Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (14 page)

Still Writing

I still remember the way he described a “best day” spent on the New Hampshire farm he inherited from his grandparents:

“This morning, when I have worked over as much prose as I wish to, when I feel tired, it’s 10:00 a.m. I’ve been up five and a half hours, and over the last four hours I have done my day’s work. It’s 10:00 a.m and the rest of the day is gravy.”

Hall goes on to describe the rest of this ideal day’s activities

—this gravy—in great detail: he dictates the changes he’s made to his manuscript, gathers the tapes of letters he dictated while watching the previous night’s Red Sox game, and delivers it all to his (yes) typist. He shaves. Reads a friend’s manuscript. Proofreads an index. Now it’s time for lunch. He takes a nap with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and—he matter-of-factly lets us know—they have sex. Then he takes his dog for a long walk. Comes home, reads the day’s mail (letters from old friends and acquaintances, and requests and invitations, most of which he politely declines). Maybe he does an errand or two—nothing taxing, just the grocery store or filling up the car with gas–-and then he picks up the clean pages from his typist and it’s back to work for a few more hours. The day ends with dinner and another Red Sox game, during which he flosses his teeth and again dictates letters.

A stunning example of a writer who accepts and understands that his work is the only thing that will save him. His tone is the same throughout, focused—gently, quietly, but 139

Dani Shapiro

unshakably, it seems—on the task at hand. He is a writer who (at least on the best day) does not succumb to inner or outer pressure but, rather, knows that what he calls “absorbedness” is the answer—the only answer. Through all of life’s twists and turns—those fleas—he turns to work the way his grandparents turned to the soil, to the harvest, which waits for no one. He operates with a tempered sense of urgency. His daughter gives birth; his elderly mother falls ill; he is diagnosed with a tumor in his liver; his wife—we know, reading this book years after it was written—his wife will die tragically young, of ovarian cancer. Still, there is this day, and there is work to be done. This absorbedness does not come from a cold heart—no, quite the opposite. It is a hedge against mortality, against depression, against indignity, against misfortune, against paralyzing sorrow. It is not a magic pill but, rather, a stark fact. After his own cancer diagnosis, Hall writes: “If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work.
Get done
what you can.
” There is this—only this. It would be good to keep these words in mind when we wake up each morning.

Get done what you can
. And then, the rest is gravy.

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Still Writing

I once heard this story from a friend of Joyce Carol Oates.

The writer was sitting at the breakfast table at home in Prince-ton with her husband, Ray Smith. Ray was reading the paper when he happened upon a review of Joyce’s new novel. He asked if she wanted to see it.

“No,” she replied.

No?

“If it’s a good review it will ruin my writing day, and if it’s a bad review, it will ruin my writing day. Either way, I intend to have a writing day.”

I don’t know whether this story is true but I like it anyway.

The understanding that
excitement
—whether the happy kind or not—will make the work all but impossible. It gets a person revved up. And a revved up state is not useful. A writer in the midst of a piece of work might do well to think of herself as nineteenth-century neurasthenic: frail and easily startled, best off bundled in a blanket with a cup of tea, in a lawn chair, perhaps, gazing out from Magic Mountain.

I like excitement as much as the next person. Perhaps even more than the next person. But I get overstimulated easily, and 141

Dani Shapiro

I can feel my brain shorting out when I have too much going on. And it doesn’t take much: a good piece of news, a nice review, a longed-for assignment, a cool invitation, and suddenly I can’t think straight. The outside world glitters, it gleams like a shiny new toy. Squinting, having lost all sense of myself, I toddle with about as much consciousness as a two-year-old in the direction of that toy. Once I get a little bit of it, I am conditioned to want more, more, more. I lose all sight of whatever I had been doing before.

One of the strangest aspects of a writing life is what I think of as
going in and out of the cave.
When we are in the middle of a piece of work, the cave is the only place we belong. Yes, there are practical considerations. Eating, for instance. Or helping a child with homework. Or taking out the trash. Whatever.

But a writer in the midst of a story needs to find a way to keep her head there. She can’t just pop out of the cave, have some fun, go dancing, and then pop back in. The work demands our full attention, our deepest concentration, our best selves.

If we’re in the middle—in the boat we’re building—we cannot let ourselves be distracted by the bright and shiny. The bright and shiny is a mirage, an illusion. It is of no use to us.

If there is a time for that brightness, it is at the end: when the book is finished and the revisions have been turned in, when you’ve given everything inside of you and then some.

When the cave is empty. Every rock turned over. The walls 142

Still Writing

covered with hieroglyphics that only you understand—notes you’ve written to yourself in the darkness. But it’s possible that something interesting has happened while you’ve toiled amid the moths and millipedes. Once you’ve acclimated to cave life, stumbling toward the light may have lost some of its appeal.

What glitters looks shopworn. The sparkle and hum of life outside the cave feels somehow less real than what has taken place deep within its recesses. Savor it—this hermetic joy, this rich, unexpected peace. It’s hard-won, and so easy to lose. It contains within it the greatest contentment I have ever known.

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all morning, and took out a comma,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “In the afternoon, I put it back again.” Let’s face it: most of us are perfec-tionists. We spend our days searching for the perfect turn of phrase. And we consider this a good time. Who else would care so much about getting it right? Who else would need the silence, the uninterrupted stretches of time, the special mug, the favorite pen? We ponder each word, aim high, strive for both music and meaning. We know that one is nothing without the other. But we are not in control, and perhaps the 143

Dani Shapiro

silence, solitude, mug, and pen are our way of dealing with the fact that we are not masters of any universe—not even the universe of our own creation. Annie Dillard refers to this lack of control as a structural mystery: “Sometimes part of a book simply gets up and walks away. The writer cannot force it back in place. It wanders off to die.”

We can’t know when this is going to happen; when a book or a story is going to just up and change on us. If we are creating a living, genuine work of art—if we are approaching it with creativity and openness—this not only can, but
will
happen. The structural mystery Dillard writes about is a part of the process. So how do we make peace with the knowledge that every word, every sentence we write may very well hit the cutting room floor? Well, we don’t make peace with this knowledge. We willfully disregard it. We find the rhythm of our process—the dance between knowing and not knowing—

and we discover, along the way, how best to see the work clearly for what it is.

There are those writers who need to lay it all out, as fast as they possibly can, very possibly not in order, very often by hand, scribbling, scribbling, gaining as much access to their unconscious mind as they can by letting it loose on the page without self-editing. Some of my friends who work like this refer to it as vomiting. I’d prefer to find a more elegant term for it, but I’m not sure I can. Maybe I’m envious. This is not 144

Still Writing

the kind of writer I am. I’m guessing that the vomiters are also people who can wake up in the morning and leave home with their beds unmade and dishes piled in the sink. Me, I’m not built that way. I make my bed first thing. Pillows fluffed.

Hospital corners. And if I were to try to leave the house with a sinkful of dishes, I’d probably spend the day twitching. Which is to say, I am a compulsive, orderly person and my method of working reflects this. I inch forward, a sentence at a time.

I read a few paragraphs back, then move forward only when I’m satisfied. Of course, I may be satisfied with a mirage. I may find—months later—that I’ll have to scrap a whole passage, or chapter, or worse. But in the moment, I am making the prose shine, burnishing each word.

There are as many intricacies to the process as there are writers struggling to find their way. It’s a matter of discovering what works for you, and eliminating the
shoulds
. My husband will often leap forward and write a scene that he thinks will appear later in a screenplay, because it has come to him in that moment. I could never do this. I need to write linearly, even when the work itself is not linear. I put one foot in front of the other. He pole-vaults from beginning to middle to end and back again, assembling the pieces as they come.

He’s also able to work in the middle of the night. My brain shuts off when the sun goes down. I have never worked well at night, prefering the daylight hours when I feel comforted 145

Dani Shapiro

by the knowledge that other people are awake all around me.

The vomiters (okay, let’s call them scribblers) feel in control when they are blasting through a story, finding shape as they go. The leapfroggers, like my husband, feel in control when they follow their spontaneous instincts. And me—I polish as I go. This gives me the illusion of control even as I, in the same breath, relinquish it.

One of the great paradoxes of the writing life is that our words—chosen carefully, so thoughtfully, with deep focus and dedication—those words once on the page go dead on us.

Language is ours only when we are forming sentences, moving elements around, grappling with punctuation, speaking words aloud, feeling them on our lips. While we are shaping a scene into something we can hear and touch and see, that scene lives and breathes. We are inside language like painters, we are working in our medium: the tempera, the thin line, the wet oil on canvas, still in process, still alive.

But once we commit—once those words dry like paint, are affixed to the page—it becomes nearly impossible to see them.
This?
We think to ourselves. Our most loathsome 146

Still Writing

critic emerges with a swirl of her cape.
Really? What the hell
is this?
The sentences appear to have been written in another language—a dark dream language, tucked into some musty, inaccessible corner of our psyche. Attempting to discern its meaning is a bit like looking at our own face in the mirror. It is at once so familiar as to be invisible, and so intimate that we turn away, baffled, ashamed.

Can we ever see ourselves, really? Can we read ourselves?

It is a powerful conundrum because without the ability to see our writing afresh we cannot do the necessary work. How do we know whether a problem lies with the work, or with our inability to enter it? We need clarity, but not coldness.

Openness, but not attachment. We want optimism, but that optimism must go hand in hand with discernment. We’re not looking for a cheerleader, nor a fault-finding judge. We want to read ourselves with equanimity.

How can we do this? Over the years, I’ve tried everything in an attempt to teach myself how to approach my own work.

I’ve carried pages with me, and read them in unfamiliar settings, at odd hours, by candlelight, or at the beach, or on the subway, in an attempt to break my usual reading habits. I’ve changed the font on a manuscript: Garamond versus Times New Roman. I’ve poured myself a glass of wine at the end of a long writing day and sat quietly, pages and red pencil in hand.

And while all of these can sometimes be effective (that is, if 147

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one glass of wine doesn’t lead to another and another) my best, most secret weapon is this:
I pretend to be someone else
.

But that “someone else” can’t be just anybody. Just as in choosing other readers for your work, when you’re deciding who to pretend to be, it is important to choose with care. You’re looking for someone kind but honest. Smart. And inclined to be interested in the world you’re exploring. You would not, for instance, choose as a pretend-reader of your science fiction novel, someone who finds H. G. Wells insufferable and has never watched an episode of
Star Trek
. You need a pretend-reader whose criticism will be motivated by genuine interest, generosity of spirit, and literary acumen. Someone beneficent and wise.

If you’re doubtful about this method, think about what happens right after you’ve sent a story, an essay, a manuscript, out to someone for a read. Perhaps you’ve submitted it to a literary magazine, or sent a draft to your editor. Doesn’t it always happen that as soon as you’ve sent it, suddenly you notice something you want to change? You read your own work differently once you’ve shared it because you are—in that moment after you’ve hit the
send
button, or stuffed that envelope into the mail slot—rereading your work
as the person to whom
you’ve just sent it
. The circle around your work suddenly grows wider. But now that you have a little more room in which to read it clearly, you’ve sent it out. It’s too late.

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So instead, find a quiet spot. Sit for a few moments with your manuscript in front of you. Close your eyes and become this other person, the way an actor inhabits a role. Ready?

When you open your eyes the words in front of you will no longer be your own. They will be alive, mutable, and new.