Carson McCullers on the writing process

Here's Carson McCullers on how she writes:

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

I understand only particles. I understand the characters, but the novel itself is not in focus. The focus comes at random moments which no one can understand, least of all the author. For me, they usually follow great effort. To me, these illuminations are the grace of labor. All of my work has happened this way. It is at once the hazard and the beauty that a writer has to depend on such illuminations. After months of confusion and labor, when the idea has flowered, the collusion is Divine. It always comes from the subconscious and cannot be controlled.

That is a fine description of the creative process. There are some writers who are determined to have theme, plot, character, development all resolved before they even write the first word. I don't understand how to write like that. It's like people who plan their holidays in advance, day by day, hour by hour, so that every single moment of the vacation is spent in predictability. Some people do that, I know. I couldn't ever do it. And, in the same way, I wouldn't want to write a story if I knew even before it started how it was going to end.

Sylvia Plath and Carson McCullers

I think I'm right in saying that Sylvia Plath is on record as being a great admirer of Carson McCullers. Wikipedia notes, in its article on McCullers's The Member of the Wedding:

The poet Sylvia Plath was known to admire McCullers' work, and the unusual phrase "silver and exact", used by McCullers to describe a set of train tracks in the novel, is the first line of Plath's poem "Mirror".

I think the opening of Plath's novel The Bell Jar also offers a deliberate echo of The Member of the Wedding. This is The Bell Jar:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions.

And this is The Member of the Wedding:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.

In both novels, the fact it is summer is a bold, declaratory statement. Both Esther and Frankie are depicted as outsiders: Esther doesn't know what she's doing in New York, while Frankie is an unjoined person belonging to no group. Esther describes herself, pejoratively, as stupid; Frankie is afraid: negative emotions are attached to each of them.

Moreover, Plath's use of "queer" in the opening line mirrors McCullers's use of the word on the first page of The Member of the Wedding, when Frankie's first words in the novel are: "It is so very queer... The way it all just happened."

It seems to me that Esther, created in 1963, is a deliberate echo of Frankie, written in 1946. At the very least, these remarkable young women would surely have found some affinity. If only one could have known the other.