Blood from a Stone

here’s a saying that goes, “You can’t get blood from a stone.” People say it with the same grim conviction with which they say, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” But inasmuch as money is printed on paper, and paper is made from trees and other plant fibers, money does grow on trees. So that saying is not true, and neither is “You can’t get blood from a stone.” You can. You might call it magic, but I call it art.

Art is the transformation of everyday experience into something wonderful, new, insightful; something that fires the imagination and delights the heart. Art is the process by which inanimate matter begins pulsing with life. You have probably seen Michelangelo’s sculptures, and so you know what I mean. I was in Florence quite recently, and I assure you, Michelangelo’s sculptures are alive. You have heard the monotonous chromatic scale turned into breathless beauty by George Gershwin. An accomplished writer can take the dry and dusty contents of a dictionary, rearrange them, and produce epic poetry.

I’m not going to tell you it’s easy, because it isn’t. But it isn’t actually magic. It is a popular belief that art is the product of sheer inspiration. This is a belief held by many young readers, who imagine writers with some kind of cell-phone connection straight to the whispering lips of the Muse. This fantasy is also supported by writers who, for lack of a better way to describe the creative process, say things like, “Gosh, my characters just start talking and I never know what they’re going to say.” I honestly don’t believe in this fantasy. It doesn’t happen that way with me, and I really don’t think it happens with other writers. I don’t see myself as a conduit for stories that are floating around in the vaporous dreamworld; I’m not channeling the thoughts of make-believe people. My imagination is a powerful organ and has done some far-out things, but I’m not psychotic. When I write a thing, I write it with deliberation. There’s a lot of machinery at work when a writer is composing paragraphs, and it is — or should be, in my opinion — the workings of a conscious mind.

Art doesn’t just happen. I don’t think that twenty chimpanzees typing for twenty years would write Hamlet. I don’t think an elephant slopping around with a loaded paintbrush is producing anything but a curiosity. Art is a conscious, deliberate product that uses the same materials we all use every day: tones, words, ideas, shapes, movements. My dictionary defines art as the conscious manipulation of these things in order to achieve an effect of beauty. What sets the artist apart from the rest is not less consciousness — abandonment of the consciousness to a wayward or capricious inspiration. What sets the artist apart is more consciousness, more deliberation, more decision-making about how to employ those materials.

For me, the materials are words. Even when I was a kid, I thought words were more fun to play with than Play-Doh or fingerpaints, and that is why I am a writer and not a sculptor or a painter. I spend a lot of time thinking about words. Looking up words. Saying them out loud. Arranging them with other words to see how they fit. I like word games. I like formally constructed poetry. Here’s a poem I wrote about getting blood from a stone:

For a metaphor of art, also here called blood, begin with stone:
sedimentary, igneous or metamorphic, a store
of mineral trash and grit such as a stork
might collect, standing lock-kneed on the stark
shoreline, arranging, forming a stack
of pebbles one upon another until it tumbles, falls slack;
it won’t give up, but tries again. The mandibles of its long beak clack
as it roots and dibbles in the mud for the right piece, ignoring the clock
of the sun that ticks toward the evening and draws the cloak
of damp dark over the day. The bird sounds a dry croak.
Why does it persist, why does it ignore the baby birds there in the crook
of a log back in the tall grass, back where the brook
noses its way through reeds to find the bigger water. The brood
waits, ogle-eyed, watching the artist on the shore try again to draw blood.

This poem is constructed around a word ladder. The last word of each line is a rung in a ladder, which changes one letter at a time until the initial word has been transformed step by step into the final word: stone, store, stork, stark, stack, slack, clack, clock, cloak, croak, crook, brook, brood, blood.

Now you may or may not think this is a good poem or an interesting one, but no matter what you think of it, I assure you, it didn’t spring full-fledged from my imagination and run through the nerves and muscles of my arms to make my fingers move on the keyboard. It took four hours of laborious puzzling on a long car ride for me to complete that word ladder (I do these things in my head as I drive, which takes more time) and then a considerable time longer to see what sort of poetry these words might inhabit. Now you might be tempted to say, “Hey, no fair! It’s a trick, a gimmick!” But it’s not, really. It’s a thing you can do with words that generates ideas. It’s a cunning little machine I can crank to see what words and images come out. Maybe the results of my cranking will take me somewhere, maybe not. But I do turn the handle on this machine in my brain. And I do it constantly.

For me, all writing happens this way. I don’t mean that I normally compose my work around word ladders to show off how clever I am, but with all my books, what you see is the end product of an enormous amount of planning and calculation. I do not just start writing and see what happens. I always know, in broad strokes, what is going to happen. Before I begin writing anything, I begin kneading my materials, the way a potter kneads clay to condition it before sculpting. I ask myself what my book is about, what ideas will be in it, what images I will use to reinforce those ideas, what metaphors, what kind of language, what tone, what voice, what characters, and why. I make lists of words that may be important. I write outlines, the way a sculptor makes the armature for a clay model. I move things around, trying them this way and that for balance or for contrast. Only when I have made extensive preparations do I begin to write.

At that point, and only at that point, does this thing we call inspiration come into play. Inspiration is another way to describe the intuitive part of the creative process. Within the armature I have modeled, and using the materials I have assembled, my intuition, my heart, puts the words onto the frame. Simply letting intuition run amok at the start with no frame to work in would create formless chaos. But by calculating the effect I want to achieve, by having a vision of the end and a plan for getting there, I get blood from a stone.

Let me give you some examples from my work to make this less abstract. One of my novels is Black-Eyed Susan, about a sod-busting family on the prairie. The book is composed of three statements: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The first statement is about the lonesomeness and isolation of the wide-open prairie; the second statement, the antithesis, is about the charms and dangers of society as represented by the town; and the third statement, the synthesis, is about bringing the two together, introducing the possibility of a society out on the prairie. This is the result of calculation and deliberate construction, not chance or let’s-see-what-happens.

Furthermore, within each of these statements are images to reinforce ideas and characters. The black-eyed Susan is an image that repeats through the book, in the girl Susie herself, in her vision of their farm as a golden field with a black center where the house is, in a bright yellow canary with bold black eyes. When an Icelandic family arrives on the scene, I found ways to reinforce their heritage as Viking mariners and to emphasize how like the ocean the prairie seems. I probably have, somewhere in my files for this book, the lists I wrote of the scenes and images I wanted to incorporate into each section. Additionally, I had set myself the technical challenge of writing a book that takes place in twenty-four hours — from one sunrise to the next. This required considerable planning and deliberation.

Likewise, for my Civil War novel, The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan, I wrote pages and pages of notes about metaphors and images. I read Irish poetry and made sure I understood its rhythms and cadences. This is a novel about destruction, about breaking, so I listed words that are associated with the word break: you can break the ice, you can break the silence, you can break your promise, you can break horses. These are all in the book. I didn’t always know where or when they would appear, but that’s the intuitive part. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get a horse into this book, which takes place largely in an inner-city saloon, but sure enough, at just the right moment, an unbroken horse burst onto the scene and was shot dead in front of Mairhe as a portent of her wild brother’s fate. The inspiration to place the horse there at just that moment was only possible because I had already decided to have a horse, which could stand in for the absent Mike Mehan, and that it would have to be broken as a portent.

In the sequel to this book, Mary Mehan Awake, there are five sections, each about one of the five senses. I can hardly overstate the amount of calculation that went into this: lists of things associated with sight, with hearing, ways to play off words such as wave or stroke or bouquet or mirror.

Calculation is a word many people associate with insincerity. But I use the term here to suggest the kind of scrupulous preparation that paves the way for truly intuitive writing. Of all my books, I am proudest of these two, and they are the most calculated, the most intricately planned and designed. I think they also have in them the best writing I’ve done. In my vainer moments, I do consider myself an artist. I do consciously and deliberately strive to arrange my materials in a way to achieve beauty. If you look at stories when they’re naked, they aren’t much to look at: someone did something, then someone else did something else, and then it all turned out well, or badly, in the end. What makes art out of a story is the series of deliberate choices of language, image, and tone that cause an effect we call beauty.

Blood from a stone. That’s why I do this work. If I feel that I’ve drawn blood from a stone, I feel that I have accomplished something really worthwhile.

Jennifer Armstrong is the author of many novels, picture books, and nonfiction books for children and young adults. Her book Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book for nonfiction; her newest book is Spirit of the Endurance. She lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Jennifer Armstrong is the author of many novels, picture books, and nonfiction books for children and young adults. Her book Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book for nonfiction; her newest book is Spirit of the Endurance. She lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.