On Beginning Again

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

Sorry, but it isn’t going to happen.

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

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

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

On the Private Heart

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

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

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

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

On Pressing to the Center

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

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

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

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

On Finding a Niche

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

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

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

On Waiting

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

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

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

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

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

On Being Singular

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Comparing

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

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

It cannot be otherwise.

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

On Recklessness

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

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

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

On Living a Writer’s Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Writing in the Dark

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

I achieved that goal.

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

I needed more time in the dark.

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

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