Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (6 page)

There would be meetings, conference calls, expectations, a day shaped for me, rather than by me.

We writers shape our own days. We sit at our desks in our pajamas. We putter around empty houses, watering plants, making stews in the slow cooker, staring out the window, and we call it “working.” We close our doors when our husbands or wives or kids are downstairs watching TV.
Shhh! I’m working!
And at the same time, often we don’t have anything to show for it. We have no guarantee that what we’re doing will amount to anything resembling art.

Every day, when I wake up, when my bare feet hit the cold wood of my bedroom floor and I begin the process—

scrambling the eggs, pouring the juice, packing the sand-wiches, locating sneakers, yelling “bye, drive carefully” as my husband and son head off—I try to remember that to sit down and write is a gift. That if I do not seize this day, it will be lost.

I think of writers I admire who are no longer living. I’m aware that the simple fact of
being here
creates a kind of responsibility, even a moral one, to get to work.

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Dani Shapiro

Who do we write for? Our friends, enemies, ex-lovers? Our families? The vast reading public? Ourselves? I find that the more people are in my head when I write, the less I am able to accomplish. It can get very busy in there. It can start to feel like a crowded subway during rush hour, no one meeting each other’s eyes, just waiting for the doors to open. So I try to heed the advice of Kurt Vonnegut, who once said that he wrote for an audience of one.

This audience of one doesn’t have to be a person you know.

She doesn’t even need to be alive and on the planet. Vonnegut wrote for his sister, who had died years earlier. It’s not about sharing the work, but about creating a connection. The wire that stretches from writer to reader is singular. The writer creates in solitude, and the reader reads in solitude. Each is unknown to the other but, nonetheless, an intimate relationship is forged. We don’t stop in the middle of
Madame Bovary
and think of all the other readers throughout history who have fallen under its spell, any more than we stop in the midst of lovemaking to think of the lovers who have come before us.

Our absorption in a great book demands that we think only of 54

Still Writing

ourselves and of the author to whom we are, at that moment, bound. We flip to the back inside flap and, if there is a photograph of the author, we examine it for clues. Are his eyes sad?

Why is she looking away? What’s behind that half-smile? And we imagine—whether consciously or not—that the author has been writing directly to us.

I write to one specific reader at a time. My audience of one, over the years, has changed. In the beginning, it was my dead father. I longed to reach out to him, through time and space, to have him know the woman I was becoming. Then, sometimes, it was my mother. Each sentence I wrote felt like a plea.

Please understand me.
Later, it became my husband—it still is.

And now, my audience of one is also my son, in the hopes that someday, he will find his mother in the pages of her books.

Behind the closed door to her office, my mother typed. Most nights, I fell asleep to the thunderous clacking of the keys on her Smith Corona, the high, thin
ding
of the carriage as she pushed the return lever at the end of each line. In her office—which shared a wall with my bedroom—she sat behind a big wooden desk piled with papers and boxes. She 55

Dani Shapiro

made carbon copies of everything she wrote. Not an inch of the surface of the desk was ever visible. If I close my eyes now, I can hear her. She was a very fast typist, with long, strong fingers. The steady rhythm—
tikatikatikatikatika,
ding! tikatikatikatikatika, ding!—
was my childhood lullaby.

In the sound of those keys, I heard frustration, anger, longing, determination, regret.

My mother was always starting things she didn’t finish.

Some of her ideas had nothing to do with writing, notably a line of jewelry for which she manufactured a prototype of a twenty-four-karat gold tennis ball pendant, with a sapphire in its center, the motto being
keep your eye on the ball!
But her greatest efforts went into writing projects. One was a children’s book called
Yes, Mary Ann, the World is Round,
a story about a girl whose dolls spring to life and tell her all about the countries they come from, for which my mother hired a famous children’s photographer and used me as a model. I still have the manuscript for this book, the photographs encased in plastic sleeves; me as a five-year-old in a yellow flannel Lanz nightgown, holding my dolls.

My mother attempted most genres: children’s books, poems, essays, journalism, and writing for TV, big screen, and stage. She wrote spec scripts for
The Partridge Family
and
Hawaii Five-O
and sent them in manila envelopes to the offices of the Hollywood producers whose names were listed 56

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in the shows’ credits. She didn’t know that submitting scripts in this manner was about as effective as making them into paper airplanes and flying them out the window. She had a strange, strained combination of cluelessness and desire. She flitted from project to project, never seeing anything through to the end.

I was highly attuned to my mother. I felt and sensed her moods the way an animal can feel thunder and lightning miles away. She was my first lesson in character and point of view.

I watched her carefully. I always,
always
knew what she was thinking. The way she behaved and what she felt were often at odds. She might, for example, be dancing around the kitchen, singing
tra-la-la-la
in her wobbly soprano and conducting with a wooden spoon, but she was staving off some sort of darkness—a rejection, an insult, a slight.

Her most impassioned work was epistolary, and her Smith Corona was her weapon: she wrote letters to the mayor, the rabbi, the president of the United States. The letters were full of emphasis, as made clear by whole paragraphs in capitals, rows of exclamation points, sentences underlined in red pen or yellow highlighter, or sometimes both. My mother was filled with what seemed to be a bottomless ire. She was fueled by self-righteous indignation, which was only made worse when the mayor, the rabbi, and the president of the United States didn’t personally write back.

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Tikatikatikatikatika, ding! Tikatikatikatikatika, ding!
A girl falls asleep each night to the song of a typewriter. A girl—once again I become a character in my own childhood—feels the unhappiness simmering beneath her mother’s determination.

The girl tries hard to please her mother. (Many years later, as a grown woman, one of her aunts will turn to her and say: “Do you want to make your mother happy? Do you really, really want to make your mother happy?” Oh, yes. Yes, she did.

“Well, then move in with her,” the aunt said.) And back then, the girl believed that her very survival depended on being good, and pretty, and accommodating, and all the things her mother wanted her to be. She had no way of knowing that it was a losing battle. That no matter what she did, she herself would some day be identified as the cause of her mother’s mis-ery. Eventually, she would be the recipient of long letters—

carbon copies—covered with red ink and yellow highlighter and rows of exclamation points.

“How dare you?” Once I was a grown woman—a writer, a teacher of writing—this came to be one of my mother’s favorite rants. “How dare you?” As I sit on my chaise longue covered by the antique Tibetan blanket, my dogs sleeping by my feet, the wind blowing hard outside my window, my small computer balanced on my lap, books and papers all around me, my mother gone eight years now, I can still hear her trembling voice as clearly as the clacking keys of her typewriter. I 58

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never asked her: What was it that I had dared? What was so terrible that I had dared to become?

How many times have you been driving along in your car, or biking, or taking a long walk covering miles, a changing landscape, when you suddenly become aware that you have no recollection of the distance you’ve traveled, the sights you’ve passed without taking them in? Where were you? Oh, you were floating around, ruminating on something that happened yesterday, or five years ago, or about plans for tomorrow, or next summer, or even what to cook for dinner. We’re so rarely in the present. A favorite yoga teacher often has us begin class in child’s pose. As we lie there with our foreheads pressed to the mat, she’ll tell us to
drop down
.
Drop in.

Sometimes when I’m at my desk, I’ll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven’t moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house. This may mean that I’m deeply engaged in the story I’m writing—that I have trans-ported myself to the universe of my characters, but ideally, I want to be in both worlds: the one I’ve created in my mind, 59

Dani Shapiro

and also the one that’s all around me. Because if I’m present, I will miss nothing. As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness. How are we meant to witness if we’re not in the room?

Feel your feet on the ground. Your butt in the chair. Your elbows on the desk. Feel the pen in your hand, or the pads of your fingers against the computer’s keys. Feel the breath moving in and out of your belly. The weight of your head on your neck. Your jaw: Is it clenched? Mine almost always is, unless I remind myself to release it. The further I get into this writing life, the more help I find I need. There are days when I am trapped in what Virginia Woolf called cotton wool: dazed, unfocused states in which the hours collapse, one flattening into the next. Days in which I am not entirely alive. Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand. If we’re writers or artists, we can’t afford to live this way. We have to recognize the cotton wool, and cut through it.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach. Essential oils with names like
concentration
and
focus
and
inspiration—
the kind of thing I might have laughed at when I was younger
.
I could pretty much open up a new-age gift shop, if the writing thing ever dries up. But really, all that stuff is there to remind me to stay in the present, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Sometimes 60

Still Writing

I can hardly stand it—that
dropping in
. It’s scary, boundless, infinite. It can feel like a free fall. But I know it’s where my best work lies.

Each of us finds our own ritual to cut through the cotton wool. We can be gentle or harsh with ourselves. We can go for a run, or drop to the floor for twenty push-ups, or slam our fists down on our desks, or blare music until it’s noisier than the noise inside of us. Hell, we can drink or do drugs—a short-term strategy that almost always ends badly. But whatever the ritual, we are attempting to see and hear and taste and smell and touch life around us. Otherwise, we escape ourselves, leaving our bodies behind like the shells of cicadas. Is it going to snow tomorrow? Was yesterday’s meeting productive? Why did she say that to me? What did he mean by that?

Who cares? We can’t know. But it is in the present—not in the past, and most certainly not in the future—that we are able to see the landscape, to feel the range of our humanity, to travel every uncomfortable mile.

For a number of years, when I was on the faculty of a graduate writing program, each spring a large envelope filled with 61

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manuscripts—the work of prospective students—appeared in my mailbox. It was a competitive program, and only a few writers would be offered admission. I pored over each application carefully, as if I held in my hands nothing less than the fragile, beating heart of each person who had applied.

Of the hundreds of applications I evaluated, one stands out in memory: I began, as I always did, with a quick scan of the letters of recommendation, and then settled down to read the statement of purpose. Why did this writer want to pursue a graduate degree? The motivation for applying was an important factor in choosing successful candidates. I looked for passion, humility, kindness—qualities that would be valuable around a workshop table. I also kept an eye out for egoism, hubris, aggression.

I don’t really see the point in studying writing,
this statement began.
I’ve already been told by many people that I’m
a genius.

I shook my head, as if the words might rearrange themselves on the page. I read on:

I intend to become an internationally famous writer, to win a
Guggenheim and live and work in the south of France
.

I kept reading, fingers crossed that maybe this was a mis-guided attempt at a
New Yorker
“Shouts & Murmurs” column.

But no. This guy wasn’t kidding. The statement continued in the same vein. I don’t remember the work—or even if I read it.

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Still Writing

I was so annoyed as I looked around my overheated, cluttered academic office.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition. We all want to win Guggenheims and live and write in the south of France, or some version thereof—don’t we? But this can’t be the goal.

If we are thinking of our work as a ticket to a life of literary glamour, we really ought to consider doing something else.

When I was first teaching, a student came up to me and asked if she should become a writer, or go work for Merrill Lynch.

“Merrill Lynch!” I replied. Not because this student wasn’t talented, but because she was even able to formulate that particular calculus.

The only reason to be a writer is
because you have to
. Most of the time, even if you’ve achieved publication and are lucky enough to be one of the few writers left in the country who are sent on book tour, you will find yourself in some small city where you know no one, in a hotel right off the highway that smells like room sanitizer, getting ready to give a reading where you might have an audience of five people sitting on folding chairs, two of whom work for the bookstore, two of whom are distant cousins of yours, and one of whom is a homeless person who gets up halfway through your reading and shuffles out. (True story.)