On Doggedness

I have a love/hate relationship with the word doggedness. It means something more than discipline, but also implies a rather dull aspect. Dogged: tenacious, single-minded. Like a dog with a bone. But when it comes to a writing life, I think doggedness is underrated, and belongs on the list of characteristics every writer must ultimately have. I would say some of the other necessary characteristics, in no particular order, are:

Talent
Discipline
Patience
Fortitude

I was going to add “a strong constitution” to this list, but that one isn’t strictly necessary. Just preferable, if a writer wants to live a long life. Maturity is helpful too, though I think maturity probably is included in the patience and fortitude departments. But so what do I mean by doggedness? How is it different from discipline? Discipline involves sitting down. Not making breakfast or lunch dates. Not answering the phone. Discipline means that your butt stays in the chair for a certain number of hours each day. Doggedness, on the other hand, involves staying the course. Putting on blinders to all that distracts you. Chewing and chewing on an idea like–yes, like a dog with a bone. Okay, and I hate to say this, but it’s true, and most of us who teach writing won’t publicly admit it–the all the doggedness and discipline in the world will only get you so far if you don’t have talent. And talent is the thing that can’t be taught. Craft can be taught, yes. But talent is ineffable. It’s either there or it isn’t. And some people have more of it than others. I’ve seen writers with buckets full of talent throw it over because they don’t have the discipline or the fortitude or the doggedness. Or–and perhaps this belongs on the master list too — the DESIRE. The burning, mad desire to do this thing, to organize words on the page until they form a picture. Until they make a kind of greater sense than you had even intended.

But one last thing about doggedness. In Ted Solotoroff‘s great essay “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years” he wonders where some of his most talented students have gone. Why he never sees their work in print any more. Why they seem to have disappeared. Perhaps writing in the cold was too much for them. They were talented, and determined. Certainly they had once been in the hands of a great teacher. Doggedness might have come in handy for Solotaroff’s students. If the talent is there, the discipline, the willingness to stand a thousand small insults, the desire to be alone in a room creating, creating — then add a small dollop of doggedness, and from that, maybe, just maybe, a lifetime of writing will emerge.

On Focusing on Results

The other day, I had a long talk with a writer friend who’s having a tough time. “If only I could see the future,” she said, “then I’d feel better.” I stopped myself from answering: “Wouldn’t we all?” Wouldn’t we all like at least a peek into a crystal ball? A life spent writing, more than most sorts of lives, is one lived as an act of faith. A glimmer of an idea becomes a sentence. A sentence builds to another sentence, then another. A paragraph. A few flimsy pages. Sometimes the whole mess gets thrown away. Other times, something begins to happen. A feeling, a sense of momentum, a shimmer around the edges that makes us thing that maybe, just maybe we’re on to something here. So we keep going. If we’re writing a book, the few flimsy pages become a pile of pages. The pile of pages becomes a novel, or a memoir, or a collection of stories. But still…there are no guarantees. Every writer I know has some version of the “if only’s”.

If only that literary magazine would accept my story.
If only I get that fellowship.
If only I sell this book.
If only I can sell it to a particular publisher.
If only they pay me _____.
If only they print enough copies.
If only it gets reviewed in ______.
If only Oprah picks it.
If only it becomes a (regional, national, international) bestseller
If only it moves from #16 to #7 on the list.

I promise you, all of these “if only’s” are real, even though some of them might seem preposterous. When I was getting ready to publish my first novel, my agent at the time told me that she had an author who was #3 on the bestseller list, but was obsessed with #2 and #1. I was perplexed, somewhat disbelieving. Surely, I thought, a writer who has reached those heights of success would feel satisfied. (I still kind of think this.) But it did illuminate what I think is a universal truth for all of us writers, which is that nothing is ever enough. I’ve experienced this myself. I’ve received some great piece of news — a rave in The New York Times Book Review, a second printing, a movie option — and my mind almost instantly leaps to the next thing. Happy, certainly. Relieved, to be sure. But also, grasping. Wanting more. Wanting to see the future. Full of more “if only’s”.

I understand why this happens. It happens because in order to write anything good–anything that feels alive–a writer has put all of herself into the writing. Heart, soul, intellect–all in there. So what external result could possibly be enough, after years of immersion, years of struggle, of solitary grappling with the page? The answer is that there IS NO ENOUGH. The crystal ball, if we had one, would show us a landscape of peaks and valleys, ups and downs that are useless information for us.

All we have the right to hope for — a teacher once told me — is the chance to do it again. And again, and again. With no answers, no guarantees, no knowledge of the future. Only “a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching, and keeps us more alive than the rest.”

On Being a Nomal Writer

I’ve written about balance before. As in, balance is a myth. It doesn’t exist. Balance is one of those pop-psych terms invented to make us feel that there’s some better way of doing things, some easier, calmer way of living that is elusive–but possible if only we try hard enough. I’m here to suggest that we throw the whole idea of balance out the window because everything changes, all the time. Every day is different. Curve balls are not the exception, but the rule. If a writer waits for things to calm down, for the dust to settle, for a sense of normalcy to descend like a soft, comforting cloud–well,that writer may be waiting for a long time.

We had a funny moment in my private writing workshop yesterday, when a student wondered if she would ever be “a normal writer”. What’s a normal writer? Isn’t that an oxymoron? There’s nothing normal about spending days in solitude, alone in a room, sifting through an endless stream of words until a few of them, strung together, make some sort of sense.

Today–my first morning to myself so far this summer: my son was out the door before nine, with lunch packed, water bottle filled, a basketball jersey hanging endearingly on his little-boy frame. I settled down at my desk, the house quiet. I have what I need now–don’t I?

A room of my own.
Solitude.
A quiet house.
A silent phone.
A stretch of hours.
Oh–and a cappuccino.

What’s missing then? Why are some days better than others? Why does it seem possible, some days, to get good work done on the subway, while other days, with everything I think I NEED — time, space, quiet, caffeine — my brain feels water-logged? Perhaps the answer is less in the quest for the perfect writing environment, and more in simply the showing up for the work, and trying to leave the self-castigating notions of balance and normalcy at the door. Every day is different. And there is no such thing as a normal writer.

On Routine

First of all, to my loyal blog readers I know I have been slacking off. I can explain this–and promise to try to do better. When I finished Devotion last month, my delicate little routine went out the window. The fact that finishing my book dovetailed with the end of Jacob’s school year, with its attendant field day/concert/awards ceremony/class party/commencement compounded matters. By the time I came out of every mom’s haze of end-of-year school events, I had lost the thread. My manuscript was at my publisher, already beginning to head down the conveyor belt toward publication. My kid was out of school and camp didn’t start for another few weeks. My precious routine–getting him off to school first thing, sitting quietly at my desk, practicing yoga, working, thinking, reading, writing–all suddenly felt so far away. And blogging fell down that rabbit hole too. Because blogging was part of the routine.

How could it happen so fast?
In the same way as a few weeks without yoga and my body feels like it’s falling apart, so too does the creative process–that daily beast–need to be fed. I tell this to my students all the time. Habit, I tell them. Even if it’s an hour in the morning. Even if it’s twenty minutes. Sit down with your work every day. Stay connected to it.

I need to practice what I preach, of course. Ideas float through my head like bits of ash off a bonfire. Should I write that short story that has been tapping me on the shoulder for a few years? Should I adapt Picturing the Wreck as a screenplay — also something I’ve been thinking of doing for years? Should I start a new book (I actually have an idea)? Meanwhile, these bits of ash go nowhere right now. The windows of time are too small, between dropping Jacob off at tennis camp (I have three hours by the time I get home and before he gets picked up) and the UPS heading up the driveway with busy work, delivering the copy-edited manuscript. More small changes to be made on Devotion. Changes that feel, in the words of Grace Paley, enormous, at the last minute.

Does it sound like I’m complaining? I’m not–I swear I’m not. I’m more like an archaeologist of my own life. Digging. Trying to sort out what matters and what doesn’t. How to prioritize. How to once again create a routine. And most of all, what next.

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.”