Deide, then follow the thread
“Once you make a choice, possibilities you haven’t yet imagined will reveal themselves.”
When D.H. Lawrence set off for Sardinia, his mind was already made up: he would write Sea and Sardinia.
He began the moment he arrived. No second-guessing, no circling around the question of whether Sardinia was the “right” subject. He simply wrote—what he saw, where he wandered, who he met. As Louise DeSalvo points out, there was no hesitation between decision and action. “It was never ‘Is writing a book about Sardinia the right thing to do?’ Instead, it was, ‘I’ll go to Sardinia and write about it.’”
This stunned DeSalvo. How much of her own energy had been wasted in indecision? She decided to practice deciding—and urged her students to do the same. “I’ve seen students waste precious writing time because they can’t decide to write about, say, their mother or their father; they want to wait until the subject seems right. I tell them, ‘Just choose. Once you make a choice, possibilities you haven’t yet imagined will reveal themselves.’”
Follow the thread
Elizabeth Gilbert was searching for a big idea for her next book.
She was waiting for inspiration to strike—goosebumps, butterflies, that unmistakable creative spark. But nothing came.
She asked herself, Is there anything you’re even a little bit interested in?
Well… maybe gardening. But only because she had just moved and was toying with the idea of planting a backyard garden—something that had never interested her before. “I didn’t desperately want a garden, understand. . . . I just thought a garden would be nice.”
The urge to plant a garden was small. “It barely had a pulse. But I didn’t ignore it. Instead, I followed that small clue of curiosity and I planted some things.”
Little by little, her curiosity grew. She traced the origin of her irises and learned they were native to Syria. Interesting. And she realized it wasn’t the gardening itself that pulled her in, but the stories behind the plants.
The more she followed this thread, the more doors opened. The right books appeared. The right people showed up. “For instance,” she writes, “the expert whose advice I needed to seek about the history of mosses lived—it turned out—only a few minutes from my grandfather’s house in rural upstate New York.” And tucked away in an old book she’d inherited from her great-grandfather was exactly what she needed: “a vivid historic character, worthy of embellishing into a novel.”
And just like that, a faint spark grew into a path she had to follow—one that carried her around the world.
“Three years of research and travel and investigation later, I finally sat down to begin writing The Signature of All Things—a novel about a fictional family of nineteenth-century botanical explorers.” It was a novel she never saw coming. “It had started with nearly nothing. I did not leap into that book with my hair on fire; I inched toward it, clue by clue. But by the time I looked up from my scavenger hunt and began to write, I was completely consumed with passion about nineteenth-century botanical exploration.”
Sometimes you just gotta start…
In When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead, Jerry Weintraub, Frank Sinatra’s manager, recalls how Frank would sink into deep lows and stay there.
One morning, Jerry got a call from Frank. He was down. He’d spent the night brooding on the roof, worn out by the grind. “The same thing, every day and night, going down to that same theater and singing the same songs to the same crowds, ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ ‘Chicago,’ I just don’t care.”
Jerry flew to Vegas that very day. When they met on the rooftop, Frank opened up—drink in one hand, cigarette in the other—saying maybe he just needed a rest.
“It’s not a rest you need,” Jerry said. “It’s a new hill to climb.”
Jerry understood Frank’s nature. He thrived when he had something to push against—an impossible task, a critic to silence. “You’re bored,” Jerry told him. “You need a challenge.”
“All right,” Frank replied. “What do you have in mind?”
Jerry told him he had a great idea—but he’d need a few days to work it out.
“No, no, what is it?” Frank pressed. “You’ve got to tell me.”
“Look, I really do have a great idea, but I need a few days.”
“Of course,” Jerry writes, “I did not have a great idea. I had no idea at all, but I knew that Frank needed a great idea less than he needed the prospect of a great idea, the promise of an event that would lift him out of his funk.”
Frank wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Tell me, Jerry. You’ve got to tell me.”
“So,” as Jerry tells it, “I started talking, improvising…
‘We’re going to do Madison Square Garden,’ I said.
‘Yeah, so what? We’ve done Madison Square Garden before. What’s so great about that?’
‘Now wait, Frank, hold on, let me tell you how we’re going to do it…’
I kicked my voice up a notch, going into full ringmaster mode.
‘…We’re going to do it live, Frank! Live!’
‘Yeah, so what? We’re live every night. That’s show business.’
‘Yes, but we’re never live like this,’ I said, ‘on every television in America and all across the world.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah…’
And now that I had gotten the thread I was gone.
‘And let’s do it in the center of the Garden,’ I told him, ‘on the floor, in a boxing ring.’
‘A boxing ring? What are you talking about?’
‘I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. You’re the heavyweight champion of the world, Frank. You hold every belt in the world of entertainment. The number-one singer in the world. No challengers, no one even close. So let’s do it in a ring, and make it like a heavyweight title fight, and invite all the people who go to heavyweight title fights, because they’re your fans. And let’s get Howard Cosell to be the announcer. Yeah, wow, I can hear it!’
‘Hear what, Jerry? What can you hear?’
‘I can hear Howard Cosell. He’s ringside, his hand over his ear, announcing it as you come down the aisle, climb through the ropes and into the ring: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, live from Madison Square Garden. Jerry Weintraub presents Sinatra, The Main Event.’
‘And here’s the best part,’ I told Frank. ‘No rehearsals.’
‘No rehearsals.’
‘No rehearsals. You just get there on the night of the show and sing your songs, and do your thing, as fresh and spontaneous as can be—like a heavyweight title fight. Frank Sinatra Live!’”
“The Main Event” became one of the era’s most iconic concerts—Sinatra, in a boxing ring, at the heart of his city, telling his life story in song. And it all started on the rooftop of Caesars—with Sinatra lost in a fog of despair, and Jerry “talking and talking.”
“Maybe this is an old Bronx thing,” Jerry reflects. “You just have to open your mouth and start talking. I can’t tell you how many jams I’ve gotten out of by talking, seeing where the words would take me. ‘What are we going to do about it? Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do about it…’ And I open my mouth and see what happens.” He made decisions and followed where they led.
