Here's the way an ideal writing day goes: I wake up early and do the knapsack/lunchbox/breakfast/off-to-school thing and my family toodles down the driveway while I still have a clear, unperturbed mind.  I make my second cappuccino of the morning and climb the stairs to my office where I do a quick email check, find nothing aggravating, then a scan of the news, and by eight a.m. I have settled in to work.  I turn the software program "Freedom" on, disabling the Internet on my computer, in the event that the lure of checking Facebook or Twitter proves too much for me.  I work, uninterrupted, for a couple of hours.  I head back downstairs, take the dogs out for some air, then throw ingredients for a stew into the slow cooker.  Back upstairs I go.  Another hour or two of work on my book.  A one-hour yoga break at lunchtime.  Revision, and the business of writing in the afternoon.  By the time four o'clock rolls around, I'm spent, feel good about the work I've done that day (not to mention the dinner in the slow cooker, the yoga) and I drive to my son's school to pick him up, cheerful and available for quality family time.

How often does a day like this happen?  Well, I had one yesterday, which is why this description is so fresh in my mind.  But really--how often?  Probably about once every two weeks, if I'm completely honest.  Something usually gives.  I struggle with getting to the page in the morning, and it's noon before I begin to accomplish anything.  I get sidetracked by a disappointing email, or an exciting email.  It almost doesn't matter what the content, a full in-box is always over-stimulating.  I don't get to the yoga mat.  I don't make dinner.  My work suffers.  Four o'clock rolls around and my head feels like it's about to pop off my shoulders, and when I pick my son up at school, I am in a fog, emotionally unavailable and hating myself for it.

The question, really, is why?  Rarely, it happens that something legitimate gets in my way.  Say, a leak in the house.  A blizzard.  A call that a friend's parent has passed away.  You know, life.  But more often than not, the only thing getting in my way is me.  Sound familiar?  It seems so simple, so obvious that all we need to do is get out of our own way.  Set up some ground rules (no internet, no email, no phone) and just follow them.  But we all know that it isn't that easy.  And the reason it isn't easy is because writing is hard.  It ain't for sissies.  It's painful, exhausting, and it exposes nerves we didn't even know we had, not to mention turmoil.  It unleashes the beast of memory.  Left to our own devices, we will do anything to avoid it.  Even though we know that we'll feel better if we just sit down and get to work.

Consider this a challenge.  Just this morning I saw a tweet (yep, today wasn't as good as yesterday) about a 28 day meditation challenge a favorite teacher of mine is starting.  Well, how about a 28 day writing habits challenge.  Do just these three things religiously: 1) begin your day by reading something nourishing, remembering Jane Kenyon's advice to always have good sentences in your ears.  2) Wait until you've been at work for a while––say, an hour––before checking email or going online.  If you can't do it on your own, download Freedom.  And 3) Take a yoga or a meditation break––even if you don't do yoga or meditate.  Even if you're totally resistant to the idea.  Just try it.  Here are a few suggestions.  Oh, and one more, a treasure trove of talks about meditation.   I'll be doing this too.  Please let me know how it's going!

It never gets easier.  Wait, bear with me--I'm not complaining.  I promise this isn't going to be a pessimistic rant.  What I mean to explore is the false idea so many of us have that the writing life will, at some point, start to go more smoothly.  That we are climbing, climbing, the terrain is rocky, strewn with roots and all manner of stuff to trip us up, but then we will reach a summit, there will be a clearing, the fog will lift, the vista endless.

Sorry, but it isn't going to happen.

Every single day, the writer begins again.  When we wake up in the morning, when we roll out of bed, brush our teeth, splash our faces with cold water, make the coffee, the toast, pack the sandwiches into lunch boxes, bundle our children off to school with the proper mittens and hats and sports attire and homework, when we wash the dishes, make the beds, answer the emails, walk the dogs––until the moment when we finally sit down at our desks, we are preparing to begin again.  We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, a memoir.  We may be nearing the finish line on a piece of work that has taken us years.  We may, in fact, be attempting to start something new.  But wherever we are within our work, we have never been exactly here, today.  Today, we need to re-learn what it is that we do.  We have to remind ourselves to be patient, to be gentle with our foibles, to be ruthless with our time, to withstand our frustrations, to divide our attention if we are parents of young children.  We must remember what it is that we need.  The solitude of an empty home?  A strong cappuccino?  A walk through the woods?  An hour of yoga?  A bath?  Half an hour with a good book, the echo of beautiful sentences in our ears?

When I was first learning to meditate, this idea of beginning again was revelatory.  It still is.  When Sharon Salzberg spoke of catching the mind, scampering off like the little monkey that it is, into the past, the future, anywhere but here, she suggested that the real skill, in meditation, is simply noticing that the mind has wandered, and beginning again.  So liberating, this idea that we can start over at any time, a thousand times a day if need be.  I see many parallels between the practices of meditation and writing, but none are more powerful than this.  Writing is hard.  We resist, we procrastinate, we veer off  course.  But we also have this tool, this ability to begin again.  Every sentence is new.  Every paragraph, every chapter, every book is a country we've never been before.  We're clearing brush.  We don't know what's on the other side of that tree.  How can we?  We are visitors in a foreign land.  And so we take a single step.  Up the stairs after the morning coffee.  Back to the desk after the doorbell has rung.  Returning to the manuscript that has been languishing, becoming a stranger.

No, it never gets easier.  It shouldn't get easier.  Word after word, book after book, we build our writing lives.  Hopefully we don't repeat ourselves.  Hopefully we grow, deepen, evolve as interpreters and witnesses of the world around us.  We remain willing to feel our way through the darkness, to stop, take stock, breathe in, breathe out, begin again.  And again, and again.

I've been thinking lately about the place inside of us from which we write.  Of course, for each one of us, this place is, de facto, different.  I recently came upon these words from a Paris Review interview of Cynthia Ozick: "What do I mean by "private heart"?  It's probably impossible to define, but it's not what the writer does–breakfast, schedule, social outings–but what the writer is.  The secret contemplative self.  An inner recess wherein insights occur.  This writer's self is perhaps coextensive with one of the writer's sentences.  It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence than in five or ten full-scale biographies."

The secret contemplative self.  The private heart.  The very phrases bring tears to my eyes.   I don't know about you, but for most of us, our daily lives take us farther and farther away from that secret self, that private heart.  A paradox central to most writers lives is that so often we spend our days not writing, not reading, not in the silence in which the secret contemplative self thrives, but rather, speaking, tweeting, traveling, facebooking, trolling the internet...doing, rather than being.

It is only in the silence that our voice emerges.  It is only in the movement of the hand across page, one word following the next, in the crafting of sentences that we know ourselves.  We can talk ourselves blue in the face, and we may be telling a certain kind of truth, but it is not the deepest truth, not the truth of our private heart.  When people ask me when I knew I wanted to be a writer, or when I "decided" to become a writer, it is this I think about.  This bittersweet pleasure, this pressure and longing to find myself on the page.  It's always been this way for me, since I was a child scribbling in my notebook.  A shape emerges.  An image, a fragment, a thought I didn't know I was thinking.

The more time I spend away from the page, the further that secret self recedes.  I know she is not always available to me.  She is a chimera, elusive, finicky, sly.  She doesn't always want to be found.  She likes to be treated with the respect she deserves.  And that respect involves sitting down.  Showing up.  Eliminating distraction.  Remembering that the writer's heart is a private heart, that our sentences are like candles in the darkness, showing us the way.

This morning, at a loss, I stretched out on the new chaise lounge I bought for my office–the chaise lounge I decided, when I first saw it in a local shop, would change my writing and reading life, and flipped open my copy of Virginia Woolf's A Writing Diary.  This never fails me.  When I remember to do it, it always sets my day straight.  Randomly opening it to a page, I read:

"My bread bakes well.  All is rather rapt, simple, quick, effective–except for my blundering on at The Waves.   I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic's dream.  Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading;  and pencil them into some sense.  Still I am not satisfied.  I think there is something lacking.  I sacrifice nothing to seemliness.  I press to my center."

How many lessons there are to be learned in this one brief paragraph!  First, the revelation that Woolf felt she was blundering as she was writing one of her masterpieces.  That we all feel we blunder.  We are failing at every moment to get it right.  The chasm between the perfect work that exists in our imagination and the chicken scratches on the page can be too much to bear.  Still, we write.  Woolf wrote through bad shots, compromises.  She was willing to put her lunatic's dream down on paper.  Then, the shaping, the penciling into some sense.  Still–and of course!–she is dissatisfied.  Something's missing.  Something's wrong.  She stays longer, doesn't polish it into prettiness, but instead, presses deeper, ever closer to the center, to the place where it's pulsing, tiny, alive.

I don't know about you, but I need to learn these lessons again and again.  I lose sight of how hard it is for all of us, and assume that it's just hard for me.  I wake up with my mind ironed clean, the best of intentions, but within moments of my feet hitting the floor, already I've begun to fret.  The dog left a stain on the carpet.   I need to schedule a doctor's appointment.  Those expenses for a recent business trip need to be turned in.  My in box is full of chores.  Letters to be written.  Why not do them now?  The chores are real, but they can also be done later.  They're a hedge against the true work at hand.  My job, the one that I have done for better or worse for the past twenty years, does not involve the dog stain, doctor's appointment, expenses, letters.  My real job involves pressing to the center.  It's hard, and painful, and god there is always something to distract us, something easier to do.  (Baking bread, perhaps?) Writing well involves walking the path of most resistance. Sitting still, being patient, allowing the lunatic dream to take shape on the page, then the shaping, the pencil on the page, breathing, slowing down, being willing–no, more than willing, being wide open–to press the bruise until it blossoms.

I recently came upon this wonderful quote from Anne Lamott: "In this dark and wounding society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, "This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong."  And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing.  After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with the one thing you've been avoiding all along––your wounds."

For years, I railed against the idea that we write from our wounds.  It makes all writing sound autobiographical.  It seems to discount the imagination, and imply that writers simply bleed onto the page.  But I've come to see that wound is just another word for obsession, and obsession is just another word for theme, or subject matter.  We cannot get away from what obsesses us.  Why would we even want to?  Those of us who write are enormously lucky to have something to do with our obsessions, a craft, an art, that turns what haunts us into something that (hopefully) resonates for others.

In truth, I often have no idea what drives me forward when I'm writing a work of fiction.  I try to remain willfully obtuse about my themes, because to over-think, at least in the early stages, creates a self-consciousness that ruins the work.  It's only later, much later, when a story or a novel is finished, that I understand what it is that I've done, and what has driven me to do it.  And still... what is most powerful is that feeling of writing in the dark, of following that line of words, first one, then another, and slowly building something that way.  A shape emerges.  It is not our business to analyze it as it takes shape, because analysis will ruin it.  First there is a foundation, then doors, windows, a roof, furniture, a faucet dripping, a flower drooping in a vase, a child crying alone in a room... Who is the child?  Why the dripping faucet?  We keep writing forward, trusting that, in time, we will know.  In other words, we allow the imagination, along with our invisible wounds, to weave together in ways that defy comprehension, that wither under too much reflection.  This is how we find our niche.  Our own fingerprint.  The one that is ours and ours alone.  This is how our wounds become art.

Recently I've been preparing to teach two intensive short-term workshops––one here, and one here––and I have therefore been immersed in one of my favorite activities.  Re-reading.  I have re-read Cheever, Munro, Didion, Ozick, Dillard, Virginia Wolff, and also dipped in and out of favorite passages in modern memoirs, and instructive first and last sentences.  I have been thinking about sentences, structure, character, setting, voice, tone, plot.  The new chaise I bought for my office is covered, just as I imagined it would be when I bought it, with books and papers.  And my mind is full, almost bursting, with thoughts about the creative process.

I confess that I have mixed feelings when it comes to teaching craft. There are brilliant teachers of craft, and I know they don't feel the same way I do about it.  When I think of teaching craft, I picture myself standing beside an old car, perhaps a vintage car, that has run efficiently and without incident for many years, and deciding, just for the hell of it, to open its hood and poke around.  Oooh, what's this?  A piston?  What's a piston?  I've been driving for years, without knowing, or needing to know.  I often tell my students that if they're sitting down to write while thinking about structure, point of view, setting, voice, plot, they're setting themselves up for misery.  That kind of self-consciousness has no place in the creative process.  There is an intuitive freedom in the getting down of a first draft, and so often, students make the mistake of thinking that the burnished prose of published, completed work just came out that way.  It almost never does.  It takes draft after draft after draft, and at a certain point, it may require knowing what a piston is.  So to speak.  But not when beginning!  Never at the beginning!

Lately I have been enduring a time of waiting.  I'm working on my book about writing, but my next novel is proving elusive--as, if I am completely honest with myself--my novels always do.  It's only when I reach a point of true despair that I begin to see through the forest to the next work of fiction.  I can't fake this despair and fool the muse.  It doesn't help to tell myself that this always happens and eventually I will find my way.  This time, I am convinced, it's different.  I have nothing.  My interior life a blank slate.  Yesterday, while re-reading an interview with Cynthia Ozick, I came across this gem: "The only thing more tormenting than writing is not writing."  I took comfort in this, as I always do from the words of my fellow writers.  And, in the meantime, I wait for what Ozick calls my "private heart" to once again reveal itself to me.  "It's probably impossible to define," she writes, "but it's not what the writer does––breakfast, schedule, social outings––but what the writer is.  The secret, contemplative self.  An inner recess wherein insight occurs."

Ozick goes on to say something that I want to impart to my students over this next month, on these two retreats: "The writers self is perhaps coextensive with one of the writer's sentences.  It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies.  Or interviews!"

This strikes me as a deep and powerful truth.  And it exists in the place that knowledge of craft cannot touch.  It exists in the dark recesses of waiting.  Of enduring.  Of reading and re-reading and thinking and not willing anything into being, but rather, allowing the possibility for a whole new shape to form.

This morning I was at a loss when I sat down to work, so I did something I haven't done in a while--something I had been in the practice of doing, but lately had forgotten about: I pulled Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary off my desk, where it is always within arm's reach.  Then I put on my glasses, held the book for a moment, communing with it, and cracked it open to a random page.  This has never failed me.  When I treat A Writer's Diary like the I Ching, it always gives me what I need.

"Can we count on another 20 years?" Woolf asks.  "I shall be fifty on the 25th.  Monday week that is: and sometimes feel that I have lived 250 years already, and sometimes that I am still the youngest person in the omnibus...Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live.  I mean I think I am about to embody at last the exact shape my brain holds.  What a long toil to reach this beginning!"

This is what we all want, what we work towards, isn't it?  To embody (at last!) the exact shape our brains hold?  I have been thinking lately about what it means to come fully in line with one's own vision.  And by vision I mean nothing grand.  I mean the peculiar alchemy, the blend of obsession, preoccupation, history, psychology, character, constitution, curiosity that makes each of us as individual as a snowflake, and our time here just about as fleeting.  The sculptor Anne Truitt put it this way: "The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity."

The juxtaposition of those two ideas: the nerve of most intimate sensitivity, yes -- but then that word, steadfastness.  It implies patience, slowness, quietude, gentleness with the self--all the while working along the nerve. This is it.  The whole story.  Everything we need to know about what it is to do this work, to live this life.  And yet, it's so difficult to achieve.  As in a meditation practice, there are moments we feel it--ah yes, there it is, I am completely inside this moment--but already, as we're thinking it, the moment has passed.  We have returned to self-consciousness, self-awareness, abstraction, intellectualizing.  We have teetered and fallen off that razor's edge.

These days, I am exquisitely aware of the days, hours, minutes when I am moving in the right direction--towards embodying the exact shape my brain holds.  It seems to me that only there will it be possible to write anything singular, and as I get older, I want nothing less than this.  I don't just want a career as a writer, even though that has been a privilege and a gift.  But no--now, as I fully enter what Carl Jung calls "the afternoon of life", what I want is to create work that is that very snowflake.  I am less and less interested in asserting myself (you know...thinking: damn, that's a good sentence!) and increasingly my desire is to disappear and have the work itself be the thing.

"For God's sake, do not write about something," wrote Emerson.  "Let the writing be the thing itself.  Every sentence should be its own evidence."

Years ago, I came across the following line from The Gnostic Gospels: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you.  If you do not bring forth what it within you, it will destroy you.  From the moment I first read these words, they have never left me.  They seem to encapsulate powerful, even profound, wisdom about how to live, and how to write.  We can only be who we are.  So simple, really, and yet so hard to remember on a daily basis.  If we try to be someone else, or to write like someone else, not only are we perverting our very nature, but--in more practical terms--we are creating work that cannot possibly ring true.

Sure, there have been times that I've looked to other writers.  Times when I have compared myself to them.  Times when I wished that my work were...edgier, say.  I have never fit into the post-modern, hyper-aware, ironic and hip coterie of my particular generation of writers.  Instead, my work has tended to be highly personal, whether in an obvious sense when I write memoir, or in a more veiled sense (sometimes veiled even to myself) in my fiction.  My obsessions and concerns, my history, my psychological and emotional reality are my interior blueprint:  the place from which my work springs.

It cannot be otherwise.

Lately I have been thinking of my own particular trajectory, and have begun to feel stirrings of gratitude for this path I'm on.  Seven (going on eight) books into this writing life, if I were to stop and compare, I might become stymied.  I might, in fact, have to crawl under my bed and stay there for a while.  I have had friends who have soared to the tops of bestseller lists.  Friends who have won the most major prizes that exist to be won.  Friends who are having trouble selling their next manuscripts.  Friends who wonder if they can keep doing this, when the response to their books has been resounding silence.  I have friends who are rich and friends who are broke.  Friends I try not to envy, and friends I suspect envy me.   And all the while, I have one job, and one job only: to bring forth what is within me.  To hew as closely and as carefully as I can, to listen well, to my own, singular, idiosyncratic vision.  Not because it's brilliant, or important, or worthy.  But because it is mine.

Such a simple idea, really.  We need to be open to the world around us.  To pay attention, not with a hyper-intense staring-down of every small detail and bit of dialogue or perfect image, not with tensed muscles and clenched jaws, but with a sense of looseness.  Of openness.  Of generous engagement with our surroundings.  Otherwise, ideas will pass us by.  We'll be too busy hunting them down to actually see them when they present themselves--and trust me, they always do.

I have lately been reminded of the state I find myself in when I'm between books.  And I'm here to tell you: it isn't pretty.  No matter how many times I've done this, it doesn't change.  I become convinced, at a certain point between finishing one book and beginning the next, that I will never have anything else to say.  This time, I'm certain, the well has run dry and it won't fill up again.  I can tell myself that my own history has proven me wrong.  I can try to remember that this always happens, and, like a huge, crashing wave, it always passes. Eventually I find myself on the other side of it.  Drained of all fear.  In fact, so drained of fear–so sick and tired of my own thrumming anxiety–that  the feeling becomes one of recklessness.  A good kind of recklessness.  Fuck it.  I'm ready.  And only when I'm in this state of readiness, recklessness--again, of openness--do the ideas come.  They come in the form of a fragment, an image, an overheard sentence, one piece of an idea meeting up with another and then, suddenly, boom, there it is.  It cannot be forced.  It will not happen if I am trying too hard, if I'm too panicked or tense or over-eager.

But it's a hard-won feeling, and sadly there are no shortcuts to it.   To reach that place, that take-no-prisoners place where the creative process takes root, there is always a journey through a sticky, dark jumble of self-recrimination, self-censorship, self-loathing.  There should be a 12 Step Program for writers who are between things, for writers who are beginning something new, who are struggling.  (Of course, it could be argued, there should be a 12 Step Program for every step of the way, since none of it is easy.)  But the white-hot recklessness that springs from the darkness and allows us to put those first words down on the page is something like falling in love.  Once you actually know the feeling, there's no mistaking it.

I used to teach in an MFA Program which advertised using the following tag line: Live the Writer's Life in New York City! During the years I taught there, I was indeed a writer living in New York City, though I had no idea what living the writer's life meant.  I got up every morning, walked the dog, wrote.  I met friends—some of whom were other writers—for coffee.  I edited my work in the afternoons.  I taught my classes.  I read a lot.  Was this what was meant by living the writer's life?

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer.  Because what it really means is hard, hard work.  It means tearing your hair out.  Feeling like your head is about to explode.  It means enduring periods of time during which you have no idea what you're doing.  It means rejection, failure, disappointment and confusion, only occasionally tempered with acceptance, triumph, joy and clarity.  From a distance, it can look good—I know this as well as anyone—but if you get up close to a working writer, what you can see and hear and even smell is the steady thrum of tension and despair that is necessary to get the words to fall onto the page in the right way, in the right order, and with the possibility of lucidity, even poetry.  We are after nothing so much as transcendence.  We must lose ourselves, temporarily, as we find the shape of our consciousness on the page.  This is  living the writer's life: existing in a kind of dream state, at once here and not here, paying attention while listening to a faint, internal music. Taking the leap, trusting the fall.

Notice I'm not talking about readings or awards dinners or book parties.  At this same MFA program, a student once rushed through my office door, having stood me up for a scheduled conference.

I'm sorry, but I got a last-minute invitation to David Foster Wallace's book party! she told me breathlessly.

As if of course I'd understand.  She was, after all, trying to live the writer's life in New York City.  I had also been invited to that book party but hadn't gone.  Instead, I was holding my usual office hours, which was my version of living the writer's life in New York City.  Which is not to say that I'm a curmudgeon.  I like parties as much as the next person.  But I had learned, by then, not to mistake the parties for the work.  Not to confuse the shiny surfaces with the true grit required to make something actually happen on the page.

And so.  Twenty years into this particular writer's life, I no longer live in New York City.  The intensity of the pace, combined with family life and my writing life, was more than my delicate constitution could handle.  I live with my family on the top of a hill in the country, and during the days, my house is quiet, save for the occasional excitement of the FedEx truck heading up the driveway.  I write.  I write small things (stories, essays, reviews, blog posts) and big things (books) with occasional forays into new things (film, television pilots).  I read as much and as often as I can.  I do yoga and meditate.  I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.  How do we live the writer's life?  There's only one simple answer: we write.

It happens without fail in every class I teach.  At least one student will come up to me and ask for advice about submitting a partially-completed manuscript of his or her novel, or memoir, or collection of stories to an agent or a publisher.  These students want to get going.  They want to be launched, secure, validated.  They're desperate to be on their way.  And I understand this.  Oh, I understand it perfectly.  I was once exactly that person: impatient, hungry, with so much to prove to myself, my family, the world.  I wanted a crystal ball.  I wanted to know that it was all going to work out for me, that those solitary years I had spent laying down words on the page, then erasing them, then laying them down again, weaving and unweaving sentences like Penelope on her loom, would not have been spent in vain.  When I was in graduate school, I set for myself an entirely unreasonable goal, which was a book contract for my first novel before graduation.

I achieved that goal.

And though this is going to be hard to believe, if I could re-write my own literary history, I wish I'd waited a while.  The truth (and I can say this now, from the hard wisdom that twenty years of retrospect brings) is that I wasn't ready.  My manuscript wasn't ready.  And even though it seemed like wonderful news at the time, the publication of my first novel at the age of twenty-seven was not in fact the best thing that could have happened to me.

I needed more time in the dark.

I envy my students now who are working on first books.  No one has told them who they are or what kind of books they write.  They can't troll the internet for reviews or commentary about themselves.  In the dark, they are free to grow, blooming like midnight plants.  Even though it's not always comfortable, that darkness is the best possible place a writer can live.  There are no expectations, no definitions.  No summing up of oeuvres.  Who are you?  What makes you tick?  What are your obsessions?  In what recesses of your psyche will you find your voice?  The line of words on the page, that weaving and unweaving, is your only answer.

Writers spend our lives trying to get back to that dark place.  We have tricks and tools.  We shut down the internet, turn off our phones.  We pack ourselves off to secluded cabins in the woods.  But there is really only one opportunity to write in complete darkness, and it's a shame to waste it.  Of course we're all impatient and ambitious and hungry, so hungry.  But for what?  Believe me, the light isn't all its cracked up to be.  Stay in the dark as long as you can, friends.  You'll be amazed by what you find there.

Who do we allow inside our creative process—those fragile early pages of a manuscript—when our thoughts may be unformed, our ideas only glimmers, our characters mere shadows of who they may some day become?  Do we let anyone in?  And if so, how do we choose?

Over the years, I have tried everything.  I've under-shared, I've over-shared.  I've chosen wisely and unwisely.  I've learned to be careful, very careful.  Showing our work when it's in process reminds me of the first time I left my newborn son for a few minutes because I had to run across the street to Duane Reade to buy diapers.  I left him in the living room of my apartment in the arms of a dear friend—and a woman who knew her way around babies—but as I rushed across the street, I felt stripped, naked, missing something essential (a limb?), a four-alarm fire going on inside of me.  He was supposed to be with me—attached to me—and it felt unnatural to be out in the world—even for a moment—without him.  When I returned just a few minutes later, everything was fine.  It was a revelation.  There was my baby, sound asleep against my friend's shoulder.

We need to know when to ask for help.  When we need another set of eyes.  An opinion.  And the choosing of that person is no simple thing.  The damage—if there is damage—can be lasting, if not irrevocable.

So how do we identify our readers—especially our early readers?  There is a point in the writing of a book when it becomes hardy and strong, when it can withstand critiquing because it has already become real.  It has a skeleton, a heart, a pulse.  Every book—it's safe to say, every single book you ever will read—has the thumbprints of others on it.  An editor, an agent, another writer, members of a workshop, a discerning friend.  But sharing the work too early—or with the wrong person—can destroy it.  All we have is our own internal music, the ocean sound (as William Maxwell once wrote) of a seashell pressed to our ears.  But we must be quiet, and listen closely.  We must preserve that intimacy for as long as possible.  An uncaring, callous, unthinking or otherwise irresponsible comment from the wrong reader can silence that music, perhaps forever.

First, be sure you really need to show the work, and aren't just being impulsive, anxious, in need of instant gratification.  Can something be solved through sharing the work?  Have you hit a wall and stayed there for a while, banging your head against it?  Then maybe you're ready.  And if you're sure you're ready, here are some types of readers to avoid:

The friend who will tell you whatever she thinks you want to hear.  The friend who is secretly competitive.  Or envious.  The friend who doesn't know how to talk to writers (a/k/a the friend with the bad bedside manner).  The friend who will unwittingly impose her own vision on your work.  The friend who isn't a friend.

A good reader is not unlike a good shrink—and a manuscript is the inner life of the writer.  The meaning is already buried (or not so buried) in those early pages, and it's there to be teased out, to be understood, to be discussed and illuminated.  You know you've made a good choice when you walk away from an inspired creative dialogue, on fire, excited, the pages more alive for having been shared and understood.

Lately I've noticed that many readers believe that we write in order to relieve ourselves of our burdens, to expel our demons--to make ourselves, in some way, feel better by setting down words on the page.  And perhaps some of us do.  On my travels, I have come across many people who "journal" or ask me if I teach "journaling".  There is great merit in keeping a journal, and perhaps in teaching ways and methods to open up this mode of expression. I kept a journal myself for many years.  I wrote in it every single morning before I settled into the work at hand.  I thought of it (sorry, journal, but this is true) as my garbage can.  Everything went into it that didn't belong in my work.  Random thoughts, musings, slights, concerns--in other words, the detritus of the day.

But.  (You knew there was a "but" coming, didn't you?)  Keeping that journal had nothing to do with the attempt to write fiction or memoir.  Keeping that journal was an entirely private act.  A necessary act.  It was meant to be read by no one.  It was not even meant to be re-read by me at some later date.  It was a spewing, a releasing, of the chatter in my head.  Sometimes I think of the boxes and boxes of those journals piled in a closet in my house, and remind myself: burn them.

I came across this, from Ann Beattie's interview in The Paris Review:  the interviewer quotes a Beattie story, in which she writes of a character, a writer, "He had tried to write for the wrong reason: to exorcise demons instead of trying to court them."  And Beattie's response to this is that there is "a kind of courtship of your demons in the writing process.  I like to think I'm grappling with characters and situations in which I've more than met my match."

I love this, the precise rightness of this, the idea of courting one's demons.  So counter-intuitive, and so true.  If we write in order to release our demons--as so many people think we do--the material invariably becomes self-indulgent.  But if we court our demons, if we invite them onto the page so that we're grappling with some of the most fundamental questions that haunt us, then we also invite the possibility of creating real tension, real drama, real originality.  It requires risk.  It requires faith, and courage, and an obdurate nature.  But what else there, really?  I am reminded again and again that the dance between the self and the page is ever-shifting, that we need to find our courage to write for the right reasons every single day.

Increasingly, we are scattered.  Our days are spent answering emails, blogging, tweeting, list-making, building platforms, surfing the internet--in short, doing everything but writing.  Quiet is something we have to demand of ourselves, rather than simply being our natural state.  Meditate, and you realize it: that in-out of the breath, the way our minds, when we are able to leave them alone, are like shaken-up snow globes, all that flurry of white slowly drifting, settling down.  We want to be quiet.  We crave silence.  We need to look inward, rather than endlessly outward, but it's hard.  And it gets harder every day.

I am ashamed to admit how much I look outward--for validation of what I do, for small bits of information about myself (ooh, there's another Amazon reader comment, there's a blogger or critic who likes me, there's a mention or a photo in a newspaper!) that makes me feel like I exist.  I'm mortified by this part of myself, and may even erase this before posting it, because who wants to admit such a thing?  Except that I know I'm far from alone.  My entire creative life is about focusing inward, and yet, with a single keystroke, I can access everything that's out there.  People respond to my work, or they don't.  They prefer certain of my books to others.  They compare me to other writers.  They wonder (seriously, this was a term used on a google search) whether I'm a real blonde.  (Yes, with a little help from my friend.)  But should I know all this?  Would I care if I didn't?  The chatter has always existed.  It's our access to the chatter that's changed.  And that access creates a pull, a need, a desire to know more, more, more--as if that knowledge does anything for us.  As if that knowledge changes anything.

When I was in the midst of writing my first novel, I lived on the top floor of a building on the upper west side, in a small apartment with slanted ceilings.  A friend who lived in a grander apartment on a lower floor had a single room--a former maid's room--on my floor, which he let me use as a writing studio.  Each morning I would leave my apartment in my pajamas with with my beloved Yorkshire terrier Gus, and we'd trot down the hall about twenty paces to that room.  All that was in the room was a desk, a chair, and a rug for Gus.  A window overlooked the center courtyard of the building.  I had no phone, certainly no internet.  Nothing but me, my dog, that window, my big old computer, and a pack of Marlboro reds.  I spent my days this way.  Looking inward.  I wasn't wondering what, if anything, anyone out there thought of me, or the work I was doing.  I simply did it.  Day in, day out.

Like breathing.  Alone, silent.  That useless flurry of white, settling down.

I've been thinking lately about the role teaching plays in my writing life.  I started teaching creative writing pretty much at the same moment I began publishing novels.  I was twenty-seven when my first teaching job--at Stern College for Women, a part of Yeshiva University--was bestowed upon me by the writer who had last taught that workshop, who had to take an unexpected leave.  If they're taking a creative writing class, she advised me, something has gone wrong.

Something has gone wrong.  I love that.  She was saying it because these were young Orthodox Jewish women who were supposed to be getting degrees in a useful field such as accounting, not creative writing.  And it was true--they came to my class in exquisite opposition to the dress code (leggings under skirts, since pants weren't allowed) and brought with them their confusion, doubt, guilt, resistance, desire to express something about their inner lives.   I fell in love with them, and I fell in love with teaching.  I went on, over the years, to teach in many MFA programs and even to start a writers conference.  And it always stayed with me, that phrase.  Something has gone wrong.  We could flip that phrase on its head, and say: something has gone right, when a writer finds her way into a workshop, when a writer begins to find her voice.

We writers do our work alone in our rooms.  We live strange, out-of-step lives.  We take naps during the day.  We work in our bathrobes (sometimes).  We spend stretches of hours without saying a word to a soul.  I realized recently that I hadn't left my house for a couple of days.  Hadn't left!  But what was most arresting about this realization is that it didn't seem strange to me.  That hermetic existence is one I've chosen for myself, and which suits me.  But because much of my life is very quiet and hermetic, I'm very aware of wanting--needing--to periodically surround myself with other people who have chosen to do the same.  Many of my friends are writers.  My husband is a writer.  But teaching writing--the tremendous pleasure for me in sitting around a table with ten or twelve students who are grappling with the page--is something that has sustained me over the years.

As we get ready to make our annual trip to Positano for our writers conference--very much getting out of the house!--I'm leaving my own work on my desk.  The first third or so of a novel, which I won't work on while we're gone.  A pile of galleys and manuscripts I won't get to while we're gone.  But when we're back, I know that I will have learned and grown in ways that I will bring back to my own work.  Because true, deep focus on the work of others--what succeeds, what doesn't, and why--has the remarkable effect of helping one see one's own writing more clearly.