Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (7 page)

The real work involves a different kind of ambition: the creative kind. No writer I know is confident in her work. Just 63

Dani Shapiro

as Raymond Carver marked up his published stories with his red pencil, writers cringe when forced to reread our own prose; we’re plagued by the certainty that we haven’t quite achieved what we’d hoped we could. The work is only as good as our small, imperfect, pedestrian selves can make it. It exists in some idealized form, just out of reach. And so we push on.

Driven by a desire to get it right, and the suspicion that there is no getting it right, we do our work in the hopes of coming close. There’s no room in this process for an overblown ego. A career—whether it takes us to Cap d’Antibes or to the Stay-bridge Suites off the interstate—can be the result, but if it’s the goal, we’re lost before we’ve even begun.

E. L. Doctorow once compared writing to driving down a country road on a dark and foggy night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make it all the way home just by slowly creeping along. So many of us, particularly fiction writers, think that it’s our own dirty little secret: we’re writing a novel or a story and
we can’t see where it’s going
. We think that other writers are the captains of their ships, navigating with a sense of clarity and purpose from one port to the next. But 64

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we—we have this shameful, idiosyncratic way of working in which we hardly know the next sentence.

Psst . . . guess what?

Unless we are writing a whodunit, or an intricately plot-ted thriller—writers rarely know where we’re headed when we start out. I began my novel
Family History
with a character, a woman in her late thirties named Rachel Jensen
,
who was lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, watching home movies. Clearly, something terrible had happened. But what?

I thought it might involve her children and her marriage. She replayed home movies again and again, searching for clues. I searched for clues along with her, as she lay there in the darkness. Over the course of the two years it took me to write that novel, the story took shape one word at a time. I discovered what had happened to the Jensens just as if I were driving through that foggy night, keeping an eye out for signposts.

I always think I should know more. That I need more information. That I should outline, perhaps. Or do some research.

But really, I need to remind myself that this not-knowing is at the heart of the creative endeavor. Paradoxically, the not-knowing is often what creates the energy, portent, and momentum in the piece of work itself. One of the truest pleasures for the writer alone in a room is when our characters surprise us by doing something unexpected. And so, as we are beginning, the most liberating thing we can do for ourselves is to 65

Dani Shapiro

exist in this state of heightened interest. It’s a bit like standing at the edge of a playground, watching our children make their way in the world. What will they do next? What has happened to them? Do you really want to go over there? Who’s the bully in the sandbox?

It requires faith in the process. The imagination has its own coherence. Our first draft will lead us. There’s always time for thinking and shaping and restructuring later, after we’ve allowed something previously hidden to emerge on the page.

I applied to college during my junior year of high school. I was sixteen—a very young and confused sixteen. My family’s religious observance had hampered certain aspects of the usual teenage rebellion. While my friends were out in the woods drinking beer and smoking pot, I was sneaking off to eat a slice of bacon, sure that God would strike me dead. (To this day, I have an uneasy relationship with shellfish, afraid that I’ll eat a bad shrimp and end up dying of anaphylactic shock.) I look back now and try to understand where I found the nerve to apply to college early. My parents didn’t help me.

They knew I was applying but they never thought I’d get in. I 66

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was a middling student, good at some subjects (English) and terrible at others (math). I was something of a pianist, having studied classical piano for most of my life, and I’m convinced it was this—the cassette tape of me playing Mozart’s Sonata in A Major—that got me into better schools than my academic record deserved.

Why did I do it? I was desperate to get away from home.

Life with my parents was unhappy. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I think I was afraid that if I didn’t leave soon, I never would. Guilt and remorse would glue me to the spot.

My parents’ troubles seemed to be my fault. They fought over me as if they were two dogs and I was the bone. They each wanted me for their own, and in the process I was being trapped. To escape, I started to tell a lot of lies. I lied to my parents, to my friends, to my high school boyfriend, to Eddie Adler, to anyone who would listen. My own lies baffled me. I couldn’t keep track of the stories I had told. Why was I making them up? Why was I pretending things had happened—often painful, dramatic things—when they hadn’t?

The week before college acceptance letters were to be mailed out, I stopped eating. I was thin to begin with, and this hunger strike appeared to my well-meaning family pediatrician to be anorexia and so I was admitted to the hospital. I’m shaking my head as I write these words, because I know how it sounds—it must have been very serious for them to have hospitalized a 67

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sixteen-year-old girl who wasn’t eating—but in truth, it was a tremendous overreaction, one of several that my parents had over the years, in which I was thought to be desperately ill.

One time, a swollen gland in my neck led to a spinal tap and ultimately to surgery to remove the offending gland. And so I lay there at our small, local New Jersey hospital, being fed intravenously, until the morning my mother arrived at the hospital holding a thick, unopened envelope from Sarah Lawrence College.

I sat up and ate some soup and a few saltines. The intravenous lines were removed. I remember the dress I wore as I left the hospital on that warm April day: delicate, white, floaty.

I was thin, but I felt strong, renewed. That envelope was my ticket out, and though a few more acceptances came in that week, my instinct told me that Sarah Lawrence—a small liberal arts college near New York City—was where I belonged.

It’s easy to make sense of it all in retrospect. To say: I knew I wanted to be a writer, that Sarah Lawrence had a faculty full of great writers who commuted there from New York City to teach, men and women who would become my mentors and surrogate parents, forever changing my life. To say: I had a plan for who I would become. But none of this was the case. Connecting the dots of a life can only be done backward, forensically. It’s possible now to see how Eddie Adler, the lying, the starving, the white cotton dress, the thick envelope 68

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led—over the course of three decades—to the quiet house in the country, the piles of books, the husband and son, the solitary days. It’s also possible to see that there are other ways it could have gone. Remove any of those elements—change a single detail—and the story spins off in another direction.

One of those working writers who was teaching at Sarah Lawrence when I first arrived was a short, sturdy woman with a cloud of white hair and the kindest face I’d ever seen. Grace Paley was legendary. She spoke the way she wrote, with the street cadence of a Brooklyn-raised Jewish immigrant’s daughter, and she was wise, humble, gentle, and incisive. I often found myself on the verge of tears when I was in her presence.

I was a girl in need of a new family. I became one of Grace’s many surrogate children. And though I wasn’t ready—though it would be another six years and a whole lot of heartache before I began to change into the woman I’d hoped to become—I recognized in her then something I wanted: a feeling mind, a thinking heart. A lived life. I flailed around, aimless, self-destructive, deluded, and without hope for years after my first encounter with Grace, but I knew 69

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there was another way to be. I had seen it in her. I just didn’t know how to get there.

I only had a few workshops with Grace in college and in graduate school, and they were often canceled, a note tacked to the door announcing that she was in jail again, imprisoned for civil disobedience, but her advice stayed with me. “If I love a sentence I’ve just written enough to get up and go into the other room to read it aloud to my husband, I know I should cut it,” she once said. I didn’t know what she meant at the time. Wasn’t it good to love your sentences? Now I know she meant simply this: don’t admire your own work, not while you’re writing it. “I do my best writing in the bathtub,” she said. I thought she meant she sat neck-deep in suds, scribbling. Now I realize that she was talking about the importance of getting away from the page to let the mind wander and solve problems. To this day, I’ll think of some casual remark she made when I was her student, and I’ll realize:
Oh, so that’s
what Grace meant
. She, among others, is in the room when I write. All my mentors—Esther Broner, Jerome Badanes—

they’re gone now, and writing their names here feels like a form of Yizkor, the Jewish prayer for the dead. They were—

they became—my family.

If we keep our eyes open, we will encounter our true teachers. We don’t even need to know them. Virginia Woolf is my teacher. I keep her near me in the form of her
A Writer’s Diary
.

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I flip the book open to a random page and encounter a kin-dred spirit who walked this road before me, and who—though her circumstances were vastly different from my own—makes me feel less isolated in the world. Though we are alone in our rooms, alone with our demons, our inner censors, our teachers remind us that we’re not alone in the endeavor. We are part of a great tapestry of those who have preceded us. And so we must ask ourselves: Are we feeling with our minds? Thinking with our hearts? Making every empathic leap we can? Are we witnesses to the world around us? Are we climbing on the shoulders of those who paved the way for us? Are we using every last bit of ourselves, living these lives of ours, spending it, spending it all, every single day?

What You Know?

Sit around a scarred wooden table in a writing workshop for enough hours and you’ll hear
write what you know,
along with
show don’t tell,
never use adverbs,
and other guidelines.

And know that every rule you’ll hear in a writing workshop is meant to be broken. You can do absolutely anything—tell, not show, make excellent use of an adverb—as long as you can pull it off. Get out there on the high wire, unafraid to fall. Who 71

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says you can’t use ellipses or an exclamation point? Who says dialogue has to be indented and in quotation marks? Who says you can’t write a whole novel from the point of view of a child trapped in a room?

What does this even mean: to write what you know? I can tell you that it makes some writers, when they’re starting out, think that they can only write about what has happened to them. Then they panic. They worry that maybe their lives aren’t dramatic enough. But can you imagine what our lives (or our work) would be like if we were only able to write directly out of our own experience? We’d have to live such interesting lives that we’d all flame out by age forty, collapsing from the exhaustion of chasing after new material.

There is a tremendous difference between writing from a place that haunts you, from the locus of your obsession and fear and desire—and writing about what you yourself have been through. We know more than we think we do. I am not, for instance, a sixty-four-year-old male psychoanalyst Holocaust survivor. But in my third novel,
Picturing the Wreck,
that is who I became. I was Solomon Grossman. “Emma Bovary, c’est moi,” said Flaubert. I didn’t question whether or not I could get inside the heart and soul of a man more than thirty years my senior, who had suffered in ways I hadn’t suffered, taken pleasure in ways I hadn’t. In the first pages, Solomon wakes up in the morning and masturbates. How did I give 72

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myself creative license to write such a scene? Because I
knew
.

I knew what he would do, and how it would make him feel, before, during, and after. We are limited only by our capacity to empathize. We have all experienced sorrow, grief, loss, joy, euphoria, thirst, lust, injustice, envy, a broken heart.

Recently I tried on a space suit known as AGNES, an ac-ronym for Age Gain Now Empathy System, designed by researchers at MIT to generate the feeling, for its wearer, of being elderly. I climbed into what looked like ski pants, which were attached by bungee cords to suspenders, limiting my range of motion. I wore a helmet that also connected to the suspenders by elastic cords, shrinking me and inhibiting my ability to turn my neck. There were goggles to obscure my vision. I stuffed my feet into slippers that had sharp plastic spikes on their soles, so that each step I took was painful.

It was a chance to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. An eighty- or perhaps ninety-year-old version of myself. A peek into what the future might hold. So this is what it would be like to pick up a spoon. To get up out of a chair. To climb a flight of stairs. And though I’m not sure I needed to experience AGNES in order to imagine the physical experience of being old and frail, it sharpened my perspective. I thought differently about that hunched-over man trying to cross Broadway as the

“Don’t Walk”
sign flashes, or the woman with dementia who escapes her assisted living facility and finds herself disoriented 73

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on the side of a highway. I haven’t yet lived these moments, and perhaps I never will. But I know what it is to be alone. To be lost. To be afraid.

Every Wednesday after school, my mother drove me a half-hour to a neighboring town for my piano lesson. On our way, we stopped at a Howard Johnson’s and I ordered a swiss choc-olate almond ice-cream cone. I don’t remember much about our car rides—I can’t summon up a single conversation—but I do remember the precise taste of the ice cream, the satisfying crunch of the almonds. The sensory details of our childhoods are often what remain vivid: the glare of the late afternoon sun, the steady
whoosh
of the highway below, the car’s uphol-stery against my back, the sight of my mother’s hands—no longer young—on the steering wheel. She drove an enormous, dark brown Cadillac Eldorado. Why? I don’t know. My parents weren’t showy people. If I were creating a character like my mother, I wouldn’t have her drive an Eldorado.