Writerland, Chapter 34: Yes, You May Go Down that Rabbit Hole. Carefully.
Writers love rabbit holes even though we are not supposed to. Rabbit holes are perilous places where writers are known to vanish. It just seems to happen, like a tattoo that appears on your arm the morning after a night you cannot recall.
The journey down a rabbit hole begins with a reasonable question. Pursuing that question, however, may lead not to an answer but instead to another question and then another, each more alluring and intriguing. You think: This is fun! I am discovering questions I had never even thought to ask!
But that is also the moment when rabbit holes can begin to take on the power of a starter drug, a dangerous first step in chasing the reportorial dragon. When editors and people who love you hear you say you cannot write until you answer a particular question they might well stage an intervention in the hope of pulling you back to the keyboard lest you become so hopelessly obsessed that your extended procrastination risks ending in a block so extreme that law school begins to look attractive.
Even the verb most associated with rabbit holes sounds like a warning label: Going down a rabbit hole. Nothing good comes from such a descent, right? After all, look what happened to the victim of the greatest, albeit fictional rabbit hole journey ever made: Alice, of Wonderland.
But I am here to tell you that rabbit holes can be a good and exciting—a worthwhile—trip to take. You discover things you didn’t even know you were looking for, and those discoveries can make your stories better, fueling them with a sense of excitement and urgency. You just have to know when it’s time to come home.
I confess that I have always liked going down rabbit holes. One of my few happy memories of high school is of Saturday afternoons sitting in front of giant microfilm machines in the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library scrolling through old newspapers, ostensibly looking for articles that might help support a long-forgotten term paper. As I turned the crank I’d notice something else on the page, an ad or a small story unrelated to what I was supposed to be researching. And off I’d go, looking to see what other gems this newspaper held. I got very few “A”s on term papers.
Now, however, I get to do this for a living and believe that this is essential to my doing my work. When I am reporting I feel like a detective in a noir novel—think, The Big Sleep—who is hired to solve a case only to discover that that case is not what the crime is about. Which leads to the detective stepping into the darkness, the noir, where the story takes on what feels like a life of its own.
Temperament dictates the nature of rabbit holes; after all, they exist only because we will them into being. I used to think that rabbit holes entrapped only reporters like me, who were not disposed to proceed in a straight line. But then my friend and colleague Sam Freedman, who is relentless in following the reporting path he established from the outset, told me about his rabbit hole.
He was finishing a book and wanted to confirm that an anecdote told by one of his main characters happened as he recalled it. The story concerned a speech by Ronad Reagan at a G.E. plant in upstate New York, given years before he was elected president. The speech changed the subject’s life and Sam needed to know that it happened when and where his subject remembered. So he started calling everyone he could think of for confirmation. Sounded right, they said, but they couldn’t be sure. Sam could not let this one go.
“I was utterly, completely obsessed with confirming it,” he told me. “My last, best tactic was to take Amtrak up to Schenectady and go to the public library to read the bound volumes of G.E.'s house organ. Surely if Reagan had spoken there, the employee newspaper would have reported it. Once again, I went through the entire decade of the 1970s: nothing. It was a very long Amtrak back to Manhattan.”
“To this day,” he added, his character still believes his memory of that speech is correct. “And I just shrug my shoulders and tell him, ‘Maybe.’"
I’ve been doing a lot of rabbit hole spelunking lately as I research a book that takes me back a hundred years, to worlds that no longer exist but that I am determined to recreate. The work is as thrilling as it is dangerous in that it leads, time and again, to rabbit holes that seem to go on forever. For instance, one of the main characters in my story, my grandfather, came to America as a sixteen-year-old orphan—at least I believe he was an orphan; still trying to determine if his mother was alive when he left his village—and made a great success of himself as what was known as a “butter and egg” man. But I didn’t know how he came to be a butter and egg man. How did he find his first job as an entry level “candler?” How did he know where to start looking? And while I’m at it, how did the butter and egg trade, which once occupied entire city blocks in Lower Manhattan, come to be dominated by Eastern European Jewish immigrants?
That last one vexed me. I researched like mad but came up empty. Surely, I told myself, the answer was out there, and it was on me to find it. Weeks passed. And while I was in the same apartment as my wife, I was in a sense absent, having disappeared down the rabbit hole of 1912 New York. She saw it. So did my brother, to whom I mentioned my fixation about the butter and eggs trade in passing thinking that he and my wife would both say, dig on.
But that is not what they said. They said: stop. You have got to stop and start writing. If you are going to find an answer it will not be today or tomorrow or even next month.
I listened. And was grateful for their insistence because it took no time at all to see they were right. I had somehow convinced myself that no progress could be made until I had my answer. I started to write again. I still don’t have my answer. Maybe, in time, I will. But in the months since I have discovered many new questions. I am surrounded by rabbit holes. I am proceeding with a mix of delight and caution.
Rabbit holes are a trick of the mind. And short of having wise and caring people lower a rope to pull you out, it is important to remember that you can stop yourself, even if it means playing yet another game to short circuit the one that got you into this mess, that felt so thrilling but which has now become quite frightening.
Another writer friend, the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, told me that much as she loves rabbit holes — she is perhaps the most curious person I know — she recognizes that the obsessiveness that compels someone to start digging a rabbit hole has at times gotten the better of her, like the time, as she put it, “in a period of romantic failure” when she started collecting orchids and succulent plants. One purchase led to another and another and when it finally came time to move from California to Chicago she had to mail 200 orchids and 400 succulents.
Her rabbit hole-like obsession ended when she relocated. The plants died. And she met someone whom she married. But what of the rabbit holes that cannot be escaped by packing up and moving east?
“What in my life isn’t a rabbit hole?” she wrote. “I had the horrified thought, staring at my book outline recently, that I’d gotten obsessed by one of the weirder and more exotic experiences people have (hearing a voice when alone), learned everything I possibly could about it, decided I knew far too much to know anything and anyway no one will ever care.
“One way I manage those pre-writing rabbit holes: I pull out all the papers and books written by other people that I have collected, and I put them in piles. I look at all the titles, and I pat each one. Really. Then I put them back on the shelves.”
Stories get shared in all kinds of ways, and the most effective is also the oldest: word of mouth. Someone you know tells you there is a story, or book, you have to read and often that is enough. There are so many terrific stories out in the world that somehow pass us by, and we thought it was well past time to begin sharing them with one another. Meaning, the subscribers to this newsletter.
So, an invitation: If there is a story you’ve discovered and loved and want to pass the word, drop us a line at delacortereview@gmail.com with a link to the story, a one or two sentence description, and a quick word about who you are and why you loved it. We’ll start adding them to this newsletter. Think of it as the Writerland Reading Circle.
We’ll start things off. One of the best stories we’ve seen in a very long time is now out in the Atlantic — What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind — by the wonderful Jennifer Senior. It’s the story of one family, and what happened to each of them in the twenty years since a death on 9/11.