On Writer’s Block

I should begin with the question of whether it exists. What does it mean to be “blocked”? It’s a term that fills writers with dread; a steady flow of creativity suddenly stopped cold by an enormous boulder tumbling from the depths of the psyche. Writer’s block has always struck me as having a bit of magical thinking connected to it. Blocked? I mean, really? Have an espresso. Do yoga. Take a long walk. Smoke something. Switch the channels–get yourself out of it. But on the other hand, I have my superstitious side, and even as I write this I feel, just a little bit, like I’m asking for trouble by even thinking about it. Writer’s block. How is it different from a bad day, or stretch of days? How is it different from a fallow period? I have a feeling it must be very different–like the vast chasm between common unhappiness and a major depressive episode.

John Gregory Dunne once said that writer’s block is a failure of nerve. I’ve always loved that quote–I used to keep it on the bulletin board above my desk, along with a cartoon from The New Yorker, titled Writer’s Block, showing two frames of a bespeckled man. In the first frame, he’s is standing in a book-lined office, looking out a window. Temporary, the caption reads. In the second frame, the same man is standing in front door of T. Roger Claypool’s Fish Store, wearing a white apron. Beneath it, caption reads: Permanent.

Dunne’s definition of failure of nerve has helped me immeasurably over the years. It has staved off the other voices in my head–the ones that tell me I’m wasting my time, on the wrong path, taking the wrong risk (or not enough of a risk). If writing is, as I believe it to be, an act of courage–the daily triumph of faith over doubt, willingness over insecurity, hope over cynicism–then the inability to do so for days on end is a failure not of character, nor of biochemistry, but of nerve.

Each morning, when I sit down to work, my demons are lined up, waiting for me. There’s the one who tells me that nothing will ever come of whatever it is I’m working on. There’s another who tells me that I’m a horrible person for writing about my family. Still another one who tells me to fold in my towel, go back to school, do something else with my life–this, after seven books! I’ve come to realize that these demons are with me for a lifetime. Some demons whisper, some shout. Some go away for a while, then return. Futility, guilt, self-flagellation, self-consciousness, insidious doubt; all these hop up on my shoulders as I sit down to write. So it is nerve, nothing more, nothing less, that helps me to swat them away. Nerve that allows me to recognize those unwelcome visitors, to make peace with them. “Good morning,” I silently say to them, even as I push them away. I think of T. Roger Claypool’s Fish Store. “Good morning. Now, go away.”

On Impatience

It has always struck me as paradoxical that we writers–who are among the most impatient people on the planet–spend our days doing work akin to watching water boil. What could possibly involve less instant gratification than writing a novel? Or working for months (or years) on a single short story? Or slowly, painstakingly picking our way through piles of research looking for the right detail, the perfect gem, only to discard the rest? We have minds like fireflies, attention spans that wander…how else would we dream up our characters and their lives? And yet the harnessing of that light, that attention, requires an almost physical effort to stay in one spot, to work slowly, carefully. To whittle, to carve, to chip away at the words on the page. To remain dissatisfied. To throw away perfectly good work if it isn’t serving the story. Not to leap ahead — to daydreams of publication, of glory, of book parties and appearances on Charlie Rose.

Here’s the thing–and believe me, I speak from hard-won experience: That’s not the best part. The publication, the glory (such as it is), the parties and the media frenzy (hah!) of a book’s publication is not the best part–far from it. I know this is hard for those who haven’t experienced it to believe. I know there’s some eye-rolling going on out there. But it’s true–and not only is it true, it’s the worst possible thing for the work itself to leap ahead to what might happen to it out there in the world. I remember, years ago, working on my first piece for The New Yorker. It was a personal history piece about my father–a story I had wanted to write for a long time–and after I got the assignment, I became completely and utterly stuck. I was–even though I hate the word–blocked. Each morning, I sat down at my desk and instead of working on the piece, I thought about The New Yorker. Which issue would it come out in? Would there be an illustration? A photo? I pictured my words in New Yorker font before I had even written them.

I had to shock myself out of that mental torpor and into a creative state. I played tricks on myself–writing in the middle of the night, which is something I never do. Writing before that first cup of coffee in the morning. I pushed myself past the wall of impatience and into that place where all that matters are setting down the words on the page. After all, in the hermetic, odd, often lonely and certainly out-of-step existence of the writer, setting the words down on the page better be the best part. The other stuff is too fleeting–if it happens at all–and unreal.

On Doing Nothing

It’s hard for writers to remember that doing nothing is as important–perhaps even more important–than doing something. I was reminded of this last week by Ian McEwan, who spoke eloquently at the Sun Valley Writers Conference about how essential it is for writers not to feel like we must be busy (or at least give the appearance of being busy) all the time. How are we going to feel that tap on the shoulder–or see Didion‘s shimmer around the edges–that leads us to new stories, new subject matter, if we’re scrambling the hamster wheel of busy-ness?

People often ask me how many hours of the day I spend writing, and I never really know how to answer. How many hours of the day am I actually setting words down on paper? Not many. On a very good day, perhaps three? Four at the most? But those three or four hours require several other hours cushioning them. They require hours spent reading, running the dogs, doing yoga, meditating, shopping online for boots (just kidding). The work is at the center–way deep down at the center–of that puttering time. We writers are not machines. We can’t just sit down and do it. Or maybe some writers can–but not this one.

The subtle distinction, though, is in the difference between good/useful doing nothing, and destructive/counter-productive doing nothing. And the distinction is, indeed, difficult to make out at times. Bouncing around the internet can be energizing and kind of fun — but more often than not, it leads to a fizzy, buzzy, attention-deficit that can’t be good for the writing. Ditto for talking on the phone. Over the years, I have become truly phone-adverse. Reading (as in, an actual book) is invariably good. Meditating, oddly, is not always helpful. An overly calm mind can sometimes shrug and just give up for the day. As a friend of mine once said, it removes the grit. Yoga, however, has never failed me. If I unroll my mat and do my practice, I sit back down at my desk afterward feeling clear-headed and refreshed. I would imagine this would be true for any form of physical exercise–or at least solitary exercise.

But there’s another, more difficult kind of doing nothing, that exists in the months or even years between books. A writer finishes a book…and then what? Trollope was known to draw a line beneath the last sentence of a manuscript, and instantly begin anew. I love the idea of doing this–it does remove all possibility of self-doubt and fear–but somehow I know I never will. When I finish a book, I have nothing left inside of me. Nothing left to say. This used to bother me. (On bad days, it still does.) When I finished my last novel, I turned to a friend and said: “I’ve got nothing.” But then I realized that having nothing was exactly what I should be feeling. It meant that everything had gone into the book I had just completed. And now I had to allow myself to do nothing. To understand that, for a writer, doing nothing is doing something. I had to push away the impulse to look busy, and instead allow the space and time for that tap on the shoulder, that shimmer.

On Writers Conferences

I’m heading to Sun Valley, Idaho tomorrow, where Michael and I will be speaking at the Sun Valley Writers Conference. This particular conference is unusual in that no teaching is involved. Writers–some very famous writers–come and give talks, and the audience is made up of smart, literate people who may or may not aspire to write. It seems to model itself more closely on something like The Aspen Institute than say, a Breadloaf, or a Tin House–discussion, rather than implementation. Dialogue, rather than honing craft. I’m excited about this conference for lots of reasons: seeing old friends, gorgeous dry mountain weather, possibly even some white-water rafting or fly-fishing. But more than anything, preparing for my talk there gave me a chance to deepen my own thoughts about memoir. I’ve been thinking a lot about memoir lately, on the cusp of the publication of my new one, as well as the reissuing of a new edition of my first one. But musing is not the same as giving a talk. Giving a talk forces one to articulate ideas into a clear narrative. (It also involves being entertaining and funny. And the wearing of decent shoes.)

Sometimes writers ask me what I think about conferences, given that I direct one. It falls into the same general query about whether writing can be taught. Honestly, I don’t think writing can be taught. I think craft can be taught, I think books can be suggested, minds can be opened to new writers, new vistas. But whatever that thing is–that combination of gift and tenacity and capacity for story-telling–that makes someone a writer, that, I’m afraid, can’t be taught. Or at least I’ve never figured out how to teach it. So why go do these things? Why apply to Breadloaf or Tin House or Sewanee or Sirenland? Some aspiring writers go because they think they’ll meet editors or agents, and while they very well may get a ten minute audience with any of the above, most of the time, nothing will come of it. Other writers go to network, to meet other writers, which is a completely valid reason–it can create a sense of community, reduce the sting of isolation. Other writers to go study with a particular writer they admire, or to workshop a story that isn’t quite there yet. They go to be together. They go to validate what it is they do with their hours in front of the page.

As I pack my bags for Sun Valley, it occurs to me that no matter how different these conferences are–large, small, exclusive, exotic, intimate, businesslike–they all have one thing in common. In this time of doomsday reports about the decline of serious readers–when iphones and ipods and webisodes and an endless stream of apps vie for our attention–attendance at conferences is booming. We have a hunger, an appetite, a desire to understand how words, when put together in a certain order, create music.

On Self-Googling

It used to be that I only knew what had been written about myself or my work when an envelope would arrive from my publisher. By regular mail. You know–with stamps, and everything. This envelope would contain a series of xeroxed reviews, profiles, little mentions here and there, often–I suspect–edited to keep out the negative stuff. My publicist would underline the nice things critics said with a yellow highlighter, along with cheery little exclamation points in the margins. Look over here! The envelope seemed to say. Don’t look over there! No good will come of it.

These envelopes stopped arriving at around the same time it became possible to know absolutely everything about oneself from typing one’s name into Google. Good, bad, indifferent–increasingly, it’s all available. Reviews from a decade ago exist alongside blog mentions from yesterday. There are ratings of my books by readers who assign them five stars–or one. Comments see-saw from “Dani Shapiro is my favorite writer” to “What a waste of time.”

When it comes to adhering to good writing habits, not googling myself is very near the top of my list–though sometimes I do fall off the wagon. Okay…OFTEN I fall off the wagon. What do I hope to learn when I type my name into a search engine? What am I really looking for? For writers who spend our days alone, who rarely have the opportunity to actually see someone else reading our books or stories, sometimes it’s hard to know that we exist. That our work exists, out there in the world. The internet provides us with a mirror, of sorts. See? There you are! And there…and there…and…whoops that stung…and there, and…oh, ouch, that was mean… And so it goes. But that mirror is not a clear reflection–it’s more of a fun house mirror: wavy, distorted, showing us our virtual likeness at any given moment, through random debris tossed about by an algorithmic wave. What does any of it mean? And more importantly–much more importantly–why does it matter?

As the years have gone by, I’ve learned a few things about myself, and paramount among them is that it requires a great deal to keep myself in good emotional, psychological, creative, and spiritual alignment. I need space, time, quiet, coffee. I need my yoga and meditation practice. But perhaps most of all, I need to be able to sit down at my desk in the morning and enter my internal world. How am I doing? Do I exist? Is my work worthwhile? The answers aren’t out there. They never are.

On the Elusive Shimmer

Joan Didion once said that she knew she needed to write about something when she saw a shimmer around the edges of it — whether it be a person, a bit of overheard conversation, a landscape. It has always stayed with me, the idea of Didion’s shimmer. It seems exactly right. I know when it happens to me it feels like a little jolt from behind. No words form, no shape, no coherent idea. Not even a conscious thought. Just a deep, silent knowledge that some day I will write about this, in some way.

I have a few assignments on my desk right now. Work I’ve already committed to doing, and in fact am looking forward to doing. An essay, a couple of speeches. But now that I’m between books–a strange, amorphous state–those shimmery bits and pieces collected over the past couple of years are calling to me, as if I had closed them off in a drawer as I finished Devotion, and now the drawer is ajar. Trying to get my attention. What next? The question follows me around. What next? I need to be writing. I’m not okay in the head when I’m not writing. My mind becomes, in some of my favorite words of Virginia Woolf, pecking and wretched.

But how do we make the choices we make? How do we know where to place our creative energy? That energy is finite, after all. I find I have maybe three good hours a day. I need all the other hours around those hours, but when I get right down to it, in terms of actual writing time, three hours and I’ve spent all my capital. So what to spend it on?

My husband–a screenwriter–has a big bulletin board in his office where he keeps titles and ideas for future projects within his line of vision. I love looking at that board–it’s such a hopeful thing–all those possibilities. The future unfurling. A lifetime of work is on that board. And often we talk about it: which one next? Where to place the emphasis? What makes the most sense?

This much I know about making choices — to a great degree, they must be creative choices. If they come from what a writer thinks she SHOULD do next…that’s where the trouble begins. I try not to think: I need to write something funny/profound/commercial/short/long…whatever. This is always a bad idea, coming at the work from the outside in. From a place of thinking what the world might applaud, as opposed to finding the shimmer. For a writer, it’s always there. All that is really necessary is quiet and careful attention to it.

On Being Literary

People at cocktail parties often ask me what my books are about. It’s one of my least favorite questions because it’s so hard to answer pithily, so recently I decided I had to come up with a rehearsed response. “I write literary novels about family,” I have started to say. “Literary novels about family secrets, dysfunction…” Which is true. My books tend to be about family. But what exactly do I mean by using the term literary? And why does it seem, as soon as I say it, that I detect a certain nervousness and boredom in my polite questioner? Could it be that literary immediately sounds…small? And possibly difficult? And maybe a bit dull? What am I even saying, really, when I call my books literary? What I intend to convey is that they’re not potboilers, or romances, or mysteries, or thrillers, or any kind of genre fiction. But I seem to be saying more than that.

When I was first starting out, my MFA friends and I wanted nothing more than to be literary writers. Literary–at its pinnacle–meant reviews in the New York Review of Books and Bookforum. It meant grants and awards and fellowships. It meant invitations to George Plimpton’s brownstone for his legendary Paris Review parties. But as the years have gone by, I find myself questioning my younger freshly-minted MFA ideas. Honestly, I think I was being a bit of a snob. I now know that calling a writer a “literary novelist” usually means that no one has ever heard of her. It means “destined to sell under 4000 copies unless something really unusual happens.”

Especially these days, I get nervous when I hear myself described (even by myself!) as a literary novelist because readers are very important to me, and I want lots and lots of them. I want it both ways. I want the New York Review of Books AND the stacks in Barnes & Noble. I want to write page-turners that are also literature. I used to be insulted when I would hear from readers that they couldn’t put my books down, or that they read a book of mine in a day. Now I love it — because I know how rare that is, especially in our culture of distraction. Books compete with other, easier forms of entertainment, and so if a reader feels compelled to keep reading, something good is happening. Call it whatever you want.

Maybe the next time someone at a cocktail party asks me what kind of books I write, I’ll just answer: hopefully good ones. And leave it at that.

On Being a Good Reader

I had a drink last night with a friend who had just returned from a writers’ conference. She is a serious writer, but had never been to a conference before, never pursued an M.F.A., had barely even attended a workshop, and I was very interested in her response to the whole thing. What had she gotten out of it? Had it helped? Hurt? Disappointed? Inspired?

“You know,” she said, “I always thought I was a pretty good reader. I could read a manuscript of a story and see when something wasn’t working, or seemed off. But I never really understood WHY something worked or didn’t.” Well, this seems key to me. In fact, this seems like perhaps the single most essential ingredient in making a workshop–or a teacher–good. Years ago, when I was first offered a job teaching a literature course to MFA students, I balked. “But I don’t have a doctorate,” I said to the head of the department. “That’s not the point,” he responded. “I want you to teach them to read as writers.”

To read as a writer is to take the first step in becoming a writer. To read as a writer means not to simply think: I’m liking this, or this isn’t any good, or I don’t like it, or it doesn’t ring true. To read as a writer means to stop and ask the question WHY. Why is this working? Or why isn’t it? How? How was this done? We often have a natural resistance to pulling apart something we love, to deconstructing a great story to examine its elements. We’re afraid that something of the mystery or the magic will vanish–and yet, this pulling apart, this understanding of what makes a story tick (or not) is the beginning of craft. Like medical students performing autopsies, we cut stories open. We look at their guts, their organs, the architecture and arrangement of their bone structure. In so doing, we learn something about our own craft, our own work.

Certainly there have been times I’ve wondered why I continue to teach. If writing can’t be taught–and I am convinced it can’t–then what exactly are we doing around those tables in those rooms, the delicate, marked-up pages of manuscripts in our hands? We are learning to read them with greater understanding and concision. And hopefully, that understanding and concision becomes a lens through which we can more clearly see our work.

On Being Open

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be open–specifically what it means to be open to other writers. I’ve been on the receiving end of amazing acts of kindness over the years, and I’ve also been on the receiving end of the sort of parched, sour behavior that really says: there’s only room for one of us out there, so get out of my way, I’m not going to even talk to you, much less help you. I’m going to horde all of my limited resources for myself. It’s easy to see which of these two types of people behaving in these two types of ways is happier. Openness and generosity is the product of an unclouded mind–a mind at peace. And the nastiness comes from fear, anxiety, envy, competitiveness. I have tried to learn, over the years, from the former, and to understand the latter as a cautionary tale.

Our friend Frank McCourt died yesterday. Not only was he a brilliant writer, an unparalleled storyteller, a funny, droll man who at the same time knew how to wring every possible emotion out of a situation–but he was also astoundingly kind. He had time for everyone. He gave of himself, and gave, and gave–and guess what? There was still room for more. More great writing. More political fund-raising for our local congressman. More hours to show up for events such as this one, which support a community after school arts organization. He was a special person, one I feel lucky to have known. His loss is tremendous and will be felt across the many lives he touched.

What is this thing, this openness? Who do some of us naturally lean in that direction, while others slam the door closed? Why does it seem, to some of us, that being open will cost us something of ourselves, when in fact, what it really allows is more room? Frank rarely said no. His answer to most of what was asked of him was a resounding yes–whether that yes was to an invitation to a book party for a younger writer, or a benefit where his presence would be helpful, or a comment for the back of a book jacket, or just simply a fun evening out. I have no doubt that those yeses–that spirit–fed his work. Openness, kindness, generosity of spirit. Something to remember and keep remembering.

On Self-Protection

I’ve heard it said that writers have one less layer of skin than most normal people. We walk around just a bit more of ourselves exposed to the elements, to snippets of overheard conversation, to something we see on the street, to the remarks of perfect strangers. Really, it can’t be any other way. That sensitivity is also where the work comes from. But sometimes the sensitivity can be hard to take, especially when it comes to dealing with the response to our work out there in the world.

Lately I have been thinking of my new book as a very young, unprotected child–perhaps a child just learning to walk–shakily moving away from me. It’s still many months before publication, but I can feel it: the way it will be come something separate from me, something other, something that people will have opinions about, will weigh in on. It won’t be for everybody. Some critic will take a swipe at it. Recently, there was a kerfuffle on Twitter about a writer who publicly lost it after receiving a negative review. The immediacy that Twitter allows, combined with the possibility of a brief public melt-down going viral, created a big mess for her. But I’ve got to say, I know how she felt. A bad review is a little bit like a kid being mean to your kid. When I have seen a child be even slightly cruel to my son, I hate that kid. I want to kill him. And not to take the books-and-babies metaphor too far, but it’s a bit like that with a piece of writing. It’s something close to the writer’s soul, something nurtured and protected until ready to see the light of day–and then–SLAM. Wow. How to avoid feeling vulnerable to that?

A few months ago, a writer who had written the single most vicious review I had ever received–over ten years ago it still stings–friended me on Facebook. No note, no nothing. Just a friend request. I stared at it for a few minutes, the words of his review as fresh in my mind as if I had received it that morning. (A universal truth for writers seems to be that we never remember a single word from our good reviews. Only the bad ones stick.) Eventually I did accept him as a friend. Why? I don’t really know. Maybe enough time had passed. Maybe I was trying to be a bigger person. Maybe I wanted to show him that I didn’t care.

But I do care–we all care. Whether it’s a review or a remark or a misunderstanding or even perceived indifference, we do care more than most people. To go back to the Martha Graham letter I quoted from the other day, we writers do walk around experiencing that queer, divine dissatisfaction. Someone once said–I think it was Valerie Martin–that there are three kinds of dispositions: a good disposition, a bad disposition, and a writer’s disposition.

So what are we to do with our dispositions? How are we to protect ourselves, our shivering, naked selves from our sensitivity to all that is? I think the only answer, if there is one, is this: we wrap ourselves in the writing. The work itself is our cloak and our shield. It’s all we’ve got. And the rest of it is none of our business.