Word After Word

I will always think of them as my stepsons. It’s easy to understand (not easy but clear, possible, necessary, messy-but-structured) how an ex-husband is an X (and also a big unknown, something to solve) but ex steps? How could that be possible? It would be like divorcing childhood itself.

Bug is in the

On the plane next to me, when I was coming back from my meditation retreat, was an Air Force Colonel. When I told her what his job was in the Air Force, her eyes misted. This is the darkest, hardest part. He picked the most dangerous job in the world. In the entire world. A colonel cried. That’s how hard. 

When I was freaking out about his choice Bug didn’t say anything. He looked really young and really confused and committed, both of those at once. Which gives the face a kind of falling quality.

Later, when I was still freaking out, but more politely, Bug told me women love heroes. “They want you to defy death, take life in your hands.” And he said, “I’m not going to get killed. I’m not.”

No never an X.

Mel lost 126 pages in September and she hasn’t written a word since.

Last summer B. lost his novel. Earlier this fall, Elle lost everything—her mother board become vehemently unmotherly and imploded. Here’s the thing. Every writer loses work.

Every writer feels like its her fault. A punishment for stepping out, for committing. Who did you think you were? A writer? Come on! Especially if you live in a world where you are the only one doing this work, this kind of work—when you lose precious pages it can feel like exactly the indictment you deserved.

This has to be changed.

Every writer loses work. It’s part of work. Every roofer falls (and then learns more about the nature of the edges). Every actor bombs. Every job in the world has a Bad Part to it and this is our bad part and no one can avoid it. It’s not your fault you are magical but not so magical you can control computers and mother boards and actually make things disappear. You’re just a writer. Get over yourself.

And get back to work. (Easy to say, I know and incredibly hard to do.)

But here is the thing, which I learned from a beautiful writer named Elizabeth and later from one of my best teachers, ever: When you start again, it will come out, easily, all of it, just as you had it before OR EVEN BETTER. It sounds to good be too true. But this wild thing happens. I have tried this multiple times, in the wake of a loss and just to test it out and I promise, this works. Try it.

You just sit down at your writing desk (maybe you will choose paper and pencil this time, it’s very relaxing, maybe you aren’t ready to face the machine that ate your soul just yet—that’s good!). You physically transport yourself to the opening scene of your book. Start writing. Don’t try to recreate it (see Leaning, below), just lean into it gently and every time you are worried it was better before, you’ll never recreate all those glorious turns of phrase, those luminous images!, just realize you are trying too hard. Pull back and gently let the book come back out. This is called drafting.

I have tested it accidentally and on purpose. Last year, I lost a short (brilliant) essay on my computer. After freaking out for way longer than was appropriate, I finally got back to work and just wrote it again, using this method. A friend found a copy of my story at her house, and mailed it to me. When I compared the two versions. Not one thing great was missing. Not one! And here’s the coolest, coolest, coolest part of all: some bad parts were improved! The essay was published. This method works so well, I would recommend regularly destroying all your work and redoing it but it would be too painful and horrible—

I call this the Starfish Method because it’s as dramatic as losing and then regenerating a fifth limb. Because it’s such a fantastic way of improving the work, I have tried it on purpose. A magazine accepted an essay of mine recently and then sent it back with revisions. I studied the editor’s notes, and then put the essay down and just rewrote it. You can’t think of new stuff as easily as you can rewrite something you wrote before. It’s hardwired into your brain. What’s so amazing is when I’m rewriting like this, I feel as though it’s all fresh, completely original. I’m stunned when I compare the two versions—how much of the original is there, in the new one, without my having even thought about it at all.

When we lose work, I doubt we will become overjoyed and instantly shout Starfish Method! Yee Haw! But less freaking out would be good. It feels like starting over, but it’s not. It’s going to feel that way though. Don’t think about it. When you write, it should feel like you are reading. Not thinking, not working, not making it up, but reading something that is already there. In starfish, it already is. That limb is more powerful than any other kind of memory there is (you just aren’t aware of it. Hence the freaking.)

Triple Redundancy. You should still practice, like all novelists and small business owners, triple redundancy, backing everything up every day in three places. No one does this but we should. However: even the triple redundancy people will still lose work! It’s part of what writing is about. Writers have been losing work since the beginning of time. Stone tablets were stolen, pulverized. Manuscripts were left in horse carriages and on trains and they blew away in east winds. Fire has eaten art along with forests and cities and men. There’s no immunity.

But remember: It’s not your fault. You are just a little baby writer and you don’t get to keep your manuscript immortal, you only get to work with it. And when it slips away from you, which it will, in small ways and large ways, you can conjure it back in an even more pure, improved version.

The trick is to get calm, ignore the horrible annihilating fears (super hard to do), and pretend like it’s there, all along, which it is. It’s not really lost. It’s still in you. Absolutely intact.

Assignment: Set your timer for ten minutes. Write something beautiful and important. Write a secret, start a sonnet, anything. Hide it from yourself. Don’t look at it. Next week, or next year, without having looked at the “lost” version, write the same thing again. Compare. Ta da! Isn’t that incredibly cool? Practicing the art of destruction can help you build up some calluses that are useful when it’s your turn to tithe to the muse.

Memoir, our teacher, Abigail Thomas said, is all about what you leave out. Any book is. You have to write as one person in one time. A wife with a husband who is hit by a car. You leave out yourself as mother, the person you are as daughter, as a sister, your teacher self.  Mostly, when you write a book, you are leaving things out not putting things in.

A great example of this is the fabulous memoir, recommended to our class this summer by Abigail Thomas, My Family and Other Animals by Gerard Durrell (the famous naturalist). (If you are a fan of The Alexandria Quartet, you’ll especially love the portrait Gerry paints of his brother, Larry; Larry isn’t quite as interested in bugs, bats, snakes, ducks, magpies, scorpions…).  You have to read this book! It’s light and funny and wonderful. It’s called on the back cover “an idyll.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but whatever an idyll really is, yes yes yes. This is perfection in the form of a book.

It’s rich and wise and reminded me of two things about making a good book. One.  It’s about what you leave out. By positioning his family members as “animals” under study, like his collection of turtles and fish and dogs, a young Gerry-narrator keeps the book about one thing. He’s surrounded by inexplicable but fascinating beasts—his teenage sister Margo (whose suitors parallel much in the animal world Gerry studies assiduously), his generous worrying indulgent mother, nudging her brood this way and that, etc. You get the crazy kid adventures in the animal world on a Greek island and you get the family—it’s all the same stuff to Gerry.  As beginning writers, we keep making this mistake. We keep putting in more. One idea per book.

Two. Kindness and love for flawed annoying people. We are all so in love with a variety of flawed people and literature exists to explain how that works and why. 

It’s the first trip in my life for which I packed light. I didn’t take baggage. At home, I wear the same clothes for days. I bought so little with me. I didn’t think about calling my Mom. I didn’t bring any work. 

Yoga classes twice a day.

Eating in silence. Buddhabowl: you eat what fits in a small bowl, the size of your stomach. Slowly.

There’s not good karma or bad karma: it’s life.

A philosophy I want to bring into my writing classroom: it’s your practice, it’s your body, it’s your yoga: what’s right for you? so that you learn—really truly feel—the difference between pain and hurtful versus what’s stretching, difficult, but nourishing and healthy and good.

Drumming, chanting, praying: a full moon ceremony (the lofty moon it’s called—it’s so high up, it appears tiny and unreasonable).

A fire ceremony. (I’m not sure what that is but it sounded cool; participants complained it went too quickly. I’m thinking: That’s fire!)

Reiki. (Who knew!)

Massage: “thank you for receiving.”

Yoga is softness and strength. It takes a lot of strength to open your heart. It takes a lot of guts. When someone yells at you, turning the other cheek comes from a place of great strength. Anyone yelling at you is saying “I NEED YOU TO LOVE ME.”

Four women, Gaia Roots, who study with elder musicians around the world, learning old rhythms, old lyrics, old instruments, and then they pass it along.

Massage: “pay attention to your body.” 

Three children spontaneously dancing in front of a crowd of a couple hundred, loving dancing and truly performing  not showing off. They were inhabiting the dancing whenever we’d clap, they bowed, hands in prayer position: thank you for letting us, thank you for loving it, it’s good isn’t it?

Massage.

Meditation. “My mat is a prayer rug.”  “Through my breath I extract God.” There’s more traffic here than you know.

“The more dysfunctional the system, the more rigid the roles.”

A still pond reflects the world. A choppy pond: all it sees is itself. (Good writing lesson.)

Green moss, the ice fairy land, Monk’s Pond. The most strange and beautiful shades of green.

A class in Shiatsu massage, where the teacher, Ken, kept saying: your partner isn’t paying you for this massage. You are doing this work for free so don’t make it work. Be selfish, get a good twist. Protect your back, your wrists. More fodder for the writing classroom: you aren’t getting paid to do this writing. It has to be fun for you. (Magically of course, when you aren’t working but playing instead, the massage is much better, your technique is smoother, wiser, instantly—so too for writing!) You aren’t getting paid! He kept saying. Stop working. Lean. He said Lean.  If you press on someone, they will press back, the body will resist, it will say: what is happening to me here? Am I under attack? If you lean, they will relax, feel safe. It’s like the floor, when you are sitting on it. You don’t press with your hands. You lean. Less effort = good.  This is true for writing. You don’t want to try. Lean. If you lean on another person, love, support, and safety are exchanged.  You can’t try. You have to entrance. You do this by making very very predictable movements, steady, no tension on part of the giver or the receiver. Great writing lessons. 

Basically, Ken said, we are trying to learn one thing: how to stop giving each other the creeps. 

Nametags. Everyone has to wear a nametag—teachers, volunteers, staff, every participant—you can’t ever be without it. Heaven.  Maybe that’s why I loved my five perfect days. Everyone was helpfully labeled. It was so easy to make friends. And keep them. 

Wise B. said: in a memoir, you have to love your flawed characters even more just as a novelist or an actor loves her flawed characters more than the good ones. Good is plain. Flawed is interesting because it’s human. I’m working on creating writing where I’m leaning (see more on leaning in Five Perfect Days post) into showing the exact nature of the way we love because of the flaws.

When you see a person, I think their face is, for you, like the tab part of a file folder. The contents are labeled, the face is the answer of a person. 

When a face blind person sees another human, it’s like being presented with a non-tabbed file folder. A folio. No label. The answer is hidden inside. When we see a folder/human we know it’s a folder, that’s clear. It’s a human, obviously. But which folder? What’s inside? Who is it? It’s not always instantly clear. There’s not a label, a quick brief answer. We face blind people have to open the folder.  We have to root around. We have to figure out what the folder should be labeled by examining the contents.  

If the folder is scarred, superbly wrinkled, or stands out in some other consistent, flagrant way, we can tell you who it is; the lack of a label isn’t important. Weird people are beloved. Radical non-comformists: you are doing the face blind community a daily public service. Freaks, we love you! We need you! Freaks of the world untie!  (sic)

When I first tell people about face blindness they are really nice. Then, later, if I should happen to recognize them (see Tabbed File Folders and Faces post) by their voice, or from the back, or by using my stunning sleuthing skills and practices, some people confront me, as though I am wrong. Wrong to know them. Wrong about face blindness. Perhaps misdiagnosed. Getting all this attention and extra help for no discernible reason they can see!  They say: How Did You Know it Was Me? How did you know how I was? Most people (like Tee and Lauren) are truly asking for more information on how the disorder works. But sometimes, I have detected in a few people a tone of judgment, doubt, or “gotcha” and it’s withering. I feel I’m wrong even though I’m right about being wrong about people all the time.

So, I pretend to know more than I do.

Do you?

I saw Tee again. (If you read post  How Did You Know It Was Me, below, this will make more sense.)

I was at the airport, coming home Sunday night from the Five Perfect Days. I walked up the jetway and at the end, there was my friend Tee, holding two balloons, each bearing the motto:

Her curly telephone cord hair, her cute self, scanning the crowd—she didn’t seem to see it was me. I went up to her, full throttle, pretending I was thrilled she’d gotten me Mo balloons. I was going to hug her when she snarled.

And looked away. This not-Tee person, waiting for the real Mo, acted huffy and weirded out as if I was the weird one. I am not the person with Mo balloons, I wanted to shout.  

(Once, I did encounter Tee at the airport, on a plane, actually, and I didn’t recognize her, but she told me it was her. I think my brain was hot-wired at that point to quickly identify Tee-like-beings at the airport as

When I told Tee the story she said, “They say everyone has a twin somewhere in the world.”

In the face blind world, everyone has sixty thousand nine hundred gazillion twins.

Magazines. Television. Movies.

It all looks like the same model, posing in the ads.  It’s as though there’s one guy and one woman. Beauty is the perfect average person. It’s impossible, because I am face blind, to tell the beautiful people apart. This is, in my book, a privilege: if you are beautiful, you have to work harder to distinguish yourself! You can’t count on your looks. I can’t count on your looks. Literally.

The New Yorker was on my table, and RP said, “Tony Soprano,” and he started singing the moon song that opens each episode. I said, “Huh?” I looked down at the cover, more closely. I still didn’t see it.

“That’s Tony,” RP said. “See? You don’t see that?”

Nope. Nothing. Nada. Just a generic man in generic pants exiting a brown room. I could not see how you could ever get Tony Soprano out of that. RP felt sad for me because he knows I like the show. I pored over that image. “How do you get Tony? How do you know that?”

Cartoons and caricatures and drawings and paintings are harder, I think, for face blind, because they are extracting the parts of the face that stand out. But we aren’t very aware of the original features to begin with, so exaggerating them does not help. A reformulated face is just another face we’ve never seen before.

Same with Wired. RP said “Al Gore,” and shook his pointed head judgmentally and ruefully. I looked at the magazine’s cover, which had been sitting on my couch for a week. I saw the words AL GORE printed across the front of the magazine, large block letters. I had assumed inside there was text on Al. It never once occurred to me the giant face, ears and hair cropped mostly away, on Wired’s cover was Al. I’d just thought it was some random face. It never occurred to me that others would see this face as a recognizable person, a famous person.

It’s like a language. RP and everyone else I know all speak Face-ian. I do not speak Face-ian and I can’t learn it—I have a learning disability that blocks me from ever speaking a word of Face-ian.

In a way, it’s like being a kid, and your parents are talking adultlanguage at the dinner table after you’ve drifted away; you’re playing nearby. You hear words like “mortgage” and “quagmire” and “taxes” and “watering restrictions” but they just pop up, whatever. You aren’t really listening. You are playing. There is so much interesting stuff to look at down on the floor, such great pursuits. You don’t really see a need to learn the language—it never occurs to you that you are really missing out on anything. There’s so much more to see from where you’re positioned. You would never think of trading places. 

I wonder how I can find out more about the languages face blind people are fluent in. If there’s a way to discover and measure our secret codes, our subtle ways of  knowing, the microperceptions, Gait-ian, Voice-ian. 

Caricatures, it occurs to me now, are Face-ian spoken in a funny accent, deliberately put-on.

Ray Crist, yoga teacher, says he meditates for three minutes, none of this hour business. I love this. It applies to writing perfectly. People who plan to write their book during summer, on weekends, on sabbatical, or after retirement, often do not get that much done. Much better than setting aside huge chunks of time for these things, meditation, yoga, writing, is three minutes now. Ray said he does his three minutes ten or twenty times a day—there’s an hour. 

Instead of quitting your job to write or reinvent yourself, write a little all the time now.