Word After Word

When we finish one piece, we have to start another the next day or we’ll vulnerable to attack: the devils of depression, doubt, distraction and weirdness are drawn to us, armed. Starting a new piece is our only defense.

How? A topic and a deadline already set out in advance of finishing the previous piece. If I know L. is going to trade essays with me at the end of the month, and we’ve assigned ourselves a topic (she’s a topic creating genius; see also Abigail Thomas.net) I will get the writing done. The topic and the deadline are how you get the airplane parts on your tarmac.

You extend yourself piece by piece, looping each new one to the previous. Maybe it’s like knitting. I don’t know anything about knitting except that sound the needles make is really annoying. I can’t imagine knitting—stabbing thread with needles in order to produce nubby things that itch (vital life-enhancing exception: Diane S’s boiled slippers) but I do know you can’t make something out of nothing

So, the first day it’s just staring at the parts. It feels like a debacle. Not only have I just written a really bad book, I can’t write at all. The airport that is my writing life can’t get a signal. Or send one.

I go to my desk the next day, and the next day. And I sit there, on the floor (literal floor) with the essay-parts around me. How will this ever work?  The wake, jet wash, of the sagging memoir is all around us, blowing bad air.

Writing is nothing like cooking. It’s nothing like gardening. You will get something even if it is inedible or dead at the end of a sequence of steps in those two endeavors. I’m not sure writing is like anything else. Mining? Dating? Cave Man Being? Alchemy.

On the fourth day, I get a little spark. I put two parts next to each other, and oh my gosh. Can I write about this? I feel like I’ve hit a vein. I can tell because I am afraid to write about this. I can’t imagine it and I have the urge to go to the library and read extensively about an obscure medical condition. (That would immediately extinguish the spark.) The next morning, I wake up with the whole essay in my head. Gaping rents in places, but it’s up and running. The engine starts right away. I can sit in the little plane.  It can’t fly yet—oh my god it might never, but it is definitely a plane like object. 

This is how it always works for me. But I can never remember that it will work this way when I’m sitting out there in the deserted field that is supposedly an airport with a bunch of sharp metal, deformed, rusted, crazy, all around me. For me the trick is to not think about any of this. Be very boring and automaton like.

I have no idea how to teach students to practice this patience, this high tolerance for attending to Nothing, being nowhere, getting no place. You have to be a little whacked in the head. You have to be dented. 

How does it work for you?

I know this. It really, really helped that Elle and Vincent bought me that dinner and made a big deal about the send-off. That was my little cushion. I’m sitting on it in what will be, someday, the cockpit. My little shiny red cushion. I’m taking it everywhere.

The day after I sent the book off, I settled at my writing desk to work on an essay. I feel like my writing life is a little airport. We got the big jet off. All the employees were involved; we weren’t sure we could do it, and there are concerns: it could easily crash. But the next morning, right back at it.

(That night of the day of the mailing, my sweet sweet friends Elle and Vincent, bought me dinner. “This must be celebrated,” they said. That was so good of them to do. I hadn’t been thinking celebration at all. I’d been only thinking: so much more to be done. So many shoddy patch jobs. So much duct tape! What a disaster. At the airport, we weren’t thinking this giant near-miss was a good thing, but more of an albatross, a horror, a kind of mental illness.

Friends don’t see that though. They’re great. They just see, from afar, a glorious jet in the sky, headed for

So, book mailed and celebrated, the next morning, I got up and went out to the tarmac and headed straight over to the little Cessna which is laying out in parts. I always knew once the big plane got launched that I would turn my attention to this little guy, an essay, an essay on humor in fiction.

I sat down. And looked at the parts. It looked like a wreck. But I have been doing this for twenty-four years, seriously, and I know a thing that looks like a wreck is most often not damaged, not wrong, just parts. Waiting to be assembled. How?

Step one: hang with the parts, get to know them. Pick each one up and let it kind of talk to you.

The advice I give my students and clients: have your next project on deck. Don’t think. Be as much like an assembly line as you can be. Practice the motion of forward motion. Slowly.

I sent the manuscript off to see what people who know a lot about books think. It’s a horrible thing to do to a manuscript.  My poor tortured manuscript is not ready. But I don’t have the courage right now to work on him. I need a break. He needs grandparents, boarding school, boot camp, a ghost. He needs professional help. He needs more than I give him right now.

I want someone brilliant to tell me how to make the book better. And I want to have the knowledge and skill to enact their vision. It’s all kind of fantastic, as in, fantasy. I know when my students submit work to the class, they want the same things. Tell me its great and tell me how to fix it. The teacher doesn’t have that power. I know the brilliant person who will tell me how to make the book better is not out there. She’s in here. She’s me.

What’s real, what’s not fantasy? Working, practicing, writing every day. I’m not sure anyone does know how to fix someone else’s book. To find that perfect pairing of editor and manuscript—well, it’s just like looking for a romantic partner, a soul mate.

Timing. We have to leave the book alone for just the right amount of time. Enough to have distance but not so much that courage and vision and interest (it’s just like dating) fade. I don’t know. A week?

Finishing is sad and horrible. NO WONDER WE AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS. I hate finishing. All I can see is everything the book was going to be, and isn’t.

 By working, or pretending to be still working (and creating all these reasons we aren’t writing, right now, but really, we will — just as soon as….. ) we still have a CHANCE to make great things happen.

I have completely, from scratch, not looking not even peeking, rewritten this book three times. Three BIG times and many many little times.

Revision = life. Finish-ion = death.

Today I finished. And my dog cut his paw on the ice, there’s blood all over the snow out front of my house, my mom is very very very ill, I have no light bulbs and four bulbs went out, dead dead dead dead and darkness.

I’m not going to bike group. That’s how much I pity myself. I’m bookless! I’m bereft! I’m walking around on land. AND THERE’S NO KALE.

Louis Menand’s article on diaries and diarists, “Woke up This Morning,” (The New Yorker, December 10 2007) takes up the question of why we read diaires. He is so smart on blogs, reliability in writing about self/other, diaries, memoirs, and bad writing—five of my most passionate interests. I’m resisting (vaguely) the urge to copy out the entire article here, all of which has bearing on the creative writing workshop, writing from life, and how we consider our work.

“The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness.”

“It’s not that we imagine we would be happier if we kept a diary; we imagine that we would be better—that diarizing is a natural healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement, about life, that we care, and that non-diarizing, or worse, failed diarizing is a confession of moral inertia, an acknowledgement, eve, of the ultimate pointlessness of one’s being in the world.”

“The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10^th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself. People find they just can’t take themselves seriously enough to continue. They may regret this—people capable of taking themselves seriously tend to go farther in life—but they accept it and move on to other things, such as collecting stamps.”

Do we learn more about a person reading their diary? Or does the impossibility of accurate self-representation mean we only get the feeling we know intimately who a person really is by reading about them in other people’s diaries? Menand says, “[Virginia] Woolf described from the outside by another person is likely to give us a more vivid picture of what Virginia Woolf was really like than Woolf described from the inside by herself. Introspection is not as reliable as observation. (That’s why we have shrinks.)

And, I’ll add: that’s why we have creative writing courses. Not to teach the art of introspection but to practice the science of observation of everyone else.

Inside, Menand claims, we are all pretty much the same. “It’s the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct.”

He notes that Woolf is “one of those writers who keep the instrument in tune: she wrote, sometimes just to be writing, whether there was anything of significance to write about or not.”

“’Never discriminate, never omit’ is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. …   If it doesn’t contain a lot of dross, it’s not a diary. It’s something else—a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).”

“The memorializing of the mundane is part of the flattening of foreground-background contrast that makes diaries different from memoirs and other forms of historical narrative. It’s also a sign of the diary’s absolute fidelity to the present…. The just-the-facts elimination of perspective, discrimination, and reflection…”

This what we’re trying to teach our students. Yes, they must write what they know; unless they are particularly gifted. When they write further from home, they have to be careful television isn’t filtering their observation. Creative writing can’t be just-the-facts. It has to be close observation, combined with perspective, discrimination, and reflection.

An example? Menand himself on Schlesinger: “…he was a golden retriever: he like being liked much more than he disliked being disliked….”   And “…he dreamed of writing a novel…but despite a fair amount of self laceration…he never made much headway. (Not many people who have that particular dream do make much headway.)”

Writing a diary may keep us from completing our novels, and it may be the only way we get to them too. Self laceration and failure to write everything down—you are for sure not writing now.

“The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.”

John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage: another part of life

As I push to the end of the book, I’m throwing away so much. I’m on p 300. I’ve got 350 sketched out.

I feel like I’m steering a ship into a harbor. And I of course have never steered a ship before. So it’s stressful. I can tell the water is getting shallow and the risk is I will run aground before I get the whole deal where it’s supposed to be.

So, I’m throwing everything that’s not nailed down overboard. Barrels of ideas, barrels of beautiful paragraphs, barrels of plans, barrels of lists, barrels of monkeys, buckets of notes, dead things, live things; I’m throwing so much over. It’s scary and liberating and funny and the seas are littered with flotsam-that-was-going-to-be-in-the-book. I’m shocked by what I see out there. Fabulous climactic insightful moments I’ve been steering towards all book long—gone. Completely gone.

I’m thinking pretty soon it’s going to switch, or it has already. Instead of not wanting to throw away, hating what I’m losing, I’m going to be thrilled with the new lightness of the book-as-ship and I am going to look for more to throw. There’s going to be a hunger and delight in throwing things overboard. And this will be good up to a point, and then not good.

I just want to land safely, without hurting anyone on shore, without scraping the belly of the book on shoals. I want to land elegantly, and pop out of my captain house, dance down the gangway, click my heels, and kiss the land.

While I’m finishing, I can’t afford to look backwards too long or off the to the sides, or below. I can’t stare at the barrels bobbing around my ship, clanging and waggling. I have to keep my eyes on where I’m headed.

Careful soundings now: Page 301, page 302. page 303. 304. 305. 306 . . . 

I think there’s always a little surge, just before you hit, land. An acceleration—risky, thrilling, lovely, a kind of loss of control when you know you’re dead-on.

My friend A., age 8, says to this question: “I don’t get nearly enough of them.”

After Pilates, I made myself go to the sealed-over book and work. I used J’s comments–those nice stepping stones–and rewrote and wrote and I was horrified by how much I hate the project and the weakness of the writing but I kept telling myself “it will get better. Just keep going forward.” It was a really not very fun way to spend time. When I found myself emptying the bottom drawer of the vanity in the bathroom, I said, nicely, “Honey, that’s a great idea to completely reorganize the bathroom, but it isn’t quite what we are doing now.  Go back to your room. Reorganize page 147. (It’s a horrible, horrible, particularly dull, seamed page.) Or, skip ahead. Or, feel free to work on the ending. Scoot! up you go! Here’s tea!”

 And back up I went.   “You are wonderful!” I said, as I entered the studio, just to keep the momentum. A lie, but necessary.

And so I worked. I just slogged through. Not pretty, fun, rewarding, entertaining, or producing good work, but I believe this is what I have to do to get this book to the next stage.

Then, at 3 pm, I went to the men’s basketball game. And after one minute, I saw the look on Number Thirty One’s face. He was so totally focused, working so incredibly hard, riding this edge. Every cell in his body, everything focused on blocking their Number Eleven. It was all he had to do. It looked incredibly fun, to be working that hard.

That’s what is missing.

Tomorrow, I’m going to play basketball with my book. I’m going to find a place in it where I can really get back in the game. It needs to be hard. I’m going to have to work up a sweat and give one hundred and ten percent and many, many, many other sports cliches.  All of them. Bring them on. Here we go.

(Our team won today.  Good game.)