On the Brass Ring

A number of years ago, there was a small item in the gossip pages about a book contract I had just signed.  It was a sizable contract for two novels, though if you actually consider the number of  years it took me to write both books, the annual income would sound less than extraordinary.  Nonetheless, the day the gossip item ran, I received a call from a novelist friend of mine, herself the author of several published books.

“You just grabbed the brass ring,” she said.

Brass ring?  I knew what she meant–and heard the puzzlement in her voice, the competitive why you and not me edge.  But what struck me at the time, and has struck me many times since, is how wrong she was about that.  There is no brass ring.  The procuring of agents, publishers, book contracts, sales, reviews, grants, awards–all writers can be forgiven for comparing, for believing that such a moment might signify arrival.  Except that there is no such thing as arrival.  You arrive, and discover that the front door has been moved.  You arrive again, and it has been moved again.  You realize, at a certain point, that you’d better damn well enjoy the journey, because there is no destination.

Recently Devotion hit a couple of bestseller lists–one of them, quite high up on the list.  Michael, Jacob and I were in London when this happened.  I awoke, jet-lagged, in a hotel room to the news.  And truthfully?  It was a good day.  One, single, good day.  We went out to dinner that night, and all raised our glasses.

“Mom’s a bestseller!”  Michael said.  And it was true. I was.  And I was happy.  For that one week, that one moment.  I tried to take it in.  I was pleased, and grateful.  But it was no brass ring.  In my writing life, there have been plenty of moments in which something I have hoped for, something I couldn’t even have dared hope for, has happened.  The great review, the bestseller list.  The elation is fleeting.  Like a sugar rush, it is followed by an emptiness, a crash.  We writers are greedy creatures.  We want more, more.  There is no enough.

I was talking about this with Ron Carlson last week, over lunch on the beach in Positano.

“There’s only one brass ring,” Ron said. “It’s being able to go back into the darkness in which we do what we do.”

In other words, it’s the writing.  And anyone who thinks otherwise is in the wrong business, for the wrong reasons.

On Students

I’m just back from Sirenland, and a very special week of teaching.  Ron Carlson, Jim Shepard, Hannah Tinti, visiting writer Nam Le, my wonderful husband, and thirty writers (and another twenty spouses, partners and children) who came from all over the United States to join us in the endeavor of thinking/eating/breathing the creative process.  It always amazes me that writers–prickly creatures that we often are–can come together in the near-sacred process of trying to make one another’s work sing. To my students from Sirenland 2010, thank you for your generosity of spirit.  Arrivederci!

On Endurability

In 1985, the great editor Ted Solotaroff wrote an essay in which he mused about why most of the talented young writers he had known had disappeared, vanished from the literary landscape.  The essay, called “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years”, found its way into the hands of nearly every young writer I knew at the time.  A bracing news bulletin, a source of intense discussion, a cautionary tale, Solotaroff wrote that the main quality separating those writers who persevere and those who fade away isn’t necessarily talent, but rather, something he called endurability.

Last week, I published an essay for the Los Angeles Times in which I revisit Solotaroff’s 1985 essay, and take a look at where we stand today.  What does it mean to endure as a writer in 2010?  Read it here.

Of course, there are many different ways in which writers are called upon to endure.  One needs this quality of endurability in the face of creative blocks; or emotional distress; or in the face of a steady stream of rejection, or criticism, or just plain lack of interest.  The only answer I have ever found in the face of all this is a steady, unwavering relationship to the work.  As Annie Dillard writes: “A work in progress quickly becomes feral.  It reverts to a wild state overnight.  It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fasted a halter, but which now you cannot catch.  It is a lion you cage in your study.  As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength.  You must visit every day and reassert your mastery over it.  If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.  You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!'”

It takes a lot to be a lion tamer: bravery, courage, quick instincts, a blind–perhaps idiotic–take -no-prisoners belief in one’s own power.  But more than anything, this: the ability to endure.

On Multi-tasking

So my loyal readers of Moments of Being may have noticed that I have begun a new blog in which I continue Devotion.  I thought about combining the two blogs, but decided instead to maintain each one separately.  Writing, of course, is a practice, its own act of devotion.  But because Moments of Being is very much about the craft of writing and the psychological and emotional life of being a writer, and because I so love writing it, I didn’t want to mix the two.  It strikes me, particularly today, that we writers need constant reminders that we live by our own peculiar rhythms and that we are, in many ways, outsiders, our noses pressed to the glass.  For the past couple of days I’ve been at a literary event in Florida, and have met a bunch of writers I hadn’t known before–fascinating, warm, wonderful people, I recognize them all as having that quality peculiar to writers, which is to say, we spend most of our time alone in room, except when we’re suddenly in front of audiences, trying to articulate what it is that we do.  We’re introverts and performers.  Outsiders and teachers.  Requiring solitude but longing for company.

I keep copies of old Paris Review Interviews near my desk for the same reason that I so enjoyed the company of these new writer friends over this long weekend in Florida.  We’re all in our tiny solitary rafts doing our work, living our lives–but it’s good to remember that we’re all in the same boat.

On Getting a Great Review

This just came in from Publisher’s Weekly–a starred review!

* Devotion, Dani Shapiro. Harper

Shapiro’s newest memoir, a mid-life exploration of spirituality begins with her son’s difficult questions—about God, mortality and the afterlife—and Shapiro’s realization that her answers are lacking, long-avoided in favor of everyday concerns. Determined to find a more satisfying set of answers, author Shapiro (Slow Motion) seeks out the help of a yogi, a Buddhist and a rabbi, and comes away with, if not the answers to life and what comes after, an insightful and penetrating memoir that readers will instantly identify with. Shapiro’s ambivalent relationship with her family, her Jewish heritage and her secularity are as universal as they are personal, and she exposes familiar but hard-to-discuss doubts to real effect: she’s neither showboating nor seeking pat answers, but using honest self-reflection to provoke herself and her readers into taking stock of their own spiritual inventory. Absorbing, intimate, direct and profound, Shapiro’s memoir is a satisfying journey that will touch fans and win her plenty of new ones. (Feb.)

On Habits

There are a lot of things I’ve done wrong as a writer. I published my first book before it was ready, and my second book too. I stayed with one agent far too long, and jumped ship before I had fully considered what I needed. I didn’t plan out my literary career, to the degree that such things can be planned, but rather, allowed myself to be buffeted by the winds of other people’s ideas and projections. I don’t regret any of it, because seven books later I am aware that the bends in the road are part of the process. Change one thing, in the light of retrospect, and everything else changes too.

But one thing I have always been pretty good at is creating habits that support the work. People often assume I must be disciplined, but really, it’s all about habit and routine.

What do I need to get my work done?

This is different for everyone, of course, and life circumstances also dictate some of the possibilities for routine. For instance, I once had a student, a psychologist and AIDS researcher, who wrote in the mornings–by which I mean 4 in the morning–before she left for work. She has published two novels. I don’t know how she did that. I really don’t. I have other students and friends who write in the middle of the night, when their families are asleep. I don’t know how they do it either. But it works for them. Me, I keep banker’s hours. I like to wake up in the morning, get my family settled in their lives for the day, and then make myself a strong cappuccino and sit down at my desk. If my cappuccino machine broke, I might have a problem working that day. I might have to drive to the Nespresso store and buy a new one. It’s that much of a habit. Another habit is my yoga practice. At some point during the mid-morning, I try to unroll my mat and practice an hour of yoga. On days when I do that, my mind is clearer, longer. And I try–though this is a losing proposition–to stay off the internet while I’m working.

We get used to whatever it is that we do. Anything can become a habit, for better or worse. But the most important habit of all–whether night or day, yoga or no yoga, cappuccino or not–is the sitting down to write.

On the Noise in my Head

How do we find the quiet space we need in which to write? By this I don’t mean finding rooms of our own. I’ve written before about rooms of our own, which are important, if not essential. But physical space isn’t the whole story. In order to write, by which I don’t mean dashing off quick, half-thought-through emails or addressing envelopes, but rather, the process of being led to the page by the words and thoughts themselves, we need quiet inside ourselves. Emotional, psychological, spiritual, mental silence. A snow globe comes to mind; shake it up, watch the flurry of whiteness until finally it’s all settled at the bottom and the thing itself–the image, the symbol, the panorama, is clear and visible.

Lately I have been having trouble with the noise in my head. There’s so much of it! When I unroll my mat to practice my yoga, it’s there. When I sit in meditation, it’s there. When I’m at my desk, it seems to be coming not only from inside my head but from the world around me. It’s on the internet, in my “in box”, in the ticking clock, the ringing phone, the piles of papers and books and travel schedules. I developed many tools over the years to turn down the volume — everything from yoga and meditation to a good strong cup of cappuccino to reading bits of Virginia Woolf’s diaries (always, without exception, a tonic) but still, sometimes… all there is left to do is make peace with the noise. I tell myself that it’s necessary, like a mountain I have to climb before I can see what’s on the other side. After all, what else do we have but the contents of our minds? And how–as writers–can we possibly know ourselves, be our own best instrument–if we can’t hear what’s in there?

Sometimes it’s appalling to listen, to really listen. Some of that mental chatter is inane. Embarrassing. Mortifying, even. Really? I think to myself. Really–that’s what’s in my head? Like an overflowing wastebasket, I try to empty it, a bit at a time. And truly–after all the other tools, the yoga, meditation, breathing, cappuccino, after the room of one’s own, the closed door, the desk full of talismans, the best way I know to do this is to write. To write past the noise, to the other side of the mountain.

On Finding Your Teachers

I have made many mistakes and missteps in my life, but looking back, one thing I can truly say I’ve always been good at is identifying my teachers–that is, the people who would respond to me, who were in a position to help me, who I respected and wished to emulate. Even in high school, during which I was otherwise a train wreck, I sought out the most engaging English teacher in the school and befriended him. We’re friends to this day, and when I read in Boston on my last book tour, he was in the audience, and let me tell you, that meant so much to me I could barely trust my voice.

In college, I was still something of a train wreck (see: Slow Motion) but I also found my teachers, and I don’t think it would be overly dramatic to say that I would have been lost without them. I remember sitting in Grace Paley‘s office, on the floor (somehow we always sat on the floor in Grace’s office, and sometimes even in her lap) and Grace telling me that I was a writer and I should go to graduate school. I’m pretty sure she just pointed at the door to the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence and suggested I walk through it. What more, really, can a teacher do than guide a student to the right door? Then, in graduate school, I received a note one day from one of the professors, Jerry Badanes, who had read a short story of mine for a contest, and invited me to lunch. During that lunch, he and I discovered that a film he had written years earlier about shtetl life in Poland contained archival footage of my family: my grandfather and great-grandfather reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish at the foot of my great-great-grandfather’s grave in a tiny village.

The Shapiro footage, Jerry’s face lit up. You’re the Shapiro footage!
I knew then, that he would help me. That he had lived, in a way, with my ancestors. That he had things to teach me, and that I would learn from him.

Jerry and I spent years meeting at Edgar’s Cafe on the Upper West Side, or sometimes at E.A.T. on Madison Avenue, when he was feeling particularly celebratory. He taught me a lot about craft, but even more than craft, he taught me something about what it meant to live as a writer, to work as a writer, to think as a writer. When he died, suddenly and far too young, it was like losing a member of my immediate family.

During the last two years, as I’ve been working on my new memoir, Devotion, I once again found my teachers. I didn’t go looking for them; I didn’t have to. Apparently, I was ready for them, and they appeared. The great Buddhist teacher, Sylvia Boorstein, the gifted yogi and author, Stephen Cope, and the brilliant rabbi, Burt Visozky. When I set out on the journey that became Devotion, I didn’t know that I would meet a Buddhist, a Yogi and Rabbi who would be my guides along the way. Their willingness to be my teachers — as was true with my high school English teacher and with my graduate school mentors — has taught me a lot about the sacred nature of that relationship.

With my own students, I try to pass it on.

On Anxiety

Of all the mental states one might find oneself in when sitting down to write, anxiety may very well be the worst of them. Of course we can’t always approach the page with a sense of inner calm, of ease, of a mind ironed clean. Sometimes we’re agitated–though a little agitation goes a long way. Rage, grief, longing, joy, frustration–all these have their place, though it’s best not to write from the center of these feelings, but rather, from the recollection of them. But anxiety is, as far as I’m concerned, the enemy. It makes us write too fast, or too prolifically, or too self-consciously. I’ve seen more writers, over the years, felled by their own anxiety, by which I mean a very particular kind of anxiety: I need to get published, I need recognition, I need it now, or I will die.

Fantasies of publication–and there are always fantasies of publication–take over and become the reason for the work, rather than the possible happy byproduct of the work, that’s where the trouble sets in. When I am at my desk dreaming of what my book is going to look like on the front tables of book stores, and what, exactly, I’m going to wear for my “Oprah” appearance, I am no longer a writer at work. I have lost the thread, and have entirely missed the purpose (not to mention the pleasure) of the process.

The pleasure is in losing track of time, in being so deeply engaged in a piece of work that hours drift by, unnoticed. You have entered what is sometimes called a flow state, or something bordering on a trance. This is why writers write. To write for any other reason would be crazy. Dreams of fame–anxiety about what will or won’t happen–is not only disastrous for the work, but for the psyche. Grasping, needing, craving–one thing I can tell you from experience is this: Nothing will ever be enough. That big review in the important place, the bestseller list, the invitations to speak…whatever it is you think you need so badly…it will fall through your fingers like so many grains of sand. It’s happened to me more times than I can count, and I still have to remind myself: What is it that makes me feel fully alive? What makes me feel a deep sense of contentment, satisfaction, even glimmers of euphoria?

Not the review.
Not the bestseller list.
Not the invitations to speak.

All of that is very very nice, but no. That profound sense that I am doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing only happens when I’m writing. Just writing. Not fantasizing, not checking my email to see if anything important has happened in the last five minutes, but simply putting one word down at a time until eventually I have something whole, something driven by my internal life–not my dreams of glory.

On Precision

These days, I often tell people not to read my early books. I inwardly cringe when someone tells me they’re reading either of my first two novels. Years ago, while talking with the writer Peter Matthiessen, he told me that his early books weren’t worth reading. I remember, at the time, watching the old master wave his hand impatiently, as if swatting away a pesky fly. I realized, with a start, that he was dismissing more books than I had even written at the time. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever feel that way. I had been profoundly attached to each book as I was writing it. I had loved them as if they were my babies–which, in a way, they were. How could I ever feel that they weren’t worth reading?

I’m seven books into this life, now. Seven books, and I can say with clarity and confidence that each of my books has been better than the last. Slow Motion was a better book than Picturing the Wreck. Black & White a more controlled and disciplined novel than Family History. Devotion, I am convinced, is my strongest book yet. I stand by those books, but I also can see the progression. I have been learning on the job all along. Is there any other way for a writer to learn? Occasionally a story emerges of a writer who holes up, spends decades in a garret, wherever garrets still exist, and enters the world fully formed, clutching a masterpiece. More often, we develop as we go.

Which brings me to precision. When I was writing my first couple of novels, I was in love with language. I’m still in love with language–but that earlier love was a blind, passionate kind of love, the kind that doesn’t allow you to see anything for what it is. I loved the sound of words, indeed, I often read them aloud to myself as I sat at my desk. When writing description, I believed that more was better. Why use one simile when you could use three? I heaped words onto the page until the very thing I was describing sank beneath the weight of the words, like one of those ice cream sundaes with too many toppings. The flavors competed. The cherry bled into the whipped cream. The whole thing melted into a giant, meaningless mess.

Over the years, my prose has become leaner. Adverbs have pretty much bitten the dust, and adjectives had better be doing their job or I show them the door too. And when I read, I am also looking for that precision. It’s incredibly hard to find just the right word. So much easier to layer on pretty words that are the literary equivalent of distracting a toddler. Look, honey! Over there–at the red balloon! The reader’s attention is diverted from the fact that the writer hasn’t nailed it. Once, in graduate school, my favorite teacher and mentor warned me against exactly this kind of pretty language: “You know how to make something sound beautiful,” he said. “Just be sure it’s actually saying something.”

Maybe it has to do with getting older. Maybe it has to do with the lessons learned from writing seven books. But now, when I sit down to write, I do so with the awareness that there is no clever substitute for exactly the right word. I’m less interested in writing something beautiful than something true.