“Hmm.” Blair was full of questions, but she wasn’t sure an interrogation would help.
“You’ve never asked me about my process.”
“I know, but I’ve been dying to.”
“Why censor yourself? That doesn’t seem very you.”
“Are you trying to say I’m nosy?” she teased.
“I’m not not saying that.”
She cracked up. “I am nosy. But I will say for the record that the same qualities that make people call me nosy would likely bedeemed curiosity or imaginativeness in a man. I haven’t asked you about your process because I thought you would hate that question.”
“You would be right. I hate the question, and I hate the word itself.Process.It sounds like something an auditor would say, or an internet self-help quack.”
“But? You suddenly want to tell me about yourprocess?” She was teasing, but she sincerely hoped the answer was yes.
“I suddenly want to tell you about my process.” He paused. “Apparently.” Another pause. “Because then maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with it.”
A flare of excitement in Blair’s chest had her physically clapping her hands together.
“You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”
Blair’s first instinct was to make a joke about NDAs, but, sensing it wouldn’t land—though when had that ever stopped her with the historically very serious Jack?—she went instead with an earnest statement. “You can trust me.”
He looked at her for what felt like an age but was probably more like a few seconds before saying, “I know.” The staring continued for another few seconds before he started talking.
“When people talk about the writing process, they usually want to know either what how-to book they can use that will magically make them masters of prose, or they want to hear that I light a candle next to my computer and write for two hours, then go for a walk in the forest to recharge my spiritual battery.”
Blair snickered. She had missed getting regular doses of Jack’s wit.
“That’s not what I’m talking about. My process is: I see the book, and then I write the book. Well, I don’t see all the book. If I did, I wouldn’t have any problems.”
That was not what she’d expected. “What does that mean, you see the book?”
“I get a flash of an image I know belongs in the book.”
“I find this fascinating,” Blair said. “Where do you think those images come from?”
“There’s a question worth asking. I wish people would ask me questions like that.”
“What’s the answer?”
“Just because it’s a good question doesn’t mean I know how to answer it. I suppose from my imagination, but it feels like they arrive fully formed—the images, I mean, not the book, alas—from some other place.”
“The collective unconscious? Paging Carl Jung?”
He shrugged. “Possibly. To be honest, I don’t love the woo-woo-ness of it. But it’s an interesting thing to ponder.In Timestarted with the image of a family on the end of a pier with a Ferris wheel behind them.”
“Oh!” Blair knew this image!
“I get an image, and then the work is to figure out what’s going on in it. And what led up to it. And what happens after it.” He paused. “I’m making it sound easier than it is. It’s not a clear image I can see straight on. It’s a flash, almost akin to a mirage. If I look at it too closely, it shimmers away.”
“It reminds me of Emily of New Moon.”
“Who?”
“Emily of New Moon. A series by L. M. Montgomery that is inexplicably less popular than Anne of Green Gables. Emily is a writer, and she has these supernatural episodes she calls the flash. She describes it as a curtain being lifted between two worlds.”
