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.

My friend the yogi and author Stephen Cope calls early attempts at meditation "the noble failure".  I have loved this phrase since I first heard Steve use it, and have often thought that it relates to the writing process.  What does it mean to embark, to attempt a piece of writing, whether essay, story, novel, comedy sketch, screenplay, whatever?  The very word essay means attempt.  There is no such thing as perfection.  No writer ever achieves what she hopes for--and if a writer thinks she has, she's often deluded.  In fact, the writers I know who have bought their own press, so to speak, are usually the ones perverting their gifts with their own overweening confidence.

So.  Failure.  What does it mean, to attempt failure?  I think it's actually incredibly liberating.  One of my greatest mentors used to regularly tell me that all novels are failures.  So why try?  Why try if all we're going to do is fail?  Because the other word in Steve Cope's phrase is this:  noble. What a beautiful idea, the idea that failure--a high wire act, an attempt, a swan dive into the unknown--can be noble.  The nobility is, I think, in the focus, the faith, the willingness to go into the corners, the depths.  To give the page everything we've got.

I am at work on a new novel, and I'm attempting things I've never dreamed of attempting before.  Whenever a rash idea occurs to  me--why not try this crazy thing?--it is instantly accompanied by its shadow, the other voice that says but you can't do that.  I've learned over the years to ignore that voice.  I hear it, sure, but I move past it.  I can try anything, after all.  What's the worst thing that will happen?  I will fail.  But the only failure worth risking is the noble kind.  What we can hope is to look back at our body of work and say, I held back nothing.

It's a very strange thing, writing about the people in one's own life.  The very first essay I ever wrote, which was published in The New York Times Magazine, was about a rift between my non-religious mother and my father's religious family.  In the piece, I wrote about the moment when my mother chose to let me know that she no longer kept kosher.  I was about fifteen years old--struggling mightily against the strict rules of my observant father--when one day my mother took me to lunch at a local Saks Fifth Avenue lunch counter in suburban New Jersey, and calmly, with no explanation or fanfare, ordered a bacon cheeseburger.  I think it's impossible to get any less kosher than that.  She didn't say a word.  Nor did I.  But in that gesture she let me know that she knew.  That she had also struggled and rebelled against the rules of Orthodox Judaism.  And so--many years later--when I wrote that essay about the rift, I told the story of the bacon cheeseburger.

When the essay came out, my mother called me.

Did you have to make it a bacon cheeseburger? she asked.

Well, it was a bacon cheeseburger, I responded.  How could I possibly omit such a perfect detail?

Several years later, I wrote my first memoir Slow Motion.  It was the story of my rebellion, of my parents car accident, my father's death.  My mother's long, arduous recovery after breaking eighty bones.  I told the story of my family as I understood it.  I wrote about aunts, uncles, parents, cousins my half-sister.  Mostly, I wrote about my own complex, interior life, and my struggle to become a whole person.  Many of my family members were less-than-happy with Slow Motion.  One aunt--my mother's sister--was angry at a description of her which was, I admit, somewhat pointed.  An uncle--my mother's brother--called to tell me that I had misspelled his third wife's name, and asked me to correct it in future editions.  My mother felt that people read the book in order to understand her, and though she never quite said this, I think she felt that I'd had the last word. This was further complicated by the fact that my mother had wanted to be a writer.  She had spent years writing unfinished things: drafts of screenplays, stage plays, children's books, letters to the editor, op-eds, poems, stories.  She drove once a week from our house in New Jersey into Manhattan, where she took writing workshops.  As a little girl, I used to fall asleep most nights to the sound of thunderous typing on the other side of the wall that separated my bedroom from my mother's study.

As I've grown older--and in the years since my mother's death--I have become increasingly aware of the responsibility of having the last word.  Had she become a writer--had she ever found her own voice--she might have written a very different story than mine.  There is both power and privilege in being a writer.  How to deal with difficult relationships?  No family chooses to have a writer in its midst, after all.  Doctors, yes.  Attorneys, insurance brokers, teachers.  But writers?  Not so much.  I could have simply chosen to not write about my family, but it was, in many ways, at the heart of most stories I wanted to tell.  I was as careful as I could be, in the years my mother and my other relatives were alive, to protect their feelings.  But it would have been a distortion of my own self not to have written about them at all.   As a friend of mine who has written beautifully and extensively about her own family once said: We don't choose our stories.  Our stories choose us, and if we don't write them, if we ignore them, we are somehow diminished.

But at the same time, I don''t feel that being a writer gives any of us the right to just let it rip.  To disregard the feelings of the people surrounding us.  So I take care.  Perhaps not as much as some people would like, but as much as I can and still not be diminished.  And there you have it: the terrible, impossible, fundamental calculus that is at the heart of every memoirist's life.  To find your voice is to tell your truth.  And there will be a different version of that truth for each and every one of us.

What does this mean, to tell the truth on the page?  How do we even begin to go about it?  It strikes me that there is something sacred about the act, the attempt.  (In his wonderful book Reality Hunger, David Shields writes that the word memoir has its roots the ancient Greek mermeros, a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mermer.  "To vividly wonder."  "To be anxious."  "To exhaustingly ponder.")

The writer, alone in a room.  Alone with her thoughts, dreams, demons, fantasies, history.  Alone with the material--invisible bricks and mortar--with which she will build, word by word, something.  A house.  A boat.  A vessel to contain those words, give them shape and meaning.  She will try to tell a certain kind of truth with them.  But what is this truth?  And what is our fidelity to it?

Sometimes it feels like my computer is on fire

This question has been coming up a lot lately.  Audiences always want to know whether, in my memoirs, I make anything up.  How can I remember the weather?  Or exactly what people say?  Or what someone was wearing at a particular moment?  Do I supply details that I don't remember?  Do I mine my life for the drama?  For the shock value?  The closest I can get to an answer is this.  I don't write to shock.  Nor do I write to manipulate.  I don't write to exact revenge, to settle scores, out of rage.  I don't make things up.  My motivation, in writing, is to connect.  To say: this is me, my truth, my world.  This is what I understand, this is my lens, this is how I see.  These are the shifting sands of my memory.  This is me, turned inside out, in all of my confusion and humanness and self-doubt.  The closer I can hew to my interior life--whether in writing fiction or memoir, though of course the material and the process is quite different--the stronger that house, that boat, that vessel will be.  The more likely that it will sail forth.

We all know there is no such thing as the truth, one truth.  We are also aware, in writing memoir, that we are telling a story.  We're not setting down a historical account.  We're not writing autobiography.  A few weeks ago, at a speaking engagement, an audience member asked me why I didn't write about a certain member of my family in Devotion.  The reason, I responded, was that she didn't belong in the book.  The book--the story--with its delicate, fragile, very specific arc, could not have made room for that family member.  Nor did I feel that I was doing anything wrong, either in an ethical or a literary sense, by omitting her.  I wasn't writing autobiography.  I was writing memoir--carving a story out of my life and my history.  Joyce Carol Oates' new memoir about her widowhood omits the fact that she has remarried.  I read a piece this week that took her to task for this.  But why should she have included that information?  The book isn't about her new marriage.  It's a chronicle of her grief.  It's a story she wrote, alone in a room, vividly wondering.  Exhaustingly pondering.  Trying to tell the truth of that time, to build a vessel to contain that spark, that bright aliveness, that attempt to capture something specific and true, essential and human.

My first writer friends were the ones I met in graduate school, and to be honest, I would say we were a bit more like frenemies.  In the hothouse environment of an MFA program, the air was thick with envy and competition, even, I hate to admit it, among some of the teachers.  When I sold my first novel while still in the graduate writing program, my workshop teacher did not even mention it in class.  She never congratulated me, nor did she come to a single reading when the book came out.  (Just sayin'.)  After those years in school, I slowly made my true writer friends--the ones who are with me to this day.  The ones who I cheer on, and who cheer me on.  The ones who, in their own solitary rooms, juggling their writing lives, the delicacy of their own constitutions, their families, the beautiful, strange, out-of-step quality of their existences, are my soul-sisters and brothers.  We don't get to see each other often.  We don't live near one another, and our lives are full.  But when we do sit down, or write to each other, and dig deep into the truth our lives, I inevitably feel less alone.

At some point in the last year, I encountered the beautiful writer Katrina Kenison.  I knew who she was, of course.  Katrina had been the series editor of Best American Short Stories for years, and as a writer of fiction, I was aware of her.  What I hadn't known is that she had moved with her family to rural New Hampshire, and had written a moving, elegant memoir called The Gift of an Ordinary Day.  Katrina's memoir is a meditation on motherhood and time and nature and...well...on being human, and it had so many similarities to the work I had just published with Devotion that it took my breath away.  Our lives, our backgrounds, the stage of motherhood each of us was grappling with were quite different--but our interior lives were remarkably in sync, and reading her, I felt less alone.  I can't count the number of times, while reading The Gift of an Ordinary Day, that my eyes stung with tears.  I don't remember which of us reached out to the other.  It seemed that wherever I turned, there she was.  I watched the amazing YouTube video she had made for her book, which had gone wildly viral.  I wanted to know her--and then, one day, there we were.  Corresponding.  Then meeting for coffee at a cafe about an hour from my home, and near her younger son's school.  A kinship, a friendship both on and off the page, was born.

At one of these coffee dates, Katrina brought me a galley of a book.  You're going to love this, she told me.  The book, with a gorgeous gem of a cover that looked almost edible-- two pears and an apple basking in the sunlight on a windowsill against a lush, leafy backdrop--was called and i shall find some peace there.  Of course the title instantly spoke to me.  Margaret Roach had been Editorial Director of Martha Stewart, and she had walked away from the city, from that life, that pace, and had moved full time to rural upstate New York, where she wrote about the pleasures and perils of solitude, and the quiet, contemplative life she craved.  Margaret's life--like Katrina's--was quite different from my own on the face of things, but as I read her eloquent, thoughtful, and yes funny memoir, I was once again struck by how much our interior lives had led us to the same desires, the same longings, the same way of seeing the world.  Though Margaret and I haven't met in person yet, we have met on the page, and in correspondence, and my circle of kindred spirits has expanded in wonderful, unexpected ways.

And so, in the name of friendship, literary and otherwise, and of community, Katrina, Margaret and I decided that all of our blog readers should know each other, and that the circle should continue to expand.  So we're doing a book giveaway -- the first one I've ever done -- and those who enter will be eligible to win one of six sets of all three of our books!  Here's how it works:

To enter, comment here on this post, and on Katrina's site and Margaret's site as well.  Ideally, if you can leave a comment about where you encounter spirit and connection in your own life, that would be great.  But if you're feeling shy, you can just check in and say "I want to win" or whatever else you might want to say.

Click here for the link to Katrina's post.

Click here for the  link to Margaret's post.

Winners will be chosen at random and the contest ends at midnight on Saturday, February 19.

To triple your chances, remember: please go on all three of our sites and leave a comment!  And when you visit Margaret and Katrina, be sure to tell them that Dani says hello.  And if what we've written resonates with you, please subscribe.  We'd all love to regularly hear from you!

One of my favorite stories--and my students have heard this many times--comes from the great writer and teacher Grace Paley, who I was lucky enough to know early in my writing life, and who was one of my greatest sources of encouragement when I was first starting out.  Grace used to tell us--her students--that she wrote in the bathtub.  The bathtub!  For years, I had a mental picture of Grace, up to her shoulders in a sudsy claw foot tub, her cloud of gray hair piled high on top of her head, a notebook somehow in hand, scribbling away.  As is true of much of Grace's wisdom, it was many years before one day, I understood: she meant that she took baths.  She stopped.  She gave herself space, time, room to float.

We need to know how--and when--to stop.  For some of us (I would certainly include myself in this group) this is not an easy thing to know.  When I'm trying to start a piece of work, before it has fully come together, I often feel like I can't leave it alone.  I gnaw at it, turning it this way and that, moving words around, re-ordering sentences, playing with punctuation, when the big ideas haven't begun to emerge yet.  This is a bit like decorating a room in a house that hasn't yet been built.  Yes, I can make my sentences pretty.  But whether they'll add up is a different matter altogether.  When I'm feeling this way--stuck on sentences, focused on the minutia--this is a really good time to take a bath.  Or a walk.  Or a drive.  Or practice yoga.  Or sit in meditation.  Or cook a stew.  Or whatever it is, for any of us, that allows our minds to stretch out.  Whatever it is that allows us the inner peace from which ideas and images and characters spring.

For many of us (me!) this is hard.  When we take our version of a bath, we feel guilty.  Lazy.  Like we're doing something wrong.  But it's so important to remember that this isn't a race we're running.  I just read somewhere yesterday that Jeff Eugenides, a wonderful guy and one of the great writers of my generation, has a new book coming out--his first since he published Middlesex nine years ago.  Nine years!  I have little doubt that there were times along the way that he beat himself up for being slow.  For not writing more quickly.  Likely, he worried that our culture's attention span might not hold any space for him when he finally was ready.  But I feel full of admiration for him.  He didn't succumb to impatience, or anxiety, or any of the scourges that plague most of us.  This doesn't mean he didn't feel them.  Let me be perfectly clear: all of us feel them, every single day. I don't trust a well-adjusted, happy, confident writer.  I mean, what the hell is that?

All we can do is run the hot water--whatever this means for each one of us--and remind ourselves that we're not machines, that the imagination must be allowed time and space in order to flourish.  And this never happens when we're sitting in front of the page, brows furrowed, teeth gritted, anxiously determined to get it right.

It took me a long time to understand that the feeling I'd had since I was a child--that feeling of always having my nose pressed to the glass, of being just at a slight remove from the flow of life around me--was an indispensable part of my becoming a writer.  Writers are by necessity, and by definition, outsiders.  We are observers of life, which doesn't mean we aren't living life, not at all--but it does mean that there is always some small part of us, standing back.  The part that's noticing, rather than engaging.  A great bit of dialogue, a slant of light, an expression on someone's face, and somewhere inside of us we feel a small jolt.  Once you've felt it, it's unmistakable.  Interesting, is what the jolt is saying.  Good material.  Does this make us merciless?  Terrible betrayers of our friends and family, of anyone who crosses our path?

I remember, once--and this has only happened to me once in my life--having dinner with a very famous American woman of letters who has written many, many books.  We were with friends at a restaurant, and I had the uncanny sense that this woman--an idol of mine, really--was watching me carefully, taking mental notes.  It was a disconcerting feeling--but I knew it was happening, and in a way, I didn't mind.  It went with the territory.  Sometimes, in the midst of telling me a story, a friend or acquaintance will stop and say: you can't write about this. Or, I'll bet you're going to write about this.  It's almost never the case, when someone says this, that I had been feeling the ping.  Other people's stories don't generally interest me as a writer.  Instead, I'm after a deeper kind of observation--the kind that then I can unleash in my imagination.  Nose pressed to the glass, the observer in me is interested in human nature.  In what makes us tick.  It isn't a conscious thing, so much as an impression, a kind of music.  And in order to feel these things, to be porous and open and aware enough, I have to remain just slightly on the outside.

As a kid, it wasn't easy.  As a young woman, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.  Why couldn't I just be part of the group?  The gang?  Why couldn't I be an insider, instead of just pretending to be one?  I might not have chosen this for myself.  It's sometimes lonely, to stand on the outside, watching.  But I think most of us would say that it isn't a choice, really.  When I was first teaching, a student came to me and asked if she should be a writer, or go work for an investment bank.  I told her she should definitely go work for the investment bank, because if it was a choice, truly a choice, then she wasn't a writer.  We don't choose to be writers--we don't choose to be outsiders, observing life.  It isn't so much what we do as what we are.  Most days, I feel grateful for that little bit of remove.

I've often heard it said that writers are born with one less layer of skin than most.  I don't think this is strictly, or even metaphorically, true -- but I do think that our daily lives, spent in solitude, mired in a kind of permanent outsider status, confers upon us a kind of hyper-sensitivity.  I'm reminded of this when I talk to someone who has a regular job, or a "job-job" as I, and my writer friends, refer to it.  Just yesterday I was on the phone for a long time with friend who has a very big job-job, and I realized just how different our inner states are.  She wakes up each morning, girded for battle.  She wears heels and cute jackets, lipstick.  She has power breakfasts, lunches, and dinners--if such meals still exist.  And I--by mid-afternoon--was lying on my office floor with my dogs, staring at the ceiling.  I was in some combination of yoga clothes, long underwear, and a big shawl.  I had spent the day sitting in my reading and writing chair...well...reading and writing.  I hadn't spoken with a soul.  I hadn't left the house.  Outside my window, enormous drifts of snow covered fields, hedges groaning from the weight of it.

We might as well have been speaking in two different languages, my friend and I.  She was part of the world out there, and I was part of the world in here.  Quiet, silence, slowness.  It's the only way I find coherence on the page, one word at a time.  When I'm writing, I never feel lonely.  In fact, I'm more likely to feel lonely, out-of-whack, when I'm not writing.  This solitude is my natural state, and if I don't have it, I lose my center.  The only hope I have of writing something good is to protect my inner life, to coddle it, to treat it like the sensitive instrument it is.  A violinist cares for her violin.  A singer babies her voice.  A sculptor finds just the right quarry.  As writers, the difference is that our own selves--our internal landscapes--are our instrument.  And so we must protect ourselves from that which throws us off course.

Here are some beautiful words to live by, from one of my favorite poets, Jane Kenyon, in the form of advice to poets and writers:

Be a good steward of your gifts.  Protect your time.  Feed your inner life.  Avoid too much noise.  Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.  Be by yourself as often as you can.  Walk.  Take the phone off the hook.  Work regular hours.

Amen to all that.

It happens like clockwork.  At every reading or event I have done in the last number of years, at some point someone comes up to me and asks the following question in a semi-embarrassed, hushed tone.  How do you deal with putting yourself...you know...putting yourself out there?  All the details of your life?  I mean, it's very brave, but don't you feel...exposed? For years, this question bothered me.  The question itself made me feel exposed, as if the person asking was pointing out that my underwear was showing, or that I had been walking around for hours (years!) with something on my teeth.

Because the truth was this.  I didn't feel exposed.  I didn't.  But I wondered if not feeling exposed by my writing--which clearly other people thought I was--meant something was wrong with me.  That I was somehow missing a gene that everybody else had, a self-protective gene designed to keep private matters private.

But now I think of the whole idea of exposure as it relates to writing very differently.  Now, when the question invariably comes up, here is my response.

You know, I didn't publish my diary, I say.  It's a tremendous privilege to have the opportunity to craft something out of one's life, to take the chaos and randomness and make order out of it.  I pick and choose what I put in my work.  Not everything goes in there--not remotely.  I only include what will serve the story, and I am always conscious that it's a story I'm telling.  I didn't publish my diary, say.  If you had read my diary, I might have to kill you.

I am, in fact, a very private person.  Sometimes, when having an intense, intimate conversation in which I sense that I'm revealing something of myself, I will feel myself grow hot, a wave of embarrassment and self-consciousness rising, literally rising to my face in the form of a bright red blush.  I don't speak easily, or often.  At dinner parties, I am often quiet unless I really have something to say.  I'm not terrific at small talk.  I have good friends who don't know about certain chapters of my life--unless they've read about them--not because I am withholding information, but because I don't tend to talk that much about myself.

And so, the exposure question is a very interesting one.  It brings to mind something that dear Frank McCourt once said at a dinner party, when his companion turned to him and asked him much the same thing.

You must feel like I know you, the woman said conspiratorially.

Darling, Frank said in his Irish accent that managed to make word sound gentle.  It's just a book.

Who among us doesn't want more?  Often it seems like whatever we writers have isn't enough.  I remember once, years ago, complaining to my agent about how one of my books was doing.  (By the way, many people would have thought it was doing just fine.)  My agent told me that she had an author who was then occupying the #3 slot on the New York Times Bestseller List, and was miserable and obsessed (see Envy) that he wasn't #2 or #1.

Sheeesh, I remember thinking.  I'll never be that way.  Now that--that's crazy.

Well, maybe so.  But I have noticed, in my own writing life, that as soon as I reach a certain goal, my mind--like a quick-eyed, sniffing little bunny rabbit--immediately darts to the next.  When I was in graduate school, I wanted more than anything to have a book contract for my first novel before I graduated.  (Yes, I know, I was a greedy young writer with something to prove--to myself, to the world, or so I thought.)  I achieved that improbable goal, and then I wanted more.  I wanted a teaching job at a good university, preferably an Ivy League one.  Check.  I published a second novel, a third.  I wasn't getting what I considered to be the serious review attention though.  I badly wanted that.  With my fourth book, I got it.  I wanted to be published in The New Yorker, and places like Granta.  Right around that time, I got that too.

Shut up, already, I know you're thinking.  You got everything that you wanted, right?

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear writer friends, I'm here to tell you in all honesty that it doesn't work that way.  I know some of you are sitting there thinking what a greedy b#@%tch. And others of you are probably nodding your heads in recognition.  Because this is the way it is.  If we are fortunate enough to reach our goals--whatever they might be--almost always, we want more.  I remember, last year, waking up in London to my husband, waving his iphone, telling me that Devotion was #3 on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List.  Now that was a very good day.  That evening, now in Paris, my husband, son and I went out and celebrated.  And I'll admit: I had a moment.  All was well.  I was in Paris with my beloved family, we were on our way to teach at our wonderful writing conference, and my book was improbably a bestseller. We toasted with champagne, we ate all manner of delicious French food, and I was completely, utterly content.

How long did it last?

It was one, maybe two days later that the fretting set in.  Would the book hit any other bestseller lists?  (It did.)  How long would it remain on the list?  (One week.)  What was I going to do next?  (It would be a long eight months before I'd be able to sink into something new.)  Was the publishing industry in as dire straights as it seemed?  (Um...yep.) And then some icky things happened. My book required an enormous amount of traveling and time away from my family in order to keep word-of-mouth going on it.  I grew ragged and worn to the bone.

How I wish that we all could hold onto the joyful moments as they come!  Whether the joyful moment has to do with completing a short story, finishing a manuscript of a novel, finding an agent, getting a book deal, admission to a writing workshop or conference, or simply feeling good at the end of a writing day--to be able to breathe into the feelings of accomplishment and creative satisfaction is all any of us ever can hope for.

I do think that greed comes from this: each and every one of us writers pours our whole selves, our hearts and souls, into the work at hand.  Those flimsy pages represent our very beings.  And so of course there is no "enough".  But I hope for all of us--at least on good days--we can counteract our greed, with this, in the words that Martha Graham wrote to Agnes DeMille on the opening night of "Cabaret":  No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Okay...this is the one I've been dreading.  The one that gave me pause, when I thought to write about the Seven Deadly Sins in the first place.  Lust?  I can make some sense out of the six other sins as they relate to the writing process, but lust...lust is a stretch.  So I'm going to take a brief detour today (before concluding the series tomorrow with the easily applicable greed) to share a few passages from one of the great contemporary writers who can create an erotic scene like none other.

But first, let's address the fact that it's incredibly difficult to write well about sex.  What makes a great sex scene?  Graphic words become strained, even comical, on the page.  And words meant to fill in as substitutes for graphic words ("member" for "penis", say) are quite possibly even worse.  The sexier we try to make a scene, the more pathetic it becomes.  You know.  Heaving, bucking, throbbing, arching... is it possible for writers to find new language for the erotic?

What makes a sex scene come to life is the quality of its realness, its humanness.  Great writers find a way--unexpected language, surprising, often deceptively simple--to show us ourselves.

Here, from James Salter's Light Years, are a few brief passages:

"At noon, twice a week, sometimes more, she lay in his bed in the quiet room in back.  On the table near her head were two empty glasses, her bracelets, her rings.  She wore nothing; her hands were naked, her wrists.

Noon, the sun beyond the ceiling, the doors closed tight.  She was lost, she was weeping.  He was doing it in the same, steady rhythm, like a monologue, like the creaking of oars.  Her cries were unending, her breasts hard.  She was flinging out the sounds of a mare, a dog, a woman fleeing for her life.  Her hair was spilling about her.  He did not alter his pace.

She saw him far above her.  Her hands were clutching the sheets.  In three, four, five vast strokes that rang along the great meridians of her body, he came in one huge splash, like a tumbler of water.  They lay in silence.  For a long time he remained without moving, as on a horse in the autumn, holding to her, exhausted, dreaming.  They were together in a deep, limb-heavy sleep, sprawled in it.  Her nipples were larger, more soft, as if she were pregnant."

And one more, because I can't resist.  Salter is just so good:

"He was moving unhurriedly, like a man setting a table, plate by plate.  There are times when one is important, and other times one almost does not exist.  She felt him kneel.  She could not see him.  Her eyes were closed, her face pressed to the sheet.

He was slow, intent, like an illiterate learning to write.  He was unaware of her; he was beginning the act as if it were a cure.  The slowness, the deliberation, struck her down like blows.

There was no movement, none at all except or a slow distending to which she reacted as if to pain.  She was rolling, sobbing.  Her shouts were muffled.  He did nothing, then more of it, and more."

Okay.  Whew.  That's quite enough.  But can we all just bow down to a master?  Do we see the way a wrist can be made infinitely  erotic?  The way the unexpected ("as on a horse in the autumn") can evoke an entire sensory world?

Pride can really, seriously get in our way as writers.  Of all the sins, I think pride implies the greatest sense of self-consciousness, and self-consciousness, as we all know, is the enemy of good work.  Why?  Think about it.  Being conscious of the self, conscious of the self while writing, means that there is an intermediary--a prideful, vainglorious, preening, worried-about-what-people-will-think intermediary--between the place where the writing really comes from and the page.

Writing doesn't come from ego.

Let me re-phrase that.  Good writing never comes from ego.

We've all read work that makes great pyrotechnic leaps around the page.  Sentences that flex their muscles.  Paragraphs that announce: look at me!  Look, Ma!  See what I can do?  And while that's completely appropriate, even delightful, behavior in a four year old swinging from the monkey bars, it has no place in the writing life.  Those sentences and paragraphs--even those that first appear to be shiny and bright--are almost always exposed as gaudy and cheap, like tossed Christmas tinsel at the end of all the revelry.  When we are quietly chuckling to ourselves about our brilliance, our incredible gifts made manifest, what we aren't doing is the real work.

Thomas Aquinas called this the sin of "inordinate self-love".

Sometimes, at a cocktail party, someone will turn to me and say: "Oh, you're a writer!  That must be so much fun!"  And I never know what to say because the truth is that it's not fun.  It's deeply pleasurable at times, but it's so not fun.  Because I'm not sitting at my desk loving what I do, or loving myself (inordinately or in any other way) but rather, trying to transcend myself.  When I'm hard at work, truly inside of the piece at hand, I am forgetting myself.  And in that forgetting, there's no place for pride.

Oh, it doesn't get much worse than this.  Wrath (along with it's very close family members Pride, Greed, and Envy) forms the deepest, basest, most toxic element of a writing life.   I can almost smell it, when a piece of work has its roots in wrath.  You know... when you want to write something because it's going to hurt someone else.   I call it the revenge memoir (though sometimes it can be further disguised as a revenge novel or story or essay).   In the revenge memoir, a writer sets out to do harm.  To use the pen as a sword.  To cut and stab with words.  Revenge memoirs reek.  They're almost never any good, because wrath is blind.

I can't tell you how many students, over the years, have turned in stories or essays that clearly have their genesis in wrath, in revenge.  He said/she said kinds of stories.  He-done-me wrong/she-hurt-me-terribly kinds of stories.  Told from a great and digested distance, of course, these stories can form the basis of  some good work.  But the key is distance.  Perspective.  Irony.  Understanding.  Told from the battle ground of the feelings themselves, the words are spewed--not controlled.  They are ammunition.  Not literature.

My favorite piece of wisdom about this, which I have been carrying around on a page of my old-fashioned Filofax since the late 1980's, comes from Edward Albee.  Albee wrote: "For the anger and rage to work aesthetically, the writer's got to distance himself from it and write in what Frank O'Hara referred to in one of his poems as 'the memory of my feelings.'  Rage is incoherent.  Observed rage can be coherent."

God I love that quote.  It's so instructive.  And it's true of any strong emotion.  It's paradoxical, but true, that we don't want to be feeling too much as we're setting words down on the page.  By feeling I mean being in the heat, the throes, of an emotion.  The crystalline clarity that comes from observing emotion is what we're after.  And that takes time.  Space.  A willingness to step back and look hard--not just at the situation, or the other person, but at oneself.

But how do we know?  Students often ask me this.  How do we know when we're ready?  When we're writing out of observed emotion and not as payback or revenge?  When whatever wrong has been perpetrated against us, in our own minds, turns into a story worth telling?  A story that might have universal resonance?  The best way I know is this.  When you sit down to write, scan the deepest parts of yourself.  Are you writing because you want so-and-so to read what you've written and weep?

If so, you're writing out of wrath. And you're not ready.

When I think of gluttony, I think of a beautiful book by Jeanette Winterson that I used to read to my son when he was very small.  In the beginning of the book, the King of Capri--a glutton--wishes that he had two mouths instead of one, so that he could eat even more.  By the end of the tale, a wind has blown the king's possessions all the way across the bay to Naples, where they end up in the hands of a washerwoman who wants only to help others with her new-found bounty.  This  being a fable, of course in the end the king and the washerwoman fall in love and live happily ever after.

Gluttony: to gulp or swallow.  The over-consumption of anything to the point of waste.  What does this mean for writers?  I suppose for some of us, it could be taken literally, given that many of us live only steps from the refrigerator, and snacking is one of the most time-honored forms of procrastination.  But what about a different form of gluttony?  What about gluttony when it comes to language itself?

I remember, when I was working on the short story that eventually morphed into my first novel, a feeling of being consumed, in love with language to the point of over-indulgence.  If one similie was good, three were better.  Writing a sentence often felt, to me, like catching a wave.  I would surf along a powerful surge of words, piling them on.  I was obsessed with the way they looked, the way they sounded.  What it took me quite a while to understand was that I was creating language that was, at times, obfuscating meaning.  One of my greatest teachers gently told me this: "Dani, you have a lyric gift.  You'd just better be sure that your beautiful sentences are saying something."

I've never forgotten that lesson.  I keep it close to me when I'm working.  And over the years, my sentences have grown leaner.  My imagery less ornate.  I've grown to understand that the gulping and swallowing of words, that gluttony, can sometimes create a powerful-seeming edifice--but one that crumbles upon careful examination.

On meditation retreats, participants are often asked to eat in silence.  To dine with a room full of people slowly chewing bite after bite, moving their forks and knives with balletic precision, pausing, savoring, contemplating--is something quite extraordinary.  What if we were to write the same way?  Not in a furious whirl of more, more, more--but rather, with complete and total discernment?