On Being Self-Protective

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.

On Exposure

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.

On Greed

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.

On Lust

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?

On Pride

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.

On Wrath

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.

On Gluttony

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?

On Sloth

What a great word.   Let’s all say it a few times: sloth, sloth, sloth.  It sounds like just what it is.  Notice the way the whole mouth sort of goes lax and limp, weary from the effort. Sloth.  Now let’s take a look at the actual animal. They move only when necessary, and very slowly.  They are known to sleep fifteen to eighteen hours a day.  They eat, sleep, give birth while hanging from limbs.  Occasionally, they fall off.

For a writer, sloth might just be the most easily overcome, in practical terms, of the seven deadly sins.  When we don’t sit down at our desks, when we don’t push ourselves, force ourselves–in the face of distraction, disenchantment, resistance–to sit down anyway, sloth wins.  It can be a tricky thing, sloth, because it can take on other guises.  What appears, on the surface of things, to be cleaning the house, doing the laundry, checking email, even blogging, can actually be, underneath all the frenzied activities, a form of laziness.  Of inertia.  Of–I love this definition–emotional apathy.

One of the simplest and truest things I know about the writing process is this: when I sit down, something happens.  The work I produce on any given day may not be perfect, or even any good.  I may end up throwing it away.  But if I don’t sit down, it doesn’t happen at all.  And of the many complicated psychological and emotional reasons I could give you, I think emotional apathy–a kind of disconnection from myself and therefore to the rest of humankind–is at work somewhere within me when I’m not able to write.  Fighting that gravitational pull, fighting it with everything I’ve got, is how I get to my desk most days.

Another definition of sloth: a wasting due to lack of use.

And yet another: the destroying of charity in a man’s heart.

I know I am  most alive when I’m connected to my writing.  I feel more.  More empathy, more of the pathos of life, a deeper understanding.  More useful.  When I move away from our work–whatever excuses I might make to myself–deep down I know that I am also moving away from that which allows me to connect with the world around me.

On Envy

Is there a worse feeling than envy?  If so I’m not sure what it is.  Because at its core, envy is about comparison.  It’s a nasty, nasty piece of work.  It wishes another person ill.  When it comes to writers, envy usually has something to do with a sense of deserving.  As in, why does she get to be…fill in the blank: published, well-reviewed, prize-winning, acclaimed…when that hasn’t happened to me?  Really, it’s an ugly thing to write about, and part of me would like to just take a pass, skip this deadly sin altogether, but the truth is that envy takes root in the murky netherworld of so many of our writing lives.  And it needs to be pulled up by those roots, expunged–because it is the most internally corrosive of all the sins, and so deeply damaging to the creative process.  It causes anxiety and dread.  It makes generosity impossible.  It shuts us down, closes us off–and what happens when we’re shut down and closed off?

The muse takes a hike, that’s what.

When I was writing Devotion, one of the most important pieces of wisdom I learned had to do with the whole idea of comparison.  I was at a retreat with Sharon Salzberg and Sylvia Boorstein, and they talked about Buddhism’s Eight Vicissitudes: pain and pleasure, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, gain and loss.  These are a part of all of our lives at one time or another, the teaching goes.  So why compare?  Comparing (which is a first cousin of envy) is (GOD I love this Buddhist term) unskillful.  It is unskillful to compare ourselves to others–to envy others–because none of us are exempt from life’s vicissitudes.  What one person has at this particular moment should be of no concern to us.

Unskillful.

I have envied.  There, I’ve said it.  I’ve also been the object of envy, which is a dreadful feeling–a nullifying feeling–because when you are envied, in a sense you are being turned into a non-person.  You are a representation, rather than a being.  And on some level–not to be overly dramatic, but I think this is true–someone wishes you dead.  As a writer, my one saving grace when it comes to envy is that I don’t envy great books.  When I read an excellent book–whether by a stranger, a friend or even a foe–I am filled with admiration, wonder, and Pollyanna-ish as this may sound–hope.  It shows me what is possible, and it inspires me to do better.  To write better.  To learn more, open myself creatively.  To take leaps.

Of course, when tremendous success comes to a book or a writer that I don’t think is great…well, that’s another story.  And that is where my lessons are, in my ongoing attempt to be more skillful.  To stop comparing.  To understand that envy is a distorted mirror, and it’s only hurting me.

On the Seven Deadly Sins

It occurs to me that the seven deadly sins (envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, pride, lust and greed) can be seen and understood through the lens of the writing life.  Don’t we feel all of these, at some point or another?  Or even–on really bad days–all at once?  We spend a lot of time alone.  Musing, fretting, obsessing, dreaming, scheming, creating.  In these hours, some powerfully negative thinking almost inevitably creeps in.  At least it does for me.  So–in honor of the end of this tumultuous and intense year–for the next week, each day I’m going to tackle a sin.

First up, tomorrow: the time-honored tradition of envy.