Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (2 page)

Still Writing

when your wild surge of energy is accompanied by the urge to leap up from your desk, are: laundry, baking, marketing, filling out insurance claims, writing thank-you notes, cleaning closets, sorting files, weeding, scrubbing, polishing, arranging, removing stains, bathing the dog.

Sit down. Stay there. It’s hard—I know just how hard—and I hate to tell you this, but it doesn’t get easier. Ever. Get used to the discomfort. Make some kind of peace with it. Several years ago, I decided to learn how to meditate, though I thought, as many do, that I’d be bad at it:
I’m too type A. I can’t sit
still
. But I needed something that, when I did get up from my desk, would bring me peace and clarity. All of my writer friends have rituals: my friend Jenny runs. John cooks barbe-cue. Mary swims. Ann knits. These are meditative acts—ones that allow the mind to roam, and ultimately to rest. When I sit down to meditate, I feel much the same way I do when I sit down to write: resistant, fidgety, anxious, eager, cranky, despairing, hopeful, my mind jammed so full of ideas, my heart so full of feelings that it seems impossible to contain them.

And yet
.
.
.
if I do just sit there without checking the clock, without answering the ringing phone, without jumping up to make a note of an all-important task, then slowly the random thoughts pinging around my mind begin to settle. If I allow myself, I begin to see more clearly what’s going on. Like a snow globe, that flurry of white floats down.

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Dani Shapiro

During the time devoted to your writing, think of the surges of energy coursing through your body as waves. They will come, they will crash over you, and then they will go.

You’ll still be sitting there. Nothing terrible will have happened. Try not to run from the wave. If, at one moment, you are sitting quietly at your desk, and then—fugue state alert!—

you are suddenly on your knees planting tulips, or perusing your favorite online shopping Web site, and you don’t know how you got there, then the wave has won. We don’t want the wave to win. We want to recognize it, accept its power, and even learn to ride it. We want to learn to withstand those wild surges, because everything we need to know, everything valuable, is contained within them.

Sometimes, when I’m teaching, I’ll start to talk to my students about the nasty little two-timing frenemy of everyone who struggles to put words down on the page—and, without even realizing I’m doing it, I’ll start gesturing to my left shoulder.

Never my right, always my left. That’s apparently where my censor sits. She has been in residence on my left shoulder for so many years that it’s a wonder I’m not completely lopsided.

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Still Writing

Here are some of the things she whispers, or shouts, depend-ing on her mood, whenever I’m beginning something new: This is stupid.

What a waste of time.

(Condescending laugh)

You really think you can pull that off?

So-and-so did it better.

What a dumb idea.

How boring.

Are you ready for a nap?

My inner censor wants to shut me down. She wants me to close up shop, like the man in one of my favorite
New Yorker
cartoons, who stands in the left frame, staring out a window looking bored, resigned. This frame is titled “Writer’s Block: Temporary.” The right frame shows him standing in the exact same way; nothing has changed, except now he’s in front of a fish store bearing his name. The title? “Writer’s Block: Permanent.” My censor wants no less than to turn me into a fish salesman. Not that there’s anything wrong with selling fish, except that I don’t know anything about selling fish and am not particularly fond of the way it smells. What I do know–-what I’ve spent the past couple of decades learning about myself—is that if I’m not writing, I’m not well. If I’m not writing, the world around me is slowly leached of its color. My senses are dulled. I am crabby with my husband, short-tempered with 13

Dani Shapiro

my kid, and more inclined to see small things wrong with my house (the crack in the ceiling, the smudge prints along the staircase wall) than look out the window at the blazing maple tree, the family of geese making its way across our driveway. If I’m not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.

And so I have learned how to live with my censor. It doesn’t happen by fighting her. It happens first by recognizing her—

oh, hello, it’s you again
—and accepting our coexistence. Like those bumper stickers most often seen on the backs of Priuses spelling out
coexist
in the symbols of all the world’s religions, the writer and her inner censor need to learn to get along. The I.C., once you’re on a nickname basis, should be treated like an annoying, potentially undermining colleague. Try manag-ing her with corporate-speak:
Thanks for reaching out, but can
I circle back to you later?

The daily discipline of this creates a muscle memory. It becomes ingrained, thereby habit. I try to remember this, each morning, as I make the solitary trek from the kitchen to my desk. My house is quiet. My family is gone. The hours stretch ahead of me. The beds have been made, the dogs have been walked. There is nothing stopping me. Nothing, except for the toxic little troll sitting on my left shoulder. Just when I think I have her beat, she will assume a new disguise. I have to be vigilant, on the ready. She will pretend to be well-intentioned.

She’s telling me
for my own good
.

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Still Writing

Maybe you should try writing something more commercial.

You know, thrillers are hot. Why not write a thriller? Or at least a mystery?

Sweetheart (I hate it when she calls me sweetheart) no one wants to read a book about a depressed old man. Or a passive-aggressive mother. Why not write a book with a strong female protagonist, for a change? You know, a superheroine. Someone less
.
.
.
I don’t know
.
.
.
victimy?

Under the guise of being helpful, or honest, my censor is like a guided missile aiming at every nook and cranny where I am at my weakest and most vulnerable. She will stoop and connive. All she wants to do is stop me from entering that sacred space from which the work springs. She is at her most insidious when I am at the beginning, because she knows that once I have begun, she will lose her power over me. And so I dip my toe into the stream. I feel the rush of words there.

Words that are like a thousand silvery minnows, below the surface, rushing by. If I don’t capture them, they will be lost.

Start small. If you try to think about all of it at once—the world you hope to capture on the page, everything you know, 15

Dani Shapiro

every idea you’ve ever had, each person you’ve met, and the panoply of feelings coursing through you like a river—you’ll be overcome with paralysis. Who wouldn’t be? Just the way we put one foot in front of the other as we get out of bed, the way we brush our teeth, splash water on our faces, feed our animals if we have animals, and our children if we have them, measure the coffee, put on the kettle, we need to approach our writing one step at a time. It’s impossible to evoke an entire world at the start. But it
is
possible to describe a crack in the sidewalk, the scuffed heel of a shoe. And that sidewalk crack or scuffed heel can be the point of entry, like a pinhole of light, to a story, a character, a universe.

Think of a jigsaw puzzle—one of those vexingly complicated puzzles that comes in a big box. Almost every family rec room has, at one point or another, seen one of these puzzles, spilled from its box, hundreds of pieces strewn across the floor.

It starts out as a fun rainy day activity and—unless the family members are both freakishly patient and spacially gifted—

there it will stay, gathering dust until, finally, someone sweeps all the puzzle pieces back into the box and retires it to the far reaches of a cupboard, never to be seen again. Too many colors and shapes! Too many possibilities! Where to even begin?

This is the writer’s mind when embarking on a piece of work. We sit perched in front of our laptop screen, or our spiral-bound notebook, or giant desktop monitor, and—we 16

Still Writing

freeze. After all, it’s so important, isn’t it, where we start? Don’t we need a plan? Hadn’t we better know where we’re going? The stakes feel impossibly high. We’re convinced that first word will dictate every word that follows. We are tyrannized by our options. All sorts of voices scream in our heads. First person or third? Present tense or past? The span of five minutes? Or two hundred years? What the hell are we doing? We don’t know.

Build a corner. This is what people who are good at puzzles do. They ignore the heap of colors and shapes and simply look for straight edges. They focus on piecing together one tiny corner. Every book, story, and essay begins with a single word. Then a sentence. Then a paragraph. These words, sentences, paragraphs may well end up not being the actual beginning. You can’t know that now. Straining to know the whole of the story before you set out is a bit like imagining great- grandchildren on a first date. But you can start with the smallest detail. Give us the gravel scattering along the highway as the pickup truck roars past. The crumb of food the wife wipes from her husband’s beard. The ripped bottom of a girl’s faded jeans. Anchor yourself somewhere—anywhere—on the page. You are committing, yes—but the commitment is to this tiny corner. One word. One image. One detail. Go ahead.

Then see what happens next.

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Dani Shapiro

One of my dearest friends began her last novel—one that went on to win the highest honor bestowed on an American novelist—by telling herself that she was going to write a short, bad book. For a long time, she talked about the short, bad book she was writing. And she believed it. It released her from her fear of failure. It’s a beautiful strategy. Anyone can write a short, bad book, right?

A while back, I was looking through a file on my computer in which I keep drafts of all my essays and stories and book reviews, and I realized that each one of these dozens of pieces had begun with the same phrase rolling through my head:
here goes nothing
. It’s my version of telling myself that I’m going to write a short, bad book.
Here goes nothing
. The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who’s going to read it, what they’re going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplish-ing anything alive on the page.

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Still Writing

My son Jacob is in a rock band. When he starts learning a new song, he likes to spend a lot of time printing out the sheet music, getting it to look just right before he puts it in his binder. Then, he thinks about the YouTube video he wants to make, the record label who will sign them. All this, before he’s learned to play the thing. I know this feeling well, this fantasy, these dreams of glory. I smile at them in my son, who, after all, is twelve and doing exactly what twelve-year-olds should be doing: trying on different identities for size. But I try to eliminate them in myself.

Years ago, I received my first big assignment from
The New
Yorker
. On the checklist of dreams I pretended not to have, this was at the top. Now I had the chance. I had a contract for one of those “Personal History” pieces. A deadline. The story, which was an investigation into a family secret—an early, tragic marriage of my late father—was rich and sad and beautiful, and I wanted to do it justice. In the days and weeks after landing the assignment, I sat down each morning to write, and nothing happened. As I sat at my desk on West Ninety-second Street in Manhattan, instead of making the journalistic and imaginative leap into the world of Brooklyn circa 1948, I pictured my story in the pages of
The New Yorker.
What would it look like in
New Yorker
font? Would it have an illustration?

What would the illustration be? Maybe they’d want an old 19

Dani Shapiro

picture of my dad. I made sure I had several of these around, should the photo department call.

I couldn’t write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing. Most published writers will tell you that the moment they hold the book, or the prestigious magazine piece, or the good review, or the
whatever
in their hands—that moment is curiously hollow. It can’t live up to the sweat, the solitude, the bloody battle that it represents.

I did eventually tire of my fantasies of being published in
The New Yorker,
and just got down to work. I set my alarm clock for a predawn hour and stumbled straight from bed to desk in an attempt to short-circuit the cocktail party chatter in my head, which went something like:
Oh, did you read . . . Yes,
brilliant . . . and a National Magazine Award to boot,
and started with one word, and then another, then another, until I had a sentence.
Here goes nothing
. Eventually, I had pages.

They were imperfect, maybe even
bad,
but I had begun. And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in
New Yorker
font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratu-latory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark.

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Still Writing

A Room of One’s Own

It doesn’t really matter what or where it is, as long as it is yours. I don’t necessarily mean that it has to belong to you.

Only that, for the time that you’re working, you have what you need. Learning what you need to do your best work is a big step forward in the life of any writer. We all have different requirements, different ways of working. I have a friend who likes to write on the subway. She will board the F train just to get work done. The jostle and cacophony—she finds it clears her mind. Me? You’d have to shoot me first. For one, I’m a wee bit claustrophobic. Also, I need solitude and silence. I have friends who work best in coffee shops, others who like to work in the same room as their partners. Friends who have written multiple books at their kitchen tables. Marcel Proust famously wrote in bed, and so did Wendy Wasserstein. Gay Talese, the son of an Italian tailor, dresses in a custom-made suit each morning and descends the stairs to his basement study. Hemingway wrote standing up. One writer I know works best late at night, a habit left over from the years when she had young children under her roof and those were the only hours that were hers alone.