On Being Between Things

There is so much I forget about the process of starting a book, writing a book, finishing a book. I tell myself that, if I could remember, I’d save myself a lot of mental trouble. If I could remember, for instance, that beginning is always hard, that middles are soupy and amorphous, that finishing is vaguely depressing, that profound self-doubt is so endemic to the process that to NOT experience it is a warning sign of some sort–if I could remember all that, my writing life would be…easier. Except that it doesn’t work that way. The latest feeling I’m reckoning with–one that is familiar, but which I have also managed to conveniently forget until now–is how I feel when I’m between things.

Having finished DEVOTION — now waiting for the copy-edited manuscript to be sent to me by my publisher, and doing all sorts of busy work like filling out author questionnaires and trying to come up with a one sentence description of my book — I find that my mind enters the unhappy state of being unoccupied. What was it Virginia Woolf once wrote about her own mind when not writing? Pecking and wretched was her term, I believe. Pecking. A perfect word for a mind like a chicken. Aimlessly, but with great energy, pecking at things.

Last week, Pico Iyer wrote a beautiful piece in The New York Times about living a simple life, and in it, he wrote that absorption is the closest he has come to understanding happiness. Absorption is what happens when an athlete trains, when surgeon operates, when a mother cares for a child, when an artist creates–absorption is a kind of loss of self-awareness, self-consciousness, and therefore–of the sense of separateness that plagues us. Absorption is what I have felt for the past two years of my daily work on DEVOTION, and I miss it.

Soon I will take my pecking and wretched mind and train it on something new, and when I do I will try to be grateful for how hard it is. Because that difficulty is the gateway to absorption, and I am always longing for it whether I know it or not.

On Finishing

How does a writer know when she’s finished–actually taken a manuscript as far as it can be taken? Whenever I think about this, one of my favorite quotes about writing, from E.L. Doctorow, comes to mind. Doctorow once famously said that writing a book is like driving in the fog, at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can get all the way home that way. To take Doctorow’s metaphor a bit further, then how do you know when you’re finished? Maybe when you crash into the garage door?

I have finished DEVOTION. Which is to say that I hit the “send” button a few weeks ago, and off it went to my agent and my editor. And then I held my breath. I didn’t even have time to turn blue in the face–and believe me, I know how lucky I am–because I heard from both of them within forty-eight hours. They both loved my book, and so we are off to the races. I went from finishing a draft of a manuscript, which is such a tender, frail thing, to pre-publication mode, which is an intensity of a completely different sort.

But still, as I turn my attention to catalog copy and blurbs and author photos and all the rest, I am fiddling. Turning a magnifying lens on my sentences. The other day I stared at two words for hours. I think someone else once famously said that a writer knows she’s finished when she takes out the final comma, then puts it back in.

DEVOTION will be published–along with a new edition of SLOW MOTION–in March.

On The Questions People Ask

I hadn’t seen the acupuncturist in five years. The last time I had visited her office had been for fertility treatments. This time, I had injured my back doing yoga, and was hoping that perhaps a session or two with her would help. She reviewed my chart as she brought me into the treatment room. The sound of a waterfall played through speakers in the background.

“Still writing?” she asked.
“Yes…still writing,” I replied faintly.

Seven books into my writing life, this question still is one of a small handful of questions that makes me insane. I resisted the urge to ask the acupuncturist if she was still acupuncture-ing. She was about to poke me with a series of needles, after all. But why is it that people ask artists if they’re still practicing their art, as if maybe the whole thing had just been a lark and a hobby–traded in for, say, needle-pointing? Can you imagine asking an attorney if she’s still practicing law? A doctor if he’s still performing surgery?

At the end of my session with the acupuncturist, she talked to me about vitamins. She suggested that I take calcium, magnesium, and a multi-vitamin. She was just trying to decide which one.

“Still menstruating?” she asked.

I limped home–my back in worse shape than before. Shook off the indignity of it all. And sat down at my desk, back to my little hobby.

On Material

Where do they come from–these stories we write? What takes hold of us, and what doesn’t–and why? I used to be willfully ignorant about my themes until I had written enough books to be informed of what my themes are by critics. Most reviews of my last couple of novels have begun with a variation on: Dani Shapiro writes about family. Or mothers and daughters. Or fractured family relationships. Or family secrets. I’ve read it enough times to know it must be true–but when I sit down to write, I am not thinking at all about theme, or material, or subject matter. I’m being led into the work by my obsessions, by some small incident I can’t let go of, something I’ve seen, or overheard, or felt. In fact, too much awareness of what I purportedly write about is damaging to the writing itself.

Here are some thoughts to avoid when sitting down to write:

1. I need to write a big book (story, whatever)
2. This idea is stupid (before even trying it out on the page)
3. What will so-and-so think?
4. I wonder if it will be published
5. I usually write about X, therefore
6. I should write about X again because it’s been so successful, or
7. I should write about Y, because I’ve already written so much about X
8. Why even bother?

I realized something recently, when looking at a file I keep on my computer of all the essays and stories I’ve written in the past few years. I looked down the list and became aware that every single time I began, it was with the thought: Here goes nothing.

Here goes nothing. It’s not a bad way to think, actually, about beginning a new piece of work. For writers, we have nothing until we have something. And the willingness to play, to try out ideas on the page, to take risks, to quiet the inner censor and just give our material a chance to live and breathe is what it’s all about.

On First Readers

I’m in the final pages of my new book–I can feel it. As I’m finishing this draft, I’m struck by a familiar feeling–one I had forgotten. I keep thinking that I’m fooling myself. That I’m faking myself out. That I can’t possibly really be finishing. And now I’m remembering that this is how I always feel after a couple of years of suspending my disbelief that the pile of pages sitting to the left of my laptop will ever amount to anything. That one flimsy, delicate page at a time will actually add up to a coherent narrative. I’m pretty sure that at some point next week, or possibly the week after, I will write the last sentences, the final words–or at least the final words for the moment. I will write the dedication page, which is something I never do until I finish. And the epigraph. (I’ll probably save the acknowledgments for later.) And then I’ll send it off to my first readers.

People often ask me how to choose their first readers. It’s a tricky thing to do–to decide in whose hands to place your brand new baby. How do you decide who to trust? Who will understand the responsibility? Who will take it seriously as the sacred job it really is? I have found, over the years, that different books require different readers. For this one, I intend to ask a couple of writer friends who I can trust to be clear, gentle and straight with me–and who have no agendas other than helping me to make this the best book it can be. In this particular case, I will also ask a few friends who are experts in certain areas I’m covering–so that I can make sure I’m getting facts right. And I will give it to my editor of course.

Maybe a better way to think of it is: who DON’T you want to be a first reader. I have a simpler answer: anyone who won’t tell you the truth, for any reason. I assume, when a writer friend or a student gives me a manuscript–implicit in this is the knowledge that I will spend many hours reading it–it’s because they want my help. Not just a pat on the back. Not just a pronouncement of their brilliance. Once I lost a friendship over this. I read a friend’s 700 page novel and went to dinner ready to talk it through (it had problems). The writer, who is brilliant and someone I respect a lot, made it clear before we even looked at the menu that he had really just been looking for praise. Praise! I could have done that without reading 700 pages. So when I give my manuscript to my first readers, it is with an understanding that we’re colleagues and take each other–and each other’s work–seriously. Gentleness, yes. Compassion, clarity. But also–most importantly–the truth about our response to what’s on the page. Otherwise, really, what’s the point?

On Titles

I am in need of a title. Devotion, which I have thought all along would be the title of this book–and which, in fact, occurred to me before I even understood what the book was really about, now–unsurprisingly–no longer feels like the right title. This has happened to me before (she says, trying not to panic). When I had finished Slow Motion, I also didn’t have a title. I remember driving the hills of Vermont with Michael, stopping in bookstores, buying endless volumes of poetry and searching, searching for a title that felt right and true. It came to me in the form of a poem by Adrienne Rich.

I then excitedly called my editor and told her I had found it: Slow Motion! It was perfect for the book.
Hmmm, my editor responded. I’m not sure about the word slow.

So here I am again, reading poetry, combing my bookcases, the quotes I have gathered, the bits of wisdom, looking for just the right word, just the right phrase, and this morning–though I have not found it–I did find this fantastic little quote from Annie Dillard’s Afterward to The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she writes about her confusion during the book’s publication:

“Later a reporter interviewed me over the phone. “You write so much about Eskimos in this book,” she said. “How come there are so many Eskimos?” I said that the spare arctic landscape suggested the soul’s emptying itself in readiness for the incursions of the divine. There was a pause. At last she said, “I don’t think my editor will go for that.”

On Confidence

I think there is a difference between approaching the page with confidence, and actually possessing confidence about the work itself. One of the above is good for the writing; the other can be quite disastrous.

A writer has to approach the page with something like confidence, otherwise why approach the page at all? There’s a feeling inside all of us who write, as small but determinative as a gene, that one has something worth saying. That there is a possibility that wrestling with words will produce a result that might be worth reading.

But there is a different, deadly kind of confidence, in which the writer believes that if she simply commits her thoughts and feelings to paper, those thoughts and feelings will have a universal coherence–simply because she’s had them. I’ve seen this again and again–I can only call it a mess on the page. And I’ve come to realize that when a piece of work is impenetrable, often it’s because the writer suffered from over-confidence.

Sorry to say that self-doubt, bordering on self-loathing, insecurity and a general sense of terror are completely appropriate…no, more than appropriate, necessary for good work to get done. A contented writer is a deluded writer. Because the truth is that the work can always be made better. That a finished piece of work is simply the best the writer could do at the time. And confidence–while it might be a very nice way to feel–is no help at all. It’s only the queer, divine dissatisfaction as Martha Graham once put it, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the rest.

On Doshas

Over the weekend, I had a consultation with an expert in Ayurvedic medicine, an ancient form of traditional medicine native to India. I went on a whim. Call it a midlife crisis. I had just had a birthday. Anyway, I had been interested in this form of medicine and philosophy for quite some time, but didn’t know very much about it. I was also curious to have my dosha identified and explained to me. Doshas are concentrations of elements in the body, and people generally have one dominant dosha, which influences their emotional, psychological, spiritual and physical life. For the curious, you can even get a sense of this by taking this quiz.

After talking for quite some time, then reading my pulse, the Ayurvedic consultant identified my primary physical dosha as Pitta, with a strong elements of both Vatta and Pitta in my mind. This made perfect sense to me, particularly in relationship to my life as a writer. Vattas have airy, spacey, creative, anxious natures. Whereas Pittas are organized, disciplined, possibly tending toward the overly controlling. As the consultant described the personality traits of these two doshas, I found myself thinking about my relationship to my work, and the very delicate balance I constantly try to maintain between air and fire — between a kind of spaciness and a need to control. Between free form and structure. Too much air and nothing gets done. Too much controlling and…you guessed it…nothing gets done. At least nothing worthwhile. The relationship, see-sawing between the two, is where it all happens. I felt like she was describing not only my internal make-up, but a combination of doshas that is probably in some proportion the make-up of most creative people who actually manage to get their work done. Of course, some days are better than others.

Today, as I sit down to work on my book, I will try to take my Ayurvedic temperature, so to speak. Am I more pitta today, or vatta? Maybe this will be one more tool in my tool box. One more way to find my way into my work, each day.

On Tenacity

When I was in graduate school, I read a great essay by Ted Solotaroff called “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years”. I used to give a copy of that essay to all my students, and I probably still should. In it, Solotaroff muses about where all the promising young writers he’s taught over the years have gone. A decade goes by, and he finds only one or two of their names occasionally in print. Did they give up? Disappear? Call it a day? Did the cold get…too cold?

I think one of the most overlooked traits that separate writers who find their way to publication and writers who don’t is tenacity. Of course there are other important–some would say more important–traits, such as an ear, an eye, a sensibility, a creative gift. But these all are useless without tenacity. In fact, it seems to me that in certain cases, tenacity replaces talent and there are certainly some writers whose whole careers are based solely on it.

But what is it, exactly? Yesterday I worked and worked on one very small section of my book. Even though I’m nearly finished with a draft, I went back to the beginning because something wasn’t quite right. And as the day wore on, as I moved sentences around, cutting them, replacing them, ditching them, loving and wanting to hold onto them, ditching them anyway… the image that came to mind was that of a dog with a bone. (It helped that my puppy was lying next to me, chewing contentedly.) But I wasn’t content. I was rabid, quite insane, really. I wasn’t going to stop until I got it right–or at least as right as I could get it for that day.

A writer with her work needs to be like a dog with a bone all the time. She needs to know where she’s hidden it. Where she’s stored the good stuff. She needs to keep gnawing at it, even after all the meat seems to be gone. When a student of mine says (okay, whines) that she’s impatient, or tired, or the worst: isn’t it good enough? this may be harsh, but she loses just a little bit of my respect. Because there is no room for impatience, or exhaustion, or self-satisfaction, or laziness. All of these really mean, simply, that the inner censor has won the day.

On Sitting Down

I’ve heard it said that the most difficult part of writing isn’t the writing–it’s the sitting down to write. This is complicated for many of us by the fact that sitting at our desks can involve all sorts of other things. Paying bills, filling out forms, surfing the web. I recently read an interview of a writer who has two desks with two computers in his study: one for non-fiction, which is hooked up to the internet, and the other for fiction, which isn’t. This struck me as a really good idea, though my study isn’t big enough for two desks. I like the idea of work spaces kept separate for separate activities. I try to keep the surface of my desk neat, and to keep only calm-inducing, non-distracting objects and papers within my sight lines.

This doesn’t always work out. This morning, as I write, there are forms to be filled out for all sorts of things. (How many camps can one child attend during the course of one upcoming summer?) Bills to be sorted. A pile of books, a pile of notebooks. Piles are never good. My datebook, open, scattered with piles of extra little pads and post-its upon which lists are scribbled. Doctor’s appointments. Jacob’s tennis lesson times. Dinner party list. The stuff of domestic life.

For the past few days, as I’ve been getting back into my book and breathing into the home stretch, I have been practicing yoga first thing in the morning, then sitting for at least ten minutes in meditation. After that–without stopping to check email, or pick dirty laundry up off the floor, or even take the dogs out–I sit down with the intention of starting to write. And it works–it really does, to sit down with that intention. I may not have the two (or three) desks that I need for each of the different aspects of my life, but I can set that intention. Once I’ve started, once I’ve gotten that foothold, I often find that the distractions don’t set in. I can check email, straighten up the house, walk the dogs, and then just come back to the work. The work is waiting for me, because I’ve already started.