall:But it started as a scribble beside a rectangle I had labeled as a window because my panes of glass haven't improved since the second grade.
D. K. Wall:Then I turned the page and sketched out the patrons. The teary man crying in his beer, the heap of clothes sleeping near the back, the construction worker scrolling their phones and murmuring in Spanish, Pat, bartender and owner, displeased with his latest customer.
D. K. Wall:And, of course, Bruiser, the hitman himself, plopping his big frame down on a wobbly barstool and ordering a beer.
D. K. Wall:I still didn't have a story, only characters in a place, a framework wanting to come alive, the monster lying on doctor Frankenstein's laboratory table.
D. K. Wall:A simple note at the bottom of the character page got that ball rolling. Not night, early afternoon, Monday. Five words framed by five penciled circles, the nugget I needed to shift the tail into gear.
D. K. Wall:The third page. A series of questions at the top. Why was a hitman in this bar on a Monday afternoon? Had he finished a job?
D. K. Wall:Was he looking for one? The answer came to me. Words scratched midway down the page. He's waiting for a client to step through the front door. With that, the rest came in a rush.
D. K. Wall:The next several pages fleshed out the framework. Mostly, it was a series of questions. Why would someone hire a hitman? What kind of person would he be? How would the conversation go? How did Bruiser end up in this career?
D. K. Wall:It's a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces must be crafted, not dumped from a box. A few don't fit and get discarded. Others are missing, leaving a hole to fill. Only when I had the pieces did I turn to the computer and type.
D. K. Wall:So does that help you understand why I write first drafts, even pre first drafts by hand? I doubt it, because it's not even really clear to me.
D. K. Wall:But like this very musing. It always starts with that blank page and a pencil. Blackwing never Ticonderoga.
D. K. Wall:No tabs. No notifications. No cursor blinking at me like it has somewhere better to be. Just a man drawing a bad chimney and asking himself why a hitman would sit in a bar on a Monday afternoon.
D. K. Wall:So, dear teacher, I was paying attention, just not to what I was supposed to.