by Dani Shapiro
Once, I took an assignment from a newspaper to write something called “Tag Team Fiction.” The idea was to pair two writers to do a story together. One would begin; the other would take up where the story left off; then—tag, you’re it!—back and forth it would go until the story was completed. I was paired with a friend, the writer Meg Wolitzer. I don’t remember which of us began, but I remember the feeling of waking up in the morning and opening my computer to see that my story had magically grown overnight. I had gone to sleep and it had written itself! And it was pretty good, too. Back and forth we went, in a dance, a duet, a writer’s fantasy, which was that the pages seemed to be accumulating on their own, as we slept, or did errands, or went to the gym.
Aside from that one wacky assignment, I’ve never again had the experience of the page giving me anything that I hadn’t put there all by myself. See, the thing is this: you can’t know. You can’t know if it’s going to work. You can’t know if it’s good, or has the potential to be good. You can spend days, weeks, years, working on something that you will end up throwing away, or, in the more gentle way of phrasing it, putting it in a drawer. It’s a lot like the rest of life, in that way. We want to know. Will this relationship work out? Will our children be successful and happy? Will this risk pay off? We fall in love, we have babies, we take risks. The alternative is cowardice. We show up—for life, for writing. We act like brave people, even when we don’t feel like brave people. And so we begin to lay down the words. We fill the page with them. Michelangelo had his marvelous hunks of marble, Nakashima communed with the interiors of trees, and we have this. We are in mid-dive and the words are the water below.
Don’t think too much. There’ll be time to think later. Analysis won’t help. You’re chiseling now. You’re passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There’s something there. It isn’t your business yet to know whether it’s going to be prize-worthy someday, or whether it will gather dust in a drawer. Now you’ve carved the tree. You’ve chiseled the marble. You’ve begun.
OUTSIDER
My mother was my father’s third wife. My father was my mother’s second husband. My mother was forty and my father was forty-two when I was born. Today, preschool halls are filled with gray-haired parents in their forties and fifties—parents who’ve lived whole other lives before their children were born. But back then, this made my parents different. It also made them stay married over many years of a contentious relationship. They each saw themselves as having failed before, and those perceived failures bound them together.
My father was the scion of a deeply religious Jewish family. My mother was not a believer, though she went along for the ride. She was fun-loving, glamorous, and wanted to wear a beautiful dress and be the belle of the ball. He was quiet, introspective, thoughtful; she twirled around the room, singing, arms flung wide. They fought. Oh, how they fought—endlessly, bitterly, in harsh whispers. They disagreed on most things, but the single source of their greatest conflict was me.
Until I was twelve, I was sent to a religious day school where I spent half the day learning in Hebrew, and the other half in English. At thirteen, my mother presumably having worn my father down, I began to attend a local prep school where both Jews and girls were a new phenomenon. But my awareness of myself as an outsider was in full flower long before this. When two people who shouldn’t be married to each other bring a child into the world, that child—I’m distancing myself here, making myself into a character—that child cannot help but feel as if she’s navigating the world on a borrowed visa. Her papers aren’t in order. Her right to be here is in question.
Whether at the yeshiva or the prep school, whether within the quiet walls of my family home or circling the neighborhood on my bike, wherever I went I felt like a foreign correspondent on the sidelines of my own life. I spent my days observing. I took note of the way Amy Stifel tilted her head to the side when she laughed; the faded rectangle on the back pocket of Kathy Kimber’s jeans that was the exact shape and size of a pack of cigarettes; the fact that the Spanish teacher always looked like she had just stopped crying. At home, I studied my parents. My mother’s posture was ramrod straight, her jaw lifted, her mouth curved into a small smile as if at any moment a camera might be pointed in her direction. My father seemed to slump as my mother grew taller. He gained weight, his belly straining over his belt. She started making more trips into New York City, where she took art classes, saw a therapist. His prescription bottles took over the kitchen counter, replacing garlic tablets and Vitamin E supplements.
Some Day This Pain Will be Useful to You is the title of my friend Peter Cameron’s novel. Looking back now, from my writing study on the second floor of my home on a hill, I see a stone wall, the bare branches of a white birch tree. I see climbing wisteria on the split wood shingles of our roof. It’s a school holiday, and my husband and son are out to breakfast at a nearby diner. The dogs pad around in the next room. A cappuccino in a small ceramic mug brought back from a trip to Italy has grown cold by my side. It’s a day. A day full of writing, reading, thinking, driving, of a child’s piano lesson, a holiday party later on. A day that holds me, connects me to the spinning world.
So the pain did indeed turn out to be useful—but only later, much later. At the time, it was more complicated than I had tools for. I worried that my parents would get a divorce. Sometimes I worried that they wouldn’t get a divorce. I regularly imagined that my father would die. Never my mother, only my father. A series of images ran through my mind like a looping reel of film: my father, clutching at his chest, falling over on the sidewalk. My father, collapsing on his way to synagogue. When I wasn’t preoccupied with my father’s death, I thought about my own. I was certain that I would die very young. That something was already wrong with me. I poked and prodded at my body. Was that a lump on my thigh, or a mosquito bite? Every headache was a brain tumor. Maybe I would just disappear.
I endured these fantasies and premonitions by writing about them. The stories I made up were medicinal. My inner life was barbed, with jagged edges. Left untended, it felt dangerous, like it might turn on me at any moment. Intuitively, I understood that I had to use it. It was all I had. By writing, I was participating in a tradition as old as humanity. I was here. Hieroglyphs on rock. I was here, and this is my story.
HABIT
People sometimes ask if I write every day. They’re incredulous when I answer that I write five days a week, Monday through Friday, and keep as close to banker’s hours as I can manage. They tell me that they can’t imagine it. They’d get lonely. Or distracted. Or bored. They need more stimulation. The track of this particular conversation often ends up with the person telling me that they’ll write a book when they retire, or hire someone to ghostwrite their life story.
You must be so disciplined, they say.
And I stand there with a smile frozen in place, not wanting to be rude, but not knowing how to respond.
It’s my job, I want to say. It has nothing to do with discipline.
But where do you find the inspiration? they’ll ask.
I sit down every day at around the same time and put myself in the path of inspiration, I sometimes say, if the person seems genuinely interested. If I don’t sit down, if I’m not there working, then inspiration will pass right by me, like the right guy in a romantic comedy who’s on the other side of the party but the girl never sees because she’s focused on her total loser of a date.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of habit. Of routine. I’ve had students who have full-time jobs—one who comes to mind is a psychologist and AIDS researcher and the mother of two young children, who wrote her first novel in the predawn hours. Another student, a book editor, worked on her first novel for precisely one uninterrupted hour before heading to her office job each day. So much can be accomplished in one focused hour, especially when that hour is part of a routine, a sacred rhythm that becomes part of your daily life.
In the yoga and medita
tion practices that have become integral to my writing day, I rarely feel like unrolling my mat. There’s always something more pressing to do. Searching online for that perfect black leather jacket on sale, for instance. But I know that if I just begin the motions, the ritual, of setting up my practice, I will probably overcome the pull of high fashion, or whatever the day’s distraction happens to be. If I light a fire in the fireplace, then the lavender-scented candle; if I get my music set up and unroll my mat; if I put the crystals on the floor that have become part of my routine, then the next thing I know, I’m in a sun salutation, and an hour goes by. I’m in lotus position, counting my breath. I haven’t waited to be in the mood. I’ve just gone ahead and done it anyway, because that’s what I’ve been doing for years now.
It’s the same with writing, which is a practice like any other. If I waited to be in the mood to write, I’d barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don’t know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it’s the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it. A runner suits up, stretches, begins to run. An inventor trudges down to his workroom, closing the door behind him. A writer sits in her writing space, setting aside the time to be alone with her work. Is she inspired doing it? Very possibly not. Is she distracted, bored, lonely, in need of stimulation? Oh, absolutely, without a doubt it’s hard to sit there. Who wants to sit there? Something nags at the edges of her mind. Should she make soup for dinner tonight? She’s on the verge of jumping up from her chair—in which case all will be lost—but wait. Suddenly she remembers: this is her hour (or two, or three). This is her habit, her job, her discipline. Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plié, elevé, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.
BIG IDEAS
If you’re sitting down to begin something new, your fingers hovering over the keyboard, or pen poised in your hand like a maestro before a symphony orchestra, if you are thinking: I’m going to write a story about race and class in the American South, told in two voices, and one voice will be in the first person, present tense, and the other will be in the third person, past tense, and I will explore themes of longing and regret, oppression and denial, you’re in trouble. These are ideas. They’re the babbling of a writer in the delusional grip of a fantasy that she is in control.
I’ve learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I’m doing. I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue—of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track. When I think I know what I’m doing—when I have a big idea—I tend to start talking about it. First, I might bring it up to my husband: I’m thinking of writing a novel that moves backward in time. Or, having clipped a newspaper article, I think there’s a good story here about the juror who forced a mistrial. Instead of sitting with a thought, I release my tension by blabbing about it. No good will come of this. The point is best made by Frederick Nietzsche: “That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” I keep Nietzsche’s words on an index card tacked to a bulletin board above my desk as a reminder, a warning, that it isn’t usually useful to talk about or to over-think what you haven’t yet written. After all, if we write out of the tension of the unexpressed, where does the tension go once we’ve expressed it?
Let go of every should or shouldn’t running through your mind when you start. Be willing to stand at the base of a new mountain, and with humility and grace, bow to it. Allow yourself to understand that it’s bigger than you, or anything you can possibly imagine. You’re not sure of the path. You’re not even sure where the next step will take you. When you begin, whisper to yourself: I don’t know.
GETTING TO WORK
I have written seven books, and still I have to remind myself that this is what I do, this is my vocation, this is what puts food on the table and pays the mortgage. It’s not a hobby, or something I spend my days doing for the sheer joy of it. It’s not—as some people like to think, as if writers are home crafting cute animals out of Play-Doh—so much fun! If I had a regular job (or what my writer friends and I have long referred to as job-jobs), I’d have a boss. Maybe multiple bosses. There would be meetings, conference calls, expectations, a day shaped for me, rather than by me.
We writers shape our own days. We sit at our desks in our pajamas. We putter around empty houses, watering plants, making stews in the slow cooker, staring out the window, and we call it “working.” We close our doors when our husbands or wives or kids are downstairs watching TV. Shhh! I’m working! And at the same time, often we don’t have anything to show for it. We have no guarantee that what we’re doing will amount to anything resembling art.
Every day, when I wake up, when my bare feet hit the cold wood of my bedroom floor and I begin the process—scrambling the eggs, pouring the juice, packing the sandwiches, locating sneakers, yelling “bye, drive carefully” as my husband and son head off—I try to remember that to sit down and write is a gift. That if I do not seize this day, it will be lost. I think of writers I admire who are no longer living. I’m aware that the simple fact of being here creates a kind of responsibility, even a moral one, to get to work.
AUDIENCE OF ONE
Who do we write for? Our friends, enemies, ex-lovers? Our families? The vast reading public? Ourselves? I find that the more people are in my head when I write, the less I am able to accomplish. It can get very busy in there. It can start to feel like a crowded subway during rush hour, no one meeting each other’s eyes, just waiting for the doors to open. So I try to heed the advice of Kurt Vonnegut, who once said that he wrote for an audience of one.
This audience of one doesn’t have to be a person you know. She doesn’t even need to be alive and on the planet. Vonnegut wrote for his sister, who had died years earlier. It’s not about sharing the work, but about creating a connection. The wire that stretches from writer to reader is singular. The writer creates in solitude, and the reader reads in solitude. Each is unknown to the other but, nonetheless, an intimate relationship is forged. We don’t stop in the middle of Madame Bovary and think of all the other readers throughout history who have fallen under its spell, any more than we stop in the midst of lovemaking to think of the lovers who have come before us. Our absorption in a great book demands that we think only of ourselves and of the author to whom we are, at that moment, bound. We flip to the back inside flap and, if there is a photograph of the author, we examine it for clues. Are his eyes sad? Why is she looking away? What’s behind that half-smile? And we imagine—whether consciously or not—that the author has been writing directly to us.
I write to one specific reader at a time. My audience of one, over the years, has changed. In the beginning, it was my dead father. I longed to reach out to him, through time and space, to have him know the woman I was becoming. Then, sometimes, it was my mother. Each sentence I wrote felt like a plea. Please understand me. Later, it became my husband—it still is. And now, my audience of one is also my son, in the hopes that someday, he will find his mother in the pages of her books.
SMITH CORONA
Behind the closed door to her office, my mother typed. Most nights, I fell asleep to the thunderous clacking of the keys on her Smith Corona, the high, thin ding of the carriage as she pushed the return lever at the end of each line. In her office—which shared a wall with my bedroom—she sat behind a big wooden desk piled with papers and boxes. She made carbon copies of everything she wrote. Not an inch of the surface of the desk was ever visible. If I close my eyes now, I can hear her. She was a very fast typist, with long, strong fingers. The steady rhythm—tikatikatikatikatika, ding! tikatikatikatikatika, ding!—was my childhood lullaby. In the sound of those keys, I heard frustration, an
ger, longing, determination, regret.
My mother was always starting things she didn’t finish. Some of her ideas had nothing to do with writing, notably a line of jewelry for which she manufactured a prototype of a twenty-four-karat gold tennis ball pendant, with a sapphire in its center, the motto being Keep your eye on the ball! But her greatest efforts went into writing projects. One was a children’s book called Yes, Mary Ann, the World is Round, a story about a girl whose dolls spring to life and tell her all about the countries they come from, for which my mother hired a famous children’s photographer and used me as a model. I still have the manuscript for this book, the photographs encased in plastic sleeves: me as a five-year-old in a yellow flannel Lanz nightgown, holding my dolls.
My mother attempted most genres: children’s books, poems, essays, journalism, and writing for TV, big screen, and stage. She wrote spec scripts for The Partridge Family and Hawaii Five-O and sent them in manila envelopes to the offices of the Hollywood producers whose names were listed in the shows’ credits. She didn’t know that submitting scripts in this manner was about as effective as making them into paper airplanes and flying them out the window. She had a strange, strained combination of cluelessness and desire. She flitted from project to project, never seeing anything through to the end.
I was highly attuned to my mother. I felt and sensed her moods the way an animal can feel thunder and lightning miles away. She was my first lesson in character and point of view. I watched her carefully. I always, always knew what she was thinking. The way she behaved and what she felt were often at odds. She might, for example, be dancing around the kitchen, singing tra-la-la-la in her wobbly soprano and conducting with a wooden spoon, but she was staving off some sort of darkness—a rejection, an insult, a slight.
