On Slowness

Last night, at a Christmas party, at least ten people asked me how the book is going. How’s the book going? Are you still working on that book? How far along are you? Do you have a deadline? I wish I could carry around a series of small, laminated index cards, printed with my answers. I would pull them out of my jeans pocket, one by one, hand them to the well-meaning party guests with a smile: It’s going. I’m working on it. Every day. I’m about halfway through. Yes, I have a deadline. No, I don’t know when I’ll be done. Presumably by the deadline. Yes indeed, that would be a good idea.

There are only a few things to say when in the middle of the book, and all of them feel boring, or like lies. A high school intern wanted to work with me last year, so that she could learn something about the life of a writer. I couldn’t imagine what she could learn from watching me sit in my desk chair, staring into space; occasionally stretching and letting out a big sigh; drinking far too many cappuccinos. The thing is, writing a book–at least the kinds of books I write and like to read–is a painstakingly slow process. In the beginning, there is nothing. For a long time, there are a few pages. Eventually there’s a pile of pages, as I have now, next to my computer. It looks like a book-length manuscript, but it’s nowhere near finished. Some days, I like it okay. Other days, I am plagued by insecurity and doubt. There is no in between. No gray area whatsoever. Yesterday I wrote a page and a half. The day before yesterday, I wrote half a page. These few pages took me all day. Lately, I feel like a woodworker. The written word on the page is the wood. It’s only the beginning. Once I have the wood, the material itself, I begin to whittle. I chip away a bit here, a bit there. I turn it this way and that, until it assumes its proper shape. Sometimes it doesn’t ever assume its proper shape, and into the dust bin it goes. There are days when nothing happens. Days when it feels to me that nothing ever will. Days when my brain is on fire. Days when I am surrounded by a fog and nothing gets in or out. Still, I whittle.

On Living in Two Spheres

The very best way for me to start the day–or rather, re-start the day after sending the boy off to winter horse camp in his new riding boots (“Mommy, they’re uncomfortable! They don’t fit!” Me, through gritted teeth: “Yes, they do. They’d better fit!”)–is to spend a few minutes with Virginia Woolf. Once again, her Writer’s Diary offers me what I need on this blustery morning. Uncanny, the way I open to a random page and find a bit of useful writerly wisdom. Here, she has just returned after many days away from her desk:

“Yes, but of all things coming home from a holiday is undoubtedly the most damned. Never was there such aimlessness, such depression. Can’t read, write or think. There’s no climax here. Comfort yes: but the coffee’s not so good as I expected. And my brain is extinct–literally hasn’t the power to lift a pen. What one must do is to set it–my machine I mean–in the rails and give it a push.”

And this:

“It strikes me–what are these sudden fits of complete exhaustion? I come in here to write: can’t even finish a sentence; and am pulled under; now is this some odd effort; the subconscious pulling me down into her? …I’m not evading anything. No, I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain. I only want walking and perfectly spontaneous childish life with L. and the accustomed when I’m writing at full tilt; to have to behave with circumspection and decision to strangers wrenches me into another region; hence the collapse.”

Since the perfectly spontaneous childish life is a distant dream of the past, there must be another way. As usual, Woolf offers it: Time to set it…my machine…on the rails and give it a push.

On Snow Days

There’s writing and then there’s living. Can the two possibly be compatible? I know what Thoreau would say. Thoreau went to Walden “…to transact some private business with the fewest ostacles.” Thoreau apparently didn’t have snow days–at least not the kind you have when you’re a mom. We’re in the midst of a two-day blizzard and the land around our house is a winter wonderland. Our windows are caked with snow. Yesterday, while I was practicing yoga, I kept catching glimpses, out of those snow-caked windows, of Jacob barreling downhill on his new sled, the puppy chasing him all the way down to the woods. I stood there, grinning. The boy and his pup. The fire crackling in the fireplace. The day’s plans to go to various holiday parties–canceled. Nothing but the snow. I baked cookies for two days running. (Note to self: black and white cookies–Jacob’s choice–are better bought in the bakery. They took four hours!)

And yet…the manuscript of Devotion is languishing on my desk. I can feel the pressure of it building inside of me. Days away from my work cost me dearly–finding my way back inside requires an effort so intense it feels physical. I want to stay connected to my book, to my work, to the inner mosaic of it–and yet how do I do that, on these snow days? There is the push of one, the pull of the other. Balance–all working mothers know this–is elusive. But particularly for writers, striving for that balance can feel impossible. After all, the work is right there, so tantalizingly close at hand, and not off in some office that’s already closed up for the holidays.

All I know is this: at some point, the snow will stop falling. The boy will grow up and lose interest in sleds and puppies. The book will be finished. As will the next one, and the next–God willing. I will not bend as far in tree pose, nor swing myself up into handstands. This moment–this blizzard to usher out 2008–is here now. And it would be a shame not to take it all in.

On Patience

Yesterday morning I spent the better part of an hour untangling a set of wind chimes that Jacob had brought home from school. They had become impossibly tangled, the clear plastic threads all knotted up. I told myself to be patient. Slowly I tried to unknot the half-dozen threads that had wound themselves around and around each other. In the end, I gave up. I cut the threads, undid the knots, re-attached the moons and stars, and–voila–less than perfect but nonetheless serviceable wind chimes, which are now dangling from our tree out back.

As I was working on the wind chimes, I thought about writers. In particular, I thought about myself, and my friends. How is it that the world’s most impatient people choose to spend their lives doing something a bit like pulling apart clear plastic, nearly invisible bits of thread? Cutting, re-tying, when all else fails? I could recount for you the history of each of my books. The way, in Picturing the Wreck, I wound up with a six hundred page draft that I had to re-imagine and re-structure until it was a lean, mean three-hundred. The way, when I walked into my editor’s office after she read that first draft, she held it–the whole massive pile of it–in her hands, as if weighing it, and said: “Can you believe you wrote all this?” I didn’t hurl myself out the window. I do vaguely remember standing at a pay phone afterward (this was 1995) and crying to a friend. How was I ever going to do what needed to be done?

I do think that writing books is a bit like having babies. Once finished, the experience sort of wipes itself out, so that eventually you can consider the lunacy of doing it again. Once a book is finished, truly finished and I’m holding it in my hands, I can’t for the life of me imagine how I ever wrote it. It’s almost as if the experience of the writing itself happened in fugue state. How did I figure it out? How did I put it together? How will I ever do it again? You’d think, after six books, I’d have a bit more confidence in the process, but the fact is that my own impatience gets in my way. I don’t want it to be a process–even though I can talk until I’m blue in the face about how it is a process. I want to blink and be done. I know, one day, I will hold a copy of my new book in my hands and have no idea how I did it. But right now, on a gloomy Monday morning, I know that it involves a daily triumph over my own impatience, and a willingness to untangle the threads.

On Competition

At the silent retreat, once each day there was a question and answer period–the only time that any of us spoke. I didn’t have any questions–or rather, I did have questions but had grown quite accustomed to the silence, and couldn’t imagine hearing the sound of my own voice. I was interested in what others had to say, and one woman’s question, in particular, struck me. She was a very young woman–I’m guessing twenty-four or twenty-five–and wore glasses, her hair in pigtails.

“I work in a very competitive field,” she said. “And I’m having a hard time when a friend of mine succeeds. A friend told me the other day that she had just signed with an agent, and it was hard to be happy for her.”

So she was a writer, I thought to myself. That wasn’t surprising. She looked like many of my students, with her retro-hippie downtown vibe. But…a competitive field? Thinking of writing as a) competitive and b) a field struck me as just plain wrong. I wanted to go up to this girl–but of course I didn’t. I’m not sure I would have, even if I could have spoken. The teacher responded with a brief discourse on sympathetic joy– and the ways in which we’re able to feel joy for the success and happiness of others only when we, ourselves, are filled with that elusive Buddhist trait: equanimity. As the teacher was speaking, I found myself thinking about competition among writers. How was writing competitive? A writing life involved many difficult feelings, certainly: isolation, frustration, impatience, loneliness, obscurity, disappointment, rejection — was it really necessary to pile competition onto this already long list? Especially when it’s a useless feeling–one that brings along in its wake that dreadful feeling, envy?

I have had moments, flashes of envy about another writer’s success. Someone gets a prestigious grant that I also applied for. Someone else gets nominated for a major award. Someone makes a boatload of money. It’s only natural to feel a pang of desire, of longing–of thinking, I want that. Give me that. And I know that other writers have felt these pangs of envy about me. I know because I can feel them. Envy is such a palpable thing. But competition? The only competition I feel is with myself. I want to be better than I am. I want the book I’m writing to be better, deeper, more powerful than the last. John Irving once said that writers are lucky because we have the chance to get better as we get older. I want to be that kind of writer — the one writing at the height of her powers, as they say, well into my eighties. If only I should be so lucky.

I wanted to go up to that girl and tell her this. I wanted to tell her that if you think that way, it only gets worse–because nothing will ever be enough. The stakes are so high, the emotions so intense. There’s always more to want, and there are always people doing better. Horse racing comes to mind. Why do horses wear blinders when they race? I like to think that it’s so they don’t look right or left. So that they don’t see who’s coming up behind them. So that they can run their hearts out.

So pigtail girl from the silent retreat, if by some strange coincidence you’re reading this–I want to say to you: write your heart out and compete with yourself.

On Domestic Life and Writing

As my regular blog readers may have intuited by now, I have developed a sudden burst of blogging energy. I’m hoping to continue this, and to write most mornings about some aspect of the writing life. Take this morning, for instance. At 7:30, my husband and son left for the day, heading down the kitchen stairs to the garage with their usual assortment of briefcase, knapsack, reading material, and in today’s case, rock specimens for something at school called “rock shop” (don’t ask). This required a last minute flurry to locate the pyrite–found in a shoe box where all geology samples have been carefully stored away. Whew. Crisis averted. They left–the car made its way down our driveway which is always a complicated, bittersweet moment for me–and then they were gone. The house was quiet.

Time for my writing to begin, right?
Wrong.

I have only been at my desk for an hour this morning and here, so far, is what I have accomplished. In my overnight emails, there was a reminder about placing orders for holiday gifts so that they’ll arrive in time. Right. So I did that. While I was looking for all the addresses I needed, I heard a suspiciously loud sound from the kitchen. My husband had left his office door open, and the puppy had wreaked havoc. He had gotten into the shredder bin, and shredded the mountain of paper even further. It looked like a small blizzard had hit. While he was at it, he used the television remote as his bone. It’s a good thing the little devil is so cute.

I dealt with the blizzard, emptied the dishwasher while I was at it, then came back upstairs to my desk. Centered? Ready to work? You tell me.

But here’s the bright side, and it really is a bright side. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to remember that you can start your day over again at any time. I’ve tried to teach this to Jacob. Take a breath. Shake it off. Begin again. I’ve also learned, in a Pavlovian way, that if I don’t have at least a decent writing day, the rest of my day has a pall over it–a gray sky. The writing itself allows light in–not that it’s easy, not that it’s even pleasurable. Just that it’s necessary–and not just because it’s my livelihood, but because it’s who I am. I will leave you today with a new favorite quote from Virginia Woolf:

“The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practice anonymity.”

On Solitude

I’m back from three days on silent retreat. The schedule was this: Forty-five minutes of meditation before breakfast, then three hours of meditation (both seated and walking) before lunch, then another three hours in the afternoon, then dinner. Then another hour and a half before bedtime. It was the gentlest possible immersion into such an experience, with two extraordinary Buddhist meditation teachers leading the group and giving talks. But still, gentle as it was, it was extremely tough going for me. There was definitely a hump to get over — and once I had begun to get over that hump, it was already time to go home.

I didn’t get to know my fellow retreatants. I saw them out of the corner of my eye, and made up stories in my mind about them. 150 people–spanning many decades, shapes, sizes–all made a commitment at some point to come on this retreat. Perhaps sitting in front of their computers, as I did last summer, reading about The Garrison Institute, or these particular teachers, and making a split second decision, as I did. Of course, some of them were old hands at this; the ones who settled on their cushions with their own comfy blankets and water bottles. It was oddly intimate, living with these strangers, each of us going through our own internal adventure. Each morning I brushed my teeth and washed my face alongside the other women in the communal bathroom–something I haven’t done since college. We ate our meals next to one another at long tables, chewing thoughtfully in silence.

Now that I’m home again, and time collapses around me as if I had never been gone (the dogs, the homework, the lists, the school bake sale, the manuscripts) I am thinking about the quality of that particular kind of solitude. Looking around at the other people on the retreat, I was aware that I am alone most of the time, and I wondered if it might be even more difficult for those people who spend their days surrounded by co-workers. I do have a solitary life during the daylight hours. But I often fight that solitude even as I live it. I run from it, I distract myself. It’s as if there’s something terrifying at the center of it, and I’m afraid to look. After three days of going incrementally deeper, closer and closer to the core of that place, I am at the moment less afraid. My mind polished, settled, clear. How long will it last? Stay tuned.

On Silence

I’m thinking about silence as I prepare to leave on a three day meditation retreat. I’ve gone on meditation retreats before, but this one, in the literature, requests that participants engage in “social silence”. This means silent meals. No eye contact. No hellos in the hallways. Just silence. And I’m truly petrified. You wouldn’t think I would be so frightened of silence. After all, I spend my days quietly. Here I sit, with one of the dogs curled up on the reading chair in my office, the other dog downstairs in the kitchen–my only company during the days. The only sounds are the crunch of gravel in the driveway when a UPS truck pulls up to the house–usually with a package of books from Amazon–or the ring of the phone, which almost always startles me since I’m already turned inward.

So what is so frightening about this kind of meditative, contemplative silence? I suppose that I will have to come face to face with my own distractions. With the way that I manage my daily periods of concentration by regularly turning my attention away from the work, rather than towards it. I remember, when I used to smoke cigarettes, how it felt to take a cigarette break. The box of Marlboros, the ashtray, the matches, the blowing of the smoke–it was a real break from writing. When I quit smoking (this was in 1989 or so, in case you’re wondering) I was at a loss. What was my new cigarette break going to be, without cigarettes? The internet hadn’t been invented yet, or at least I didn’t have access to it. I didn’t have email. I remember the feeling: it was time for a break, but I had nothing to do. I sat there, fidgeting, nervous, waiting for the wave of discomfort to pass. I imagine this is how it will be, sitting in silence.

Here’s my current version of a cigarette break, nearly twenty years later: as I sit at my desk working, I regularly hit upon moments when I need to look away from what I’m doing. Instead of gazing out the window, or standing and stretching, or any one of a number of mentally quiet activities, I check email. I go online and look things up. Depending on the day and the state of my mental health, I find myself on the blogs of friends; or literary websites; I browse my favorite fashion website, though in all the years I’ve clicked through there, I’ve bought exactly two items; and worst of all, I google myself. This is never good, and I try hard not to do it. As Joyce Carol Oates said to her husband Ray at breakfast one morning, when he noticed that the New York Times had a review of one of her novels–I’m not going to read it now. If it’s good, it will ruin my writing day, and if it’s bad, it will ruin my writing day. But either way, I want to have a writing day.

As I embark on this rather brief period of silence that stretches before me like a great yawning gulf, I’m frightened, yes–but also curious to see what happens with no version of a cigarette break.

On Generosity

I’ve noticed that sometimes it’s hard for writers to be genuinely supportive of each other. I’ve seen this up close, myself, and I’ve seen it in graduate schools where I’ve taught creative writing to MFA students. The mistaken idea: that we’re all in competition. That what’s good for one writer necessarily takes something away from another. That there’s a small pot of gold (well, maybe copper) at the end of the rainbow and if one writer gets some of it–and this can be defined by prizes, literary acclaim, a publishing contract, or even just damned good work–that means there’s less for everybody else.

Well, bullshit. Over the last decade, MFA programs have become less creative environments–more about the elusive destination than the journey. Every student is looking over his or her shoulder at the competition. A couple of years ago, a thesis student of mine explained a little bit about this to me. “We all know that there’s a very small window,” she said.

Window? What window? I looked out the window of my home office at the meadow below. It seemed large enough.

“The writers who are teaching us–they’ll forget about us after the semester is over unless we make an impression on them right now,” she went on. “This is our only chance for our teachers to help us get agents and publishers.”

I was dismayed by this, even as it helped make sense of the hostility I had been sensing in the classroom. Students exchanging meaningful glances. Students not giving of themselves when it came to critiquing. I pointed to a pile on my office floor. It was a towering, teetering pile of manuscripts, galleys, books.

“See that manuscript on the bottom there? That’s from a former Columbia student of mine from, oh, ten years ago. The next one up? A galley from a former NYU student whose first book is coming out–I’m blurbing it. The manuscript after that? The fifth draft of a novel by a New School student who asked me to read it. The one on top of that? From someone I met at Bread Loaf.”

The thesis student looked at me skeptically. This was not what she had been led to believe. I told her that once someone was my student, they remained my student no matter how many years had passed–and I knew that my colleagues felt the same way. The act of teaching writing is one I have come to think of as sacred. It involves trust and commitment, and even though of course writers struggle with the balance–with doing our own work and giving energy to the work of others–this is a responsibility we take seriously. Honestly, I was appalled that students felt this way. And on a practical level, the effect of this kind of thinking was to constrict the work itself. Who can do good work when worrying about agents and publishers? Let me tell you, I know what it feels like to fall into this trap myself. I’ll be sitting at my desk and working on a story, and next thing I know, I’ll be imagining that story in The New Yorker font. This is the moment I stop writing well. Or I find myself thinking about a writer I dislike whose career is going well, or a writer I like whose career is going poorly–and I’ll compare. How am I doing? Where do I fall in the scheme of things? When I’m doing this, I’m lost. Completely, utterly lost. The work dries up, becomes a self-conscious attempt to please a marketplace rather than to find its purest and best form.

It seems a tremendous shame to spend the valuable time and considerable money on an MFA, or in a good workshop of any kind, worrying, comparing, envying, competing. The best workshops are like a fine orchestra, perfectly in tune, each writer’s melodic line supporting the next and the next. I’ve had the good fortune of teaching several of those workshops, and let me tell you: the work produced reflects the difference.

Prison

Often, after I’ve visited a book group, I like to post a picture. But there are no pictures of my most recent book group visit, because I wasn’t allowed to bring a camera. In fact, I was instructed to leave my entire bag in the car, and only bring my driver’s license in with me to the prison where I met last week with a gathering of female inmates. I had been asked to visit by a wonderful bookseller who has been involved in a longtime project of bringing literature (and, occasionally, the writers themselves) to this particular prison. Apparently, one of the inmates had heard me on The Faith Middleton Show, talking about Black & White. She registered that I live in Connecticut, and thought that maybe I’d be willing to join them.

I had never been inside a prison before. Before I went, I asked Michael if he had ever been in a prison, and he said: “Not in this country.” I was pretty sure that this was the place that Jean Harris had been incarcerated. It was Federal, minimum security. How disturbing could it be? Well, let me tell you: it was plenty disturbing. After going through security involving metal detectors, a body scan and a stamp on my hand, we were escorted into the prison proper by a guard. Once those doors clanged shut behind us, we entered an outdoor quadrangle with old, gnarled fruit trees, their branches bare and twisted like a Maurice Sendak illustration. The quadrangle was filled with women in gray sweat suits, and the lights overhead were bright. I looked up at the sky and wondered what it would be like to be incarcerated. To have the view straight up be one’s only view of the world out there.

The women in the book group were amazing readers. They had time to read, and the desire to read, and were starved for stories. They asked some of the best questions I’ve ever been asked by an audience. They had really thought about my books–some of them had read two or three of them–and were intensely curious and engaged. The whole time I was with them, I kept wondering about their own stories. Why were there here? What had happened? What had gone wrong–and when, and how? There were women of every age, shape, color, socioeconomic background in that room. I wanted to hear their stories, but knew I shouldn’t ask.

At the end of the visit, a bell rang–loud, like an alarm–startling the hell out of me. I stopped mid-sentence. I was a little jumpy to begin with, after the metal detector, the clanging doors. The women laughed. “It isn’t that bad,” one of them said. “You can finish your sentence.”