On Emptiness

When I’m not writing, I’m a bit of a crazy person.  If I write in order to organize my inner life–to know what I think, feel, believe–when I’m not writing, my inner life is like a closet into which everything has gotten stuffed; messy drawers overflowing with junk I should have given away years ago, a jumble, a mishmash.  Hard to sort out what to keep and what to toss.  Every thought I have, I chase for a few minutes, like my dog chases a tennis ball.  Oh, that seems like a good idea!  Oh, wait–no that!  No, hold on–that’s better! I am easily influenced.  When I’m in this state, I can be convinced of almost anything.  I should write a screenplay, say.  (For which I truly–unlike my husband–have no gift.)  I should write a sweeping historical novel.  I should write a modern, tight little novel in multiple points-of-view.  I should write another memoir.  I should write a book about writing.  I should write a hybrid of fiction and memoir.  Stop me, please.

The thing about this state of being is that it can either be enormously fertile, or self-destructive.  A writer can breathe into the emptiness, can wait patiently as the parade of bad ideas and externally-driven silliness sweeps by.  A writer can, in the words of my former teacher Grace Paley, take baths.  Or a  writer can tighten up, get anxious, over-eager.  A writer can start thinking about things like the marketplace, in which case, a writer will be sunk.  I’ve seen it happen over and over again.  This way leads to manufactured ideas, reeking of fear and manipulation.  Ideas that will eventually lead to a brick wall, or a desk drawer, or (worse still) a bad book.  The only solution for a writer not writing–a writer who is not yet ready to write–is to accept the avalanche of feeling, to welcome it, even, the way that when we meditate we welcome our thoughts and feelings with a sense of self-compassion.  Oh, I’m thinking that.  isn’t that interesting.  Okay.  Now, back to the breath.  The book will come.

On Courage

I’ve been thinking lately that courage has nothing to do with the absence of fear, but rather, with being willing to walk into the fear and straight through it to the other side.  With feeling the fear and not letting it stop you.  I’ve been on the road (again) this week, and I’ve had my moments.  I did a big radio show, appearing on a panel with some very smart people who I suspected might be smarter than me.  I appeared on TV, which always gets me agitated.  All through this, I found myself thinking about the difference between fear and excitement.  It’s a fine line: the pounding heart, the sweating palms, the buzzing head.  As I walked from the green room into the recording studio, I though to myself: cool–look at what you get to do!  As I waited in the wings of the TV show, about to go on the air, I reminded myself that I was excited.  Not terrified.  And do you know what?  It sort of worked.

But when it come to writing, I think courage expresses itself differently.  What does it mean to find a voice?  To experiment wildly?  To be willing to fail?  Without the willingness to fall flat on our faces, we cannot create anything of value.  Without the gnawing, roiling, back-up-against-the-wall feeling of not-knowing, we can’t begin to hope to know.  It’s so easy to forget this.  To think that somehow, that the road to a powerful piece of work can ever be a smooth one.  Seven books, and I still have to remind myself of this.  In meditation, and in life, we are always beginning again.  We also begin again every time we set pen to paper.  What we did yesterday, or last month, or last year–that does little to bolster us.  We have to once again buck up our courage, face our fear, and walk–perhaps even with some small degree of excitement–into the abyss.

On Betrayal (2)

When I wrote Black & White, I had many questions in mind, questions that I wanted to try to answer by exploring the world of the novel.  First and foremost among these was the subject of privacy.  Where does a writer (or an artist of any kind) draw the line?  Is it all right for us to write about our parents, but not our children?  Or our parents, but only after they’re dead?  Or children, but only when they’re small?  Our spouses, but only if it’s flattering?  Our friends, but only if they’re either disguised, or it’s pre-approved?  If we write fiction, are all bets off because it’s fiction, no matter how thinly-veiled?   A writer’s life is her laboratory.  Bits and pieces float up to the surface.  Wallpaper, for instance.  Or the smell of a stew simmering on a stove.  Or the way someone’s mouth curves around a particular word.  Or a caught bit of dialogue.  Or an old couple and the way they hold hands.  Who knows what it is that  sparks us, that creates Didion’s shimmer, of which I’ve written before?

I have always been mindful of the responsibility of being someone who publishes work in which others often show up as characters.  I never feel like I’m trolling for information, or am lying in wait for the next bit of inspiration to thwack me upside the head.  That isn’t how it works, at least not for me.  But I am aware that there is a certain distrust.  A sense, in others, that maybe I’m taking mental notes.  And maybe, in a way, I am.  After all, that’s one of the great advantages of being writer (and there are so many down sides; as I write this on tour, sandwiched in a middle seat on an airplane with a very large snoring man whose head is dangerously close to lolling on my shoulder…)  But I digress.  The upside is in the aliveness.  In the sense that around any corner, there is the possibility of something that feels exciting, real, true, worth exploring.  Something that goes ping.  That shimmers.

When that happens, what is a writer’s responsibility?  There is a fine line between worrying about betrayal–and self-censorship.  There is an equally fine line between hearing  that little voice perched on your shoulder (on all of our shoulders) who tell us that we can’t/shouldn’t/mustn’t — and knowing whether that voice is speaking for the right reasons–or the wrong ones.  In my experience, most writers who are concerned about hurting others in their work–don’t.  The ones who don’t even think about it–those are the dangerous ones, running around like child soldiers wielding great big  guns.  Deep down, we know.  We know why we’re doing what we’re doing?  Pride? Envy? Resentment? Take-no-prisoners selfishness?  Proving something–as in, I’ll show them?

All I’m saying is, if we pay close attention to our motivations, we know.  And what we know about ourselves will protect us–and those around us.

On Over-stimulation

What is a sensitive person to do when she finds herself in a state of over-stimulation?  I woke up yesterday morning shaking–literally shaking.  Faint with exhaustion, teary in anticipation of just how many miles I had to travel that day.  I had been away from home–away from my husband and son– for longer than is comfortable for me.  In the previous five days, I had spoken at events in New York City, Wilmington, Delaware, Los Angeles, and Sun Valley, Idaho.  I had been in trains, cars, big planes and little ones.  And finally I was feeling it.  The well was empty.  In today’s New York Times there is an interesting piece on vital exhaustion, which may be the new term for nervous breakdown.  We are not machines — though sometimes we (okay, I) treat ourselves as if we are.  As if there is no breaking point.  No point at which our bodies, our minds, our very souls sit up, trembling, and say: enough.

It occurs to me that we writers–who spend most of our time alone in our rooms, thinking, staring into space,  occasionally putting words on the page–are among the least equipped to be out there in the world doing what needs to be done for our books.  Don’t get me wrong–I am one of the writers who really enjoys this aspect of things.  Not all of us do.  I’ve come to like speaking and reading to audiences, even as my heart flutters, even as I wonder and marvel that they’ve come out to hear what I have to say.  But we all need to know how to take care of ourselves, and what that means.  For some of us, it means not traveling at all (though these days I’m not sure how anyone sells books without it).  For others, it means careful monitoring of sleep, food, drink.  For me, yoga and meditation are my best tools for centering myself.  Last night, on the flight back east from LA, I bought myself one of those little neck pillows at the airport store.  As we waited in line for take-off, I leaned my head back.  Closed my eyes.  That small gesture of self-care made a huge difference–not necessarily because of the pillow itself, but because it meant that I was noticing that I needed comfort.  I silently repeated the Metta phrases: may I be safe, may I be happy, may I be strong, may I live with ease. As the plane flew into the night, I felt myself slowly calm.  I read a beautiful novel instead of the piles of juicy tabloids.  I began to come back to myself.

On Sensitivity

I’ve heard it said that writers are born with one less layer of skin–one less layer of protection–than normal people, or civilians, as I like to think of them.  I don’t know if this is true of all writers, but it certainly is true of me.  I have long felt like a slightly neurasthenic creature who needs great amounts of solitude and quiet.  In the words of my wonderful teacher and friend Sylvia Boorstein, I am easily startled.  My natural habitat is my house–in the daytime hours–when all is silent.  Even the dogs barking at wild turkeys out the window makes me jump.  And I admit that I ask Jacob not to practice his recorder first thing in the morning.  I recently had a conversation with another writer I greatly admire, and she told me that she never travels far from home without earplugs, eye masks, slippers… anything to create a buffer with the noisy, noisy world.  I so related to that.  But what about when a buffer isn’t possible?  What about those times when we need to simply be in the world in all its cacophony, to embrace the noise, the tumult, the…aliveness?

Over the years, I continue to develop tools.  These tools can be as simple as remembering to breathe.  To go inside myself, no matter what’s happening on the outside.  To find the words that center me, and remind me that everything I need is right here, right now.  When I am internal, I am a witness.  I’m the outsider, the observer, absorbing and seeing everything around me.  Sometimes it’s a little bit lonely–the price to pay for being on the other side of the window, nose pressed to the glass, looking in.  But when I’m too external, I become part of the world–and I lose my own outline.  I lose myself.  I do think this is the lot of the writer.  We need to be ever-so-slightly apart from what goes on around us, so that we can see it, feel it.  Ultimately, so that we can record and understand it.  Instead of berating myself (as is my wont) for the silence, the buffer I crave, perhaps instead I should see it as my greatest friend.

Rest and Restlessness: A Conversation

On Generosity

A couple of years ago I taught a course on memoir at Wesleyan University, and I noticed that many of my students (otherwise smart and generous people) were approaching the books I assigned them–some of my favorite modern memoirs!–with a jaundiced eye.  Why should we believe this? They seemed to be asking.  Why should we care? I chalked their responses up to the recent kerfuffles about made-up memoirs, what I have come to think of as pathological memoirs, in which the writers purposefully set out to dupe readers.  But as time has worn on, I’ve found myself mulling over some different theories about generosity–not just when it comes to reading memoirs, but when it comes to reading and writing–both fiction and non-fiction.

What does it mean to be generous?  To read generously?  To write generously?  Does it imply a kind of blindness, or dulling of the senses, or stupidity?  That’s what our culture would sometimes have us think.  Opening a book with a sense of excitement and exploration–of hopefulness–rather than with a skeptical show me attitude, requires effort.  Hope takes more effort than skepticism.  Generosity requires greater rigor than approaching a book with a defensive stance.

This is even more important when it comes to writing.  When I sit down to write, I have to systematically eliminate all the nasty, judging, doubting voices in my head.  They crowd in the room all around me, threatening to take over.  Who do you think you are? They taunt me.  Why do you think you have anything to say? Why should we–why should anybody–care? This voices are the enemy of generosity.  And really, though I like to think of them in some metaphysical way as coming from outside myself, they come from deep within me.  From a dark place I always need to keep my eye on.  Perhaps it is most difficult for us to be generous to ourselves–and it all radiates outward from there.

On Paying Attention

Lately I’ve been noticing that my attention is often split.  I’m on the phone and checking email.  I’m driving and checking my iphone at red lights.  (Only at red lights!)  I’m listening to my son with half an ear.  I’m in the middle of my yoga practice but also taking mental notes about what I need to do after.  Talk about not being in the present!  I know I’m not alone in this.  It’s a cultural malady, or I should probably say, a cultural reality, and it’s heading in one direction only: everything is moving faster and faster.  Now that I have an ipad, I find myself, even when reading,  suddenly taking a break to check my email every five minutes–as if an internal beeper has gone off.  Apparently I’ve been concentrating, had a single-minded focus for too long.

I could talk about what this is probably doing to all of our brains, and our children’s brains, and their children’s brains… but what most interests me about the way that my attention feels split, or even splintered, is how it might or might not be affecting my writing.  I have a friend who uses a computer application that actually shuts down her ability to go online for several hours at a time–sort of an internet babysitter.  She swears by it.  I’ve been tempted to try it at times, but am still interested to see if I can discipline myself.  Sometimes I work long-hand.  That certainly works, and I highly recommend it.  There’s nothing like the slow and tactile feeling of holding a pen, feeling it glide across the page, the ink itself, the crossing out of phrases, the circling of words, the use of arrows and asterisks rather than the neat-and-tidy cut and paste function.  Really, even as I type this now, I’m longing for a pen and a notebook.  I started Family History in a blue and white spiral bound notebook purchased at The Andover Bookstore in my husband’s home town.  This became a bit of a fetish for me, and several years later, when I began Black & White, I stockpiled these notebooks.  I still have a half-dozen blank ones in my office closet.  I like the messiness of longhand.  I like the way the pages begin to look indecipherable to anyone but me.  I like being able to doodle.  But mostly, what I respond to is the slowness.  Sitting in a chair with a notebook balanced on my lap forces me to pay attention to one thing at a time.  And when I do that, I am propelled into the moment.  Into the present, and deeply onto the page, where, as a writer, I am most fully alive.

On Exposure

You must feel so exposed.  I’ve been hearing a lot of that lately.  At readings, at speaking engagements, or even from friends and acquaintances.  How does it feel to have exposed so much of yourself? Honestly, the question itself makes me feel…well…exposed.  But having written two memoirs and dozens of personal essays over the years, I have to say that I do not feel like I’m running down the street naked.  Or that people have somehow gotten their hands on my diary.  In fact, quite the opposite.  How to explain this?

Life, as we live it, is a messy, sometimes chaotic, rambling, shapeless thing.  Even as we try to shape it–with holidays, schedules, routines, rituals–still, it remains just outside our grasp.  We can have the illusion of control, but we are not, in fact, in control of our lives–it’s one of the most complex and vexing facts of being human.  Life comes at us–it keeps coming at us, constantly changing, shifting, just when we least expect it.  This too, as the great Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says.  This too, this too, this too.  But when a writer sits down to write memoir, one of the extraordinary, hidden gifts of that process is that through the craft itself, through the shaping, forming, editing, pruning, thinking, that writer is–for that brief moment–in the driver’s seat.  With all the time in the world at her disposal, the writer is creating order out of chaos.  Clarity out of confusion.  A memoir is not a diary.  Diaries (unless they are meant for publication) are like garbage cans, collecting the detritus, the trash, the ramblings of a mind trying to sort itself out.  I would die if someone were to read my diaries.  But when a reader writes to me about Devotion, or a young woman comes up to me to talk about Slow Motion, or I stand in front of a group of people who have read my work, I feel something powerful, something that has nothing to do with exposure.  It has to do with connection.  Of one soul reaching out to another soul as the poet Jane Kenyon once wrote, and saying I’ve been there too.

On Intention

In the yoga and meditation world–really in the world of anyone seeking–the concept of intention comes up a lot.  Setting an intention.  Being aware of one’s intention.  Remembering one’s intention.  In the writing world, this word comes up far less, but I think I want to bring it into the dialogue about what it means to sit down to write.  Do we sit down with scattered thoughts and ideas?  With a wish and a prayer?  With a bit of self-trickery (as I have often done) pretending that it doesn’t matter, the whole “here goes nothing” approach to beginning something new, which I’ve found helpful over the years because it silences the whispering voice that tells me I can’t do it anyway?

People often ask me how I know if a glimmer of an idea should be a short story, a novel, an essay, a memoir, a screenplay–or anything at all.  That part of it always seems clear to me from the get-go, and I’ve been thinking about why.  Recently, a few loose ideas have been floating around my mind.  Two are clearly novels.  One is a short story.  One is either a screenplay or a magazine profile.  In all likelihood, only one of these (if any) will see the light of day.  I’ll mull, I’ll obsess, I’ll talk a little about it with a trusted friend or two–and then I will sit down at some point, and embark.  Usually, this point of embarkation for me comes from a pretty committed place.  One idea will have risen to the surface and announced itself as The One.  I’m not much of a player, a tinkerer.  I spend quite a bit of time between books, and that time is usually all about coming up with the next idea.  This happens not from sitting at my desk tearing my hair out, but doing other things–sleeping, eating, yoga, walking, driving, taking baths.  In fact, just the other night, one of my ideas for a novel came to me while putting on my make-up before going to a wedding!  But once it does, this is where I think intention comes in.

Intention.  A beautiful word, really.  When I think of it, I think of a face: rapt, brow slightly furrowed, eyes focused.  A body, posture alert.  A certain readiness, framed by the moment.  Intention pulls us into the moment.  It tunes out the external, the detritus, the useless worries.  Come into this second, this minute, it seems to say.  Bring your whole self to bear on setting this single word down on the page.  And then the next one.  And the next.  And here we go.