Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (11 page)

Narrative slop.
Why wasn’t I the research scientist who had invented the drug that was stalling our son’s seizures? Now
that
was important. What if he had decided to become a poet instead? What then?

But writing was how my husband and I both made our liv-ings, and we had a mortgage and doctors’ bills. I
had
to write.

I had no choice. I continued to stare at the wall until—it took the better part of a year—a story started to form at the center of the most shaken place inside of me. As my boy began to heal, I began to write a novel about maternal anxiety. What else was there? I was a big, quivering heap of maternal anxiety.

I wondered if I would ever find any other subject interesting, ever again. Love and the terrifying, concomitant potential of loss, were, for a long time, my only subject. I had been forever altered by our brush with catastrophe. It was written on my body. My instrument had changed. And I now understood that it would continue to change. That there would be more befores and afters ahead. Fighting it was futile, impossible. Accepting, even embracing this, was the true work, not only of being a writer, but of being alive.

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We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, or a memoir or we may be nearing the finish line on a piece that has taken us years. But wherever we are in our work, we have never been exactly here, today. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need. The solitude of an empty home, a walk through the woods, a bath, or half an hour with a good book—the echo of well-formed sentences in our ears. Whatever it takes to begin again.

When I was first learning to meditate, this idea of beginning again was revelatory. It still is. The meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg speaks of catching the mind scampering off, like the little monkey that it is, into the past, the future, anywhere but here, and suggests that the real skill in meditation is simply noticing that the mind has wandered. So liberating, this idea that we can start over at any time, a thousand times a day if need be. I see many parallels between the practices of meditation and writing but none are more powerful than this. Writing is hard. We resist, we procrastinate, we veer off 109

Dani Shapiro

course. But we have this tool, this ability to begin again. Every sentence is new. Every paragraph, every chapter, every book is a country we’ve never been to before. We’re clearing brush. We don’t know what’s on the other side of that tree. We are visitors in a foreign land. And so we take a step. Up the stairs after the morning coffee. Back to the desk after the doorbell has rung.

Return to the manuscript.

It never gets easier. It
shouldn’t
get easier. Word after word, sentence after sentence, we build our writing lives. We hope not to repeat ourselves. We hope to evolve as interpreters and witnesses of the world around us. We feel our way through darkness, pause, consider, breathe in, breathe out, begin again.

And again, and again.

I’m upstairs working when I hear a strange thumping sound coming from below, and I can’t resist investigating. Any excuse to get up and stretch. I follow the sound to my dining room and catch sight of a blur of red slamming itself against the window. A cardinal is hurling itself at its own reflection in the glass. Does it think it’s fighting another bird? Or mating?

The poor thing keeps at it.
Slam.
Then back to the tree branch.

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It must be dazed but it doesn’t learn its lesson.
Slam
. Wings fluttering. Black eyes, black beak highlighted against the red.

Slam.
I want to help it but know I can’t.

Things we do repeatedly are evidence of our own nature.

These might be physical gestures: twirling hair, drumming fingers, biting nails. We might pour ourselves a glass of wine at six o’clock every evening. We might talk to ourselves or sing in the shower without even knowing it. We might have actual tics: a throbbing muscle under one eye, a shoulder that lifts involuntarily. When it comes to the writing life, we have these impulses, too. And—unlike our friend the cardinal—we can learn something about ourselves and our process if we pay close attention.

When I finished my novel
Black & White,
it had been through multiple drafts and close reads, but it wasn’t until the book was in production that I received a note from a copy editor. “Do you realize,” she wrote, “that the word
muffled
appears eleven times in this manuscript?”
Muffled
. The copy editor referenced the pages on which the offending word appeared. Sounds were muffled. Feelings were muffled. How had I not noticed? Muffled is not a word I use regularly in conversation. What had happened? How had I not caught this, in read after read?

The more I thought about it, the more I understood. And fortunately I still had time to do some small but important 111

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revisions—which didn’t have to do simply with removing the
muffled
s, but rather, with realizing that each time I unconsciously repeated the word, I was not close enough to the interior life of my main character. She had been her mother’s muse as a child—posing nude for a series of provocative photographs—an experience that continued to haunt and define her life as an adult. If you had asked me, while I was writing
Black & White,
if there were any direct autobiographi-cal components to it, I would have told you no. But in fact I had been a child model myself. As a three-year-old, I was the Kodak poster child at Christmas, displayed on billboards all over America. And though the experience wasn’t nearly as traumatic as the one I gave my main character, it was strange and confusing to be the Orthodox Jewish Christmas poster child. Those feelings were buried for me.
Muffled
. Those places in my manuscript—that unconscious repetition—were signals that I needed to dig a little deeper. What was being muffled?

What was beneath that overused word?

Our tics are a road map to our most hidden and sensitive wounds. My husband has pointed out to me that when I describe my parents’ car accident or Jacob’s illness, I tend to fall back on the exact same language.
My father was killed, my
mother had eighty broken bones. Rare seizure disorder; seven out
of a million babies; only 15 percent survive.
I do this—and I would wager we all do—because I don’t want to go back there.

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I don’t want to revisit the pain, and so I go on automatic pilot.

Eighty broken bones. Fifteen percent.
I prefer to skim the surface, hit the main points, and move on, thank you very much.

But if we
are
interested in delving deeply, if we are students of the observed life, we’d best take a good hard look at these easy fallbacks. Repeated words. Familiar phrases. Consider them clues. When you discover them, slow down. In fact, stop. Become willing to press against the bruise—it’s there anyway—

and see what it yields.

I recently had a long phone conversation with a writer working on a first novel. This writer, a former journalist and television producer, had reached a low point. She was intensely frustrated by her lack of progress. I could hear it in her voice. She sounded strained, confused, almost angry at her book, as if it were a truculent child. Why wouldn’t it behave? Structure was her problem, she told me. She had characters she loved and felt she knew well. She was halfway through the manuscript, and had outlined the rest of it, but now she found herself stuck.

At the word
outline,
I began to see a red flag waving. I had a feeling that I knew the problem. It is common among writers 113

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who have been journalists, reporters, editors, business owners, attorneys, or pretty much any career that rewards concise and ordered thinking. It stands to reason, of course, that we ought to know where we’re going before we set out—doesn’t it? The outline serves as a literary form of a GPS. We wouldn’t get into our car and head to an unfamiliar destination without plugging the address into our GPS, would we? We are comforted by that electronic voice—mine is a British woman who always sounds slightly miffed—telling us that our destination is ahead on the right.

Except that when it comes to creative writing—by which I mean the kind of work that the artist Anne Truitt describes as “the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity”—

outlines are not necessarily helpful. We need Doctorow’s fog.

If we know too much about where we’re going, the work will suffer along the way. It will convulse and die before our eyes.

We’ll end up dragging along a corpse until finally, exhausted, we just give up.

Outlines offer us an illusion that we are in control, that we know where we’re going. And while this may be comforting, it is also antithetical to the process of making work that lives and breathes. If we are painting by numbers, how can we give birth to something new? Jorie Graham also describes Mark Strand’s poems on canvas in this way: “The columns swerve, 114

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making these abstract paintings, as in: what makes the shape move is the mind making mistakes, or taking change on, or trying out variations until the right one appears and stills the mind.”

The mind making mistakes
. This is what makes the shape move. Such a magnificent idea, and one to hold onto, that the mistakes themselves are what make the work alive. Structure may emerge in the middle, even may announce itself once we’re in over our heads, in the thick of it, having relinquished control. Then,
then,
the architecture begins to whisper to us.

We may have thought we were building a Gothic cathedral, only to find that the shape is an adobe. We may realize that our beginning is not the beginning at all, and that where we are, on page one hundred and sixty-five, is actually the starting point. We may realize that a minor character has taken over.

That the book needs a prologue set fifty years before the story begins. It isn’t always pleasant, when the true structure reveals itself, because it often means a lot more work. You may need to shore up the foundation, or perhaps you’ll have to build an entire new one.

My husband has a recurring fantasy in which he’s a brick-layer. He finds something immensely satisfying in the idea of laying one brick at a time, not moving forward until that brick is cemented in place. He returns to this fantasy because it’s the opposite of the writing process, which he likens to building a 115

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skyscraper in a swamp. You don’t know—you
can’t
know—

whether the bricks you’ve layed on top will be supported by the bricks at the bottom. There’s only one way to find out, and that is to build the thing, regardless.

“Maybe I should just throw my outline out the window,”

the fledgling novelist half-joked. I leapt. “Yes!” I nearly shouted into the phone, probably scaring her half to death. But then what, she wondered. Working with no signposts, no game plan is so frightening, such an anathema to most of us.

“Do you feel connected to your main characters?” I asked.

Yes, she told me. These characters were her whole reason for wanting to write the book. She was deeply invested in them and felt she had to tell their story.

I gave her, then, one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, from Aristotle’s
Poetics
: “Action is not plot,” wrote Aristotle,

“but merely the result of pathos.”

This is not just advice about writing, but about life itself, the whole megillah, the human catastrophe. If you have people, you will have pathos. We are incited by our feelings—by the love, rage, envy, sorrow, joy, longing, fear, passion—that lead us to action. Plot is really just a fancy word for whatever happens, and structure is a fancy word for how it happens.

Plot can be as intricate as a whodunit, or as simple as a character experiencing a small but significant shift in perspective.

But invariably it comes from the people we create on the page.

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If you are creating something real, structure will reveal itself to you eventually. Look—there’s the vista. You lay the bricks. Moments connect. History and heritage ripple through the present. A voice emerges like a strain of music.

And then—through the fog—a shape. It may not be what you expected. It may not even be what you hoped for. But it will be yours.

Agnes de Mille, who revolutionized musical theater by cho-reographing the dream ballet sequence in the 1943 Broadway hit,
Oklahoma!,
confessed to her lifelong friend Martha Graham that she found the success of
Oklahoma!
strange and dis-heartening. She preferred her earlier dances, which had largely been ignored. She didn’t think the ballet sequence was her best work by a long shot—only “fairly good.” She went on to tell Graham that she had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that she could be.

Later, Graham sent this letter to de Mille: There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through 117

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any other medium and be lost. The world will not hear it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even need to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.