On Making the Donuts

Remember that old Dunkin’Donuts commercial where the exhausted middle-aged guy wakes up while it’s still dark out, sits on the side of his bed, rubs his eyes and says “Time to make the donuts…time to make the donuts”? Lately I’ve been thinking about that commercial. I think about it when I just don’t feel like sitting down to work. I often don’t feel like sitting down to work. Conditions must be perfect. The house silent. The dogs sleeping. The kid happily at school. The husband happily at work. The cappuccino hot and steaming. And–most of all–the inside of my head calm and quiet, as smooth as a lake at dawn. Hmmm. How many days of the week does that happen? If I only wrote in those optimal conditions, I would have published perhaps one volume of haiku by now.

There is much to be said for daily routine. For creating habits of the mind, physical habits, work habits. I remember, years ago, non-writer friends (or procrastinating writer-friends) liked to go out for breakfast. Or even lunch. If I go out to breakfast, that’s it. That’s my day. It’s completely hopeless to sit down to work after the clatter, the waiter, the conversation, the plate of croissants. Pretty much the same goes for lunch. If I go out to lunch, it means I’m done with my work. Which is fine–so long as I know that’s what I’m doing.

Since we’re getting ready to leave for Italy in just a few weeks, I am even more protective of my work time. I have a pretty big pile of pages next to this computer as I write–pages that represent a manuscript, the better part of a book. I can see the end in sight. But I remember, when I started, the flimsy few pages. The beginning. I didn’t trust it, of course. (I still don’t.) But I tried not to think about it. I tried just to get up in the morning and make the donuts.

On Looseness

There are times, as I’m working on Devotion, when I feel like I’m writing hundreds of prose poems as opposed to a straightforward story. Well, in a way, that’s exactly what I’m doing, though if the book is to work, it will hopefully flow as a narrative even though it’s being put together like pieces to a puzzle. Or another way I’ve come to think of the structure of this book is as stepping stones across a stream. I can’t move from one until I have my footing on the next. But–in the end–hopefully the reader will be aware only of the stream, not the stones. I’ve joked with friends that this feels like death by prose-poem. Each one polished and as good as I can make it–though how it will fit into the whole of the project is something I won’t know until I’m done. As a process, it’s the most difficult I’ve ever undertaken.

But what it makes me think of, on a daily basis, is looseness when it comes to the writing itself. The worst thing a writer can do when she sits down to write (other than to not sit down to write) is to think to herself: now I’m am writing. Because from there, at least for me, it spirals into a chorus of useless thoughts: I wonder if so-and-so will like it; I hope my publisher thinks it’s good; gee, will this excerpt well in The New Yorker? Maybe I should show so-and-so and get feedback. And on, and on and on. Those thoughts are such a waste of time and creative energy. What’s more, they’re the enemy of looseness. By looseness I do not mean laziness. By looseness I mean a creative undertaking that is flexible, without self-censorship, focused but light. I think of great athletes and the way they warm themselves up, shake out their limbs. They maintain concentration but avoid seizing up. Sometimes, as I sit at my desk, I realize that I’ve worked my entire body into a pretzel. My legs are crossed tightly. My feet have fallen asleep. My shoulders are up to my ears. My jaw is clenched. Is good work going to get done from that place of tension?

On What People Think

A few years ago, I wrote an essay that got a lot of attention–not all of it positive. The magazine received more letters on this piece than any piece it had ever published–and a lot of those letters were from people who were seriously pissed-off. Apparently I had touched a nerve in writing about that particular subject matter. I know it may sound disingenuous to say that I wasn’t aware, as I was writing the essay, that it would set off a mini-firestorm. But it’s true. I didn’t think about it while I was writing, because if I had thought about it while I was writing, I wouldn’t have written it. When the letters started pouring in, Michael turned to me one day and asked: “Well, what did you expect?” I didn’t expect anything–because to expect anything would have necessitated an awareness that millions of people would read this thing, and…well, just think of it. Millions of people. Or even thousands of people. Or hundreds. Or just one’s own friends and family. Thinking about an audience is a recipe for creative paralysis.

A friend of mine, an older writer, once suggested to me, as I was writing Slow Motion, that I proceed as if everyone close to me had left the planet. It was good advice, and I have passed it along countless times to friends and students. This doesn’t give one carte blanche to be heedless, hurtful, insensitive to the feelings of others. What it means is that when a writer is working on a first draft, those concerns must be pushed far to the side, out of the range of even peripheral vision. There’s always time, later, for revision, for softening, for editing out the gratuitously damaging bits. I say “gratuitous” because sometimes a damaging bit is too good to edit out. I remember, when my first essay was published in The New York Times Magazine, I had written about the moment my mother decided to let me know that she no longer kept Kosher. She did so by taking me out to lunch at a local Saks Fifth Avenue, and ordering a bacon cheeseburger. I was thirteen years old, a yeshiva girl who believed God would strike me dead for eating non-Kosher food. The moment made an impression. When the essay was published, my mother called me.

“Did you have to make it a BACON cheeseburger?” she asked, only half-kidding.
“Mom, it WAS a bacon cheeseburger.”
It was just too good a detail to alter or leave out.

On the Best Part

I often tell my students that the most satisfying part of working on a book is the last third or so–when you’re deep inside of it, but you can make out the horizon and suddenly–after years of struggle–everything in the world, everything you see and hear and happen upon, seems to be there to help you. An overheard snippet of conversation illuminates some small piece of the story. A sign on the road makes something inside your head fall into place. It all begins, however briefly, to make sense. I remember where I’ve been during the last thirds of each of my books. When I was finishing Picturing the Wreck, it was August and I was in a top floor study of a rented house in Sag Harbor. There was an Italian market two doors down, and I took breaks every couple of hours and walked a few steps to the market for some biscotti and cappuccino. I finished Slow Motion in a tiny cottage in East Hampton. Family History, in the wonderful Writers Room on Astor Place in Manhattan. And Black & White in an office I had for a while near my house in Connecticut. Now–as I am rounding the bend in Devotion, as I see the horizon I never thought I’d see–I am at my desk, in my office at home. It is a book about daily life, and somehow I have needed to be right here, in the beating heart of my own daily life, in order to find the through line of it.

But even as the remaining pieces of my new book line up like good little soldiers, even as I am holding it all in my head, it’s so easy to lose sight of what I’m really doing, which is finishing a first draft. I often think of Michelangelo’s famous quote about creating The David: the sculpture was already there, he said–he just had to remove the marble. Writers often mistake the blank page for the marble. But the blank page is just that — blank. It’s the first draft that is the real material to then be chiseled and shaped and smoothed. My husband has been finding some great quotes about writing, lately and here’s one he sent me yesterday from Annie Dillard:

“The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it progresses, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.”

On Teaching

Yesterday I went to a memorial service for a former student. She had been my student in three different places over the years: at my first teaching job at the West Side Y, then in the graduate writing program at NYU, and finally in my private class. She was only a few years younger than I, but I’ve discovered over the years that age doesn’t matter when it comes to the relationship between writing student and teacher. I have students much older than I am, and younger ones, but it is almost always the case that once I am someone’s teacher, I remain in that role for the rest of our lives. I guess it’s sort of like shrinks and patients. I’ve been at dinner parties with shrinks of mine, but still…our primary relationship remains.

The memorial was beautiful and sad. Ellen was extravagantly gifted. She was genuinely brilliant, big-hearted, ablaze. She couldn’t stop. At first glance, her work was wild and messy and original. As writer friends and colleagues stood up and read pieces of her first (and, it turns out, only) novel, I was struck anew at just how good it is, sentence by sentence. Just how careful, within all that wildness.

I had found myself curiously dry-eyed since the day, just after New Year’s, when I heard she had died. But yesterday, at the memorial, each time I saw another of the students from her class at NYU walk through the door, I became unhinged. It had been an amazing class, one of the best groups of students I had ever taught. I loved them, and I loved being part of their struggles and their triumphs. Ellen was the first of them to sell a book. She sold her novel well before graduating from the program. And I knew that there was envy. There was a feeling among the others of “why not me? will this ever happen for me?” The feeling was as futile as it was natural and unavoidable. I had one student in tears in my office, certain–at the age of, oh, twenty-seven or so–that it was over for her. Seeing these wonderful people yesterday–a dozen years later–each one of them coming into the brownstone where the memorial was being held, I saw the passage of time. I saw the way time works on all of us. Each one of them had books published to considerable acclaim. Each of them had achieved that elusive thing which, back at NYU, they thought would solve their whole lives. After all, wasn’t publishing a book the key to the kingdom? But then, each had discovered that the goal posts had moved, there were no keys, there was no kingdom. Lives don’t get solved. They get lived. And sometimes they are cut short. These students–who had sat around a workshop table all those years ago–were stricken. Something had been taken away from them, even though for most of us it had been many years since we’d seen Ellen.

We’re here. This is what I read on their faces. We’re still here, and writing books, and making babies, and after this memorial we’ll walk out into the evening on Tenth Street and go out to dinner, or meet friends, or pay the babysitter. We’ll go back to our lives. And she–the one who burned so brightly–is gone.

On the Ebb and Flow

Yesterday was one of those days. I couldn’t get traction. I felt like I was scrambling up a muddy incline. Not only couldn’t I get traction, but somehow I couldn’t even try. It was a hopeless, spirit-bruising day. I most definitely did not practice what I preach. I did all the things I say not to do: I surfed the internet like a lunatic, looking for…what? I went on Facebook multiple times, hoping to…what? I checked email literally dozens of times an hour. Why? All that happened was that my brain became fuzzier by the minute. Crackling with useless information and way too many people. While on Facebook, I discovered that someone I went to high school with just lost his twenty-year-old son, a college student who was found dead on Saturday. That tragedy haunted me for the rest of the day. I hadn’t seen these people in decades. I had never met the boy. I didn’t know them well enough to go to the memorial service, which is today. But their tragedy became a part of my consciousness.

I never left my desk, and by the time mid-afternoon rolled around, I realized that I should have. Anything would have been better for me, more nourishing, than what I was doing. I always tell students to ignore feelings of inspiration or lack of inspiration, and just sit down to write. We all know that sitting down is the hardest part. But sometimes, sitting down is counterproductive. Sometimes, a drive, a walk, a bath, a phone call to a friend actually makes more sense. Yesterday, I would have been better off driving to my favorite cheese store (an hour away!) and listening to NPR. Oh, well. I continue to live and learn.

But it was a useful day, because it reminded me that I’m not in control. Sure, I can sit down, and I do. I can create conditions optimal for writing. The good coffee, the quiet (at least sometimes) house; the clear surface (sometimes) of my desk. The ringer turned off on the phone. I can do my yoga and meditation practice, which always helps. But still, we writers aren’t machines. We can punch our time clock, but we can’t always produce. But the days we don’t produce can still be productive.

Here’s a great quote Michael sent me yesterday, from Richard Ford: “This is actual life now, not a stopover, a diversion, or an oddment in time, but permanent life, the one that will provide history, memory, the one I’ll be responsible for in the long run. Everything counts, after all. What else do you need to know?”

On More Snow Days

My boy is home from school today. Some sort of snow/ice/freezing rain storm is supposed to hit this afternoon. And I am holed up in my office, desperately needing to work but feeling ripped to shreds by having to make the choice between motherhood and writing on this gray, gloomy morning. Do fathers go through this? As politically incorrect as it is to say so, I don’t think they do. At least not the same way. Ever since the day Jacob was born, part of me is tuned in to him no matter where I am or what I’m doing.

Our wonderful babysitter is downstairs. The dogs are running around. Jacob has a new game for the Wii–Rock Band–which should keep him occupied. So why do I feel so…guilty? So torn? Usually in this situation I would leave the house and go sit in a cafe — and I may have to do that today. But I’m going to try to stay right here, with my door closed, and move past this feeling and into the work. Seven books, and on days like this it still feels like a selfish choice I’m making, rather than what I do with my life–not to mention my livelihood. Could I take a day off? Theoretically, yes. But it’s more of a matter of what that day off would cost me when I return to the manuscript. Lately I’ve been pushing hard, making progress, feeling in control. But as every writer knows, we have to ride that wave when it presents itself. Never taking it for granted. Never presuming that it will still be here tomorrow, or the next day.

I hope Jacob will understand, some day. I hope the books–at least some of them? one or two of them?–are worth the sacrifice of these days of his childhood. Later today, I’ll make it up to him. We’ll make popcorn tonight, watch a movie. And slowly the bad mommy feeling will fade away to nothing.

On Growing

One of the most frustrating things about writing books (this is true of stories too) is that the process of writing necessarily involves a certain degree of blindness to the work itself. I can’t see what I’m doing while I’m doing it. Like looking through a pinhole, I can see only the sentence in front of me, or perhaps the paragraph, or the chapter if I’m lucky. More often than not, everything else is occluded. This is why it’s very good practice to put fresh work aside. It’s always more possible to see it clearly later, with the cold eye of distance. It’s been said that Raymond Carver used to hold a red pencil with him when he gave readings from already-published work. He would edit the stories or poems as he went along. When I first heard this, as a graduate student, I didn’t really get it. I mean, the work was published, right? Wasn’t that the end? I now know that publication only means that the words are typeset–but not set in stone. To the writer, they continue to taunt and embarrass. To say: see? you could have done better. Doing better: isn’t that what we all want to do, all the time? John Irving once said that writers are lucky, because it’s possible — with a reasonable amount of clean living — to get better as we get older. To get better until the very end. I think of Saul Bellow, who wrote Ravelstein near the end of his life. Or Updike, who produced beautiful work until his sad and untimely (seventy-six was too young) death. But getting better also means looking back at earlier work and seeing its flaws.

I was very young when I published my first novel, and my second. Truly, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was learning the craft as I went along, and my missteps, instead of ending up in a drawer, found their way into bookstores instead. Though it’s useless to regret anything, I do have a certain amount of regret about that. I feel like I didn’t start out a strongly as I would have wished–but I didn’t know any better. But what I can say about my writing life is this, and I am certain of it. I have gotten better with every book. That’s my demand of myself. To get better. To stretch myself each time. To not settle into any kind of complacency. Complacency, for an artist, is the end of something.

On Visibility

A friend sent me a remarkable essay that really got me thinking about solitude, invisibility and visibility. In it, the author writes: “The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.”

I tossed and turned last night after reading the essay, thinking about all sorts of ways that this societal hunger for visibility has entered my life–because I realize that I don’t like it. Take blogging, for instance. I found myself thinking about why I blog. When I first started, it was at the urging of my publisher and my husband because I had a novel coming out, and this is what writers do now. We blog, and do video promotional trailers. We hope (slightly more than we dread) that we’re invited to go on talk shows. We are creatures whose natural habitat is solitude, and yet visibility is the way our books sell, and if I’m completely honest it’s probably something more than that. We live in a culture in which, if we’re not seen, we don’t exist.

As I continued to toss and turn, I found myself thinking about Facebook, with which I really have a love/hate relationship. The essay tipped the balance toward hate, I must say. What does it mean that I have many hundreds of Facebook friends? That I receive status updates on people I don’t know, informing me that so-and-so is cooking paella for dinner, or that so-and-so is giddy about the election? At its best, Facebook has reconnected me with childhood friends, and is also a great way for me to let my reader/fans know about upcoming events–which is why I joined in the first place. So why, now, am I checking Facebook multiple times a day to see what everybody is up to? Why is solitude suddenly, increasingly difficult? Why do I write status updates myself? Just this weekend I wrote: Dani is groggy but happy. Who cares?

As I write a book that has forced me into greater depths of solitude, the internet is the way I pull myself out of it. I’ve told myself that it’s a better distraction than taking a drive, or making a lunch date. It takes less time. I don’t have to leave my desk. But I wonder. I wonder if the constant, easy one-click access to a world of people is simply a way of staving off deeper thought, not to mention boredom. Often, after I’ve spent time zooming around the web looking for…what? news? gossip? random tidbits of distracting information?…my brain has literally felt fried. Like that old TV commercial about drugs: This is your brain. This is your brain on the internet.

I don’t really know what to do about any of this, other than to be aware of it. As for blogging, well–blogging feels somewhat different to me. I try to blog only when I actually have something to say beyond meaningless newsflashes like Dani is groggy but happy.

On Research

Earlier this week, I was invited to visit a residential theraputic school down the road from my house. The director had read Family History, and wanted to show me his school, which was quite different from the one I invented in my novel. As we toured the school–which struck me as a unique and special place where the kids do therapy with the animals, and a non-denominational chapel is being built in a hayloft, the bracing scent of fresh hay wafting in–we got into a discussion about research. How did I know so much about these theraputic communities? Surely I had spent time in one? Or at least I had done a huge amount of legwork? It was gratifying to hear that these people, who spent their careers working in such a place, felt I had gotten it right. But they couldn’t understand how I had gotten it right, and in truth, I didn’t quite understand either.

While I was writing Family History, occasionally I went on websites for wilderness programs or boarding schools for troubled kids. But only once in a while–and usually to confirm that a detail I had already come up with was accurate. Early in my writing life, I was teaching with E.L. Doctorow, and I had dinner with him one night just after he had published a novel set in New York in the decade following the Civil War. I asked him about research. Surely it must have been intense, exhausting. I pictured Doctorow poring over old texts in the New York Public Library. No, he said. He hadn’t done any research, other than after the fact–again, to make sure that his imagination had gotten it right.

Yesterday, Michael reminded me of a conversation he had with T.C. Boyle one evening when we were all together at a literary festival in Wales. Michael had read and admired Water Music, a novel of Tom’s that was set in Africa. As someone who knows Africa well, Michael felt Tom had captured the atmosphere beautifully, and asked him how much time he had spent there.

None, Tom replied. He hadn’t done research.

How does this happen? Fiction writers know it happens all the time–but how? It’s as if a whiff of something allows all the rest to fall into place. The process of imagination filling in around one small kernel, one fleeting image or bit of information, is a forensic process. The imagination has its own coherence, and left to its own devices, can come up with scenes and stories and characters that feel–not only very close to the truth, but often somehow truer. I had a hard time explaining this to the director and his colleague. I told them bits and pieces of my own history that would explain my affinity for the subject matter — but that wasn’t the real explanation. Just one tiny piece of it.

I’ll leave off today with this perfect bit of wisdom from a sign that I saw in one of the facility’s classrooms, because it seems like a great plan, not only for troubled kids but for us all:

COPING SKILLS:

* Put head down on desk
* Ask for a time in
* Ask for a hug
* Take a deep breath