Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  Sit around a scarred wooden table in a writing workshop for enough hours and you’ll hear write what you know, along with show don’t tell, never use adverbs, and other guidelines. And know that every rule you’ll hear in a writing workshop is meant to be broken. You can do absolutely anything—tell, not show, make excellent use of an adverb—as long as you can pull it off. Get out there on the high wire, unafraid to fall. Who says you can’t use ellipses or an exclamation point? Who says dialogue has to be indented and in quotation marks? Who says you can’t write a whole novel from the point of view of a child trapped in a room?

  What does this even mean: to write what you know? I can tell you that it makes some writers, when they’re starting out, think that they can only write about what has happened to them. Then they panic. They worry that maybe their lives aren’t dramatic enough. But can you imagine what our lives (or our work) would be like if we were only able to write directly out of our own experience? We’d have to live such interesting lives that we’d all flame out by age forty, collapsing from the exhaustion of chasing after new material.

  There is a tremendous difference between writing from a place that haunts you, from the locus of your obsession and fear and desire—and writing about what you yourself have been through. We know more than we think we do. I am not, for instance, a sixty-four-year-old male psychoanalyst Holocaust survivor. But in my third novel, Picturing the Wreck, that is who I became. I was Solomon Grossman. “Emma Bovary, c’est moi,” said Flaubert. I didn’t question whether or not I could get inside the heart and soul of a man more than thirty years my senior, who had suffered in ways I hadn’t suffered, taken pleasure in ways I hadn’t. In the first pages, Solomon wakes up in the morning and masturbates. How did I give myself creative license to write such a scene? Because I knew. I knew what he would do, and how it would make him feel, before, during, and after. We are limited only by our capacity to empathize. We have all experienced sorrow, grief, loss, joy, euphoria, thirst, lust, injustice, envy, a broken heart.

  Recently I tried on a space suit known as AGNES, an acronym for Age Gain Now Empathy System, designed by researchers at MIT to generate the feeling, for its wearer, of being elderly. I climbed into what looked like ski pants, which were attached by bungee cords to suspenders, limiting my range of motion. I wore a helmet that also connected to the suspenders by elastic cords, shrinking me and inhibiting my ability to turn my neck. There were goggles to obscure my vision. I stuffed my feet into slippers that had sharp plastic spikes on their soles, so that each step I took was painful.

  It was a chance to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. An eighty- or perhaps ninety-year-old version of myself. A peek into what the future might hold. So this is what it would be like to pick up a spoon. To get up out of a chair. To climb a flight of stairs. And though I’m not sure I needed to experience AGNES in order to imagine the physical experience of being old and frail, it sharpened my perspective. I thought differently about that hunched-over man trying to cross Broadway as the “Don’t Walk” sign flashes, or the woman with dementia who escapes her assisted living facility and finds herself disoriented on the side of a highway. I haven’t yet lived these moments, and perhaps I never will. But I know what it is to be alone. To be lost. To be afraid.

  PIANO

  Every Wednesday after school, my mother drove me a half-hour to a neighboring town for my piano lesson. On our way, we stopped at a Howard Johnson’s and I ordered a swiss chocolate almond ice-cream cone. I don’t remember much about our car rides—I can’t summon up a single conversation—but I do remember the precise taste of the ice cream, the satisfying crunch of the almonds. The sensory details of our childhoods are often what remain vivid: the glare of the late afternoon sun, the steady whoosh of the highway below, the car’s upholstery against my back, the sight of my mother’s hands—no longer young—on the steering wheel. She drove an enormous, dark brown Cadillac Eldorado. Why? I don’t know. My parents weren’t showy people. If I were creating a character like my mother, I wouldn’t have her drive an Eldorado.

  My piano lesson was the punctuation—a comma, perhaps, or better yet a semicolon—in the middle of my week. The rest of life paused on either side of it. Mr. Tipton was passionate, exacting, wounded if a student came to a lesson unprepared. He had bright red hair and a ruddy face, as did Mrs. Tipton, and they had a brood of red-headed Tiptons. I cared a lot about what Mr. Tipton thought, and I tried never to be unprepared. When I practiced piano, my usual fears and anxieties fell away. Did Sol Kimpinski really have a crush on me? Did I have a crush on him? Had I studied enough for my American history exam? Was my father—so pale, so overweight, so unhappy—about to have a heart attack and die?

  At my upright Mason & Hamlin piano in the den where my father spent the evenings hanging in traction, I practiced for hours every day. I ran through my scales and arpeggios, then turned to whatever piece of music I was working on: a Bach Invention, a Chopin nocturne, a Beethoven bagatelle, a Mozart sonata. I didn’t consider the meaning of the word practice. It would be many years before I began to understand that all of life is practice: writing, driving, hiking, brushing teeth, packing lunch boxes, making beds, cooking dinner, making love, walking dogs, even sleeping. We are always practicing. Only practicing.

  For a while, I thought I might want to be a pianist when I grew up. I thought this the way my son Jacob wants to be a professional basketball player. Or the way my mother wanted to be a famous writer. It was a romantic daydream; I had a little bit of talent, a pretty good ear, some dedication. I see now that piano was my training ground—at least as important as any writing workshop. I was preparing myself for a lifetime of working with words. The phrasing, the pauses, the crescendos and diminuendos, keeping time, the creating of shape, the coaxing out of a tonal quality. All these are with me as I approach the page.

  When you have written something—whether part of a story, a poem, an essay, an opening for a longer piece, anything that feels like it might be a keeper—listen to it. What does it sound like? Read your words aloud. Even if you look like a crazy person, it doesn’t matter. No one’s watching. Pay attention to the way the language moves. Is it creating the effect you’re after? I think of some of Nabokov’s sentences, or the end of Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Fluid sentence-rivers, carrying us along on a current of commas, faster, faster until we are nearly breathless. Or the atonal juxtapositions of Don DeLillo’s. Or the clean, staccato beats of Hemingway, a period like a knife jab in the gut. What instrument does your language call to mind? A cello? An electric guitar? An oboe? Are you writing a concerto? A symphony? A lullaby? Listen and you will begin to hear the rhythms of your own voice.

  FIVE SENSES

  A character is taking a walk—say, down a winding path in the countryside. That character is lost in thought. We get memory, wistfulness, longing, regret. This character—let’s call him Joe—is on his way to his girlfriend’s house. They’ve had a fight and he’s hoping to make up with her. He’s thinking about how he’ll apologize to her, what she’ll say, whether the day will turn out well. But in the meantime, Joe is walking. His good city shoes are caked with mud from the previous night’s rain. A bumblebee buzzes in the nearby honeysuckle. The scent wafts over him, reminding him of a happier time with the girlfriend, a picnic they took last summer. He has a slight sniffle. His nose is running. He stuffs his hands deep into his pockets, looking for a tissue, but instead finds a wrapper from a fortune cookie. His stomach rumbles. He wonders if she’ll offer him anything to eat.

  For us to feel Joe’s essential humanness, we must have access to his body. This is one of the simplest ways to bring a character to life on the page, and yet we so easily forget. If we inhabit his body as he walks down the path, things will happen in the writing: the bumblebee, the honeysuckle, the fortune cookie. His musings will be associative, connected to the corporeal present. After all, what else is there? We see, smell, taste, hear, and touch. The senses are gateways
to our inner lives.

  A friend once told me about a walk she took through Washington Square Park in New York City on an early spring day. It was a route she took regularly, from her home to her office, but on this day she stopped dead in the middle of the park, overcome by a panic attack. What had happened? Why that moment? Her heart raced and she tried to catch her breath. It seemed the world was dissolving around her. When she was finally able to sit down on a park bench, she realized that the quality of the air and the sunlight were precisely the same as they had been a year before—a year to the day—when she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She had made a full recovery and until that moment she hadn’t remembered that it was the anniversary of her diagnosis. But her body remembered. The light, the air. The breeze against her skin. A street band playing in the distance. Her body brought her back to that place of terror, to a time that her mind resisted.

  Write the words “The Five Senses” on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of who you are and what you’re doing. When it comes to building a character, to grounding one in a place and time, ask: What does she smell right now? What does the air feel like against her bare arms? Is there a siren in the distance? A slamming door? A car alarm? Is she thirsty? Hung over? Does her back ache? Not all of this needs to end up on the page. But you need to know. Because knowing your character’s five senses will open up the world around her. It may even unlock the story itself.

  BAD DAYS

  Some of my worst writing days have been the ones that stretched out before me in all their glory. No doctor’s appointments, no plumber coming to fix the bathroom leak, no early pickup for my son at school. Not even a pesky fly banging against the lamp shade. Eight clear hours. Just me and the silence. Me and the dogs asleep at my feet. Me and the scented candle, the fire roaring in the fireplace. Me and . . .

  Well, you see the problem: that little word, me. Wherever we go, to borrow a phrase from the Buddhist writer Jon Kabat-Zinn, there we are. It is easy to get in our own way. We can promise ourselves that we’re just going to check this one e-mail (make this bed, cook this sauce, run this errand) and before we know it, we have been swept away from our work as if by a rogue wave. We grow angrier as the day progresses this way. How can we be letting this happen? How, when circumstances were so damned perfect?

  Sometimes, it’s those perfect circumstances that can be the most oppressive. In another life—before motherhood—I spent months at a time at artists’ colonies—those bucolic, faraway places where lunch is dropped off at your cabin in the woods, and silence is the rule during daytime hours. Composers, painters, sculptors, poets, novelists all living and breathing their work—but I remember the difficulty I always had, settling into an ideal work environment. Especially if I’d headed off into the woods to attempt something new. In the endless quiet, my inner censor’s voice grew louder. A composer friend was once shown to his studio at a famous colony by a man who told him that Aaron Copland had composed Appalachian Spring in that same room. My friend spent the ensuing weeks staring out the window, mired in self-doubt. Sometimes we’re better off with just enough time. Or even not enough time.

  When my son was little, he loved a book by Judith Viorst called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Poor Alexander. He woke up with gum in his hair, he ended up in the middle seat during carpool, his mom forgot to pack dessert in his lunch box, he had a cavity at the dentist, and just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse, he saw people kissing on television. You can feel the momentum of a day like that turning against you, and if it does, sometimes the best thing to do is crawl back into bed and wait for it to pass.

  We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. What we’re doing isn’t easy. We have chosen to spend the better part of our lives in solitude, wrestling with our deepest thoughts and obsessions and concerns. We unleash the beast of memory; we peer into Pandora’s box. We do all this in the spirit of faith and exploration, with no guarantee that what we produce will be worthwhile. We don’t call in sick. We don’t take mental health days. We don’t get two weeks paid vacation, or summer Fridays, or holiday weekends. Often, we are out of step with the tempo of those around us. It can feel isolating and weird. And so, when the day turns against us, we might do well to follow the advice of the Buddhist writer Sylvia Boorstein, who talks to herself as if she’s a child she loves very much. Sweetheart, she’ll say. Darling. Honey. That’s all right. There, there. Go take a walk. Take a bath. Take a drive. Bake a cake. Nap a little. You’ll try again tomorrow.

  MESS

  I had just turned seventeen when I went off to college, and though I may have looked the part of a freshman, I was immature and confused. The rules of my strict upbringing had defined me and kept me in place. In casting those rules aside—no longer worried that God might be watching—I was on my own, and as prepared for it as a toddler crossing a city street by herself. They say that the cerebral frontal cortex—the part of the brain that identifies and comprehends risk and danger—is not fully developed until well into one’s twenties. Risk and danger—these were mere abstractions. I never even considered that actions produce consequences.

  I entered a self-destructive spiral that lasted six years and involved drugs, alcohol, and a powerful married man, the step-father of one of my closest friends. He was also a sociopath who eventually served time in prison for tax evasion and embezzlement. Read that again. Slowly. Try to make sense of it. Mistress of a married man. A married criminal man. I didn’t rebel by half-measures. Once I began, there was no stopping me. Anything could have happened, and a lot did, none of it pretty. Certainly, observing me during that time, few would have laid odds on my growing up to become a novelist and memoirist, a professor, a contented wife and mother living in rural Connecticut. Life doesn’t follow narrative arcs that stretch from one predictable scene to the next—does it? The landmark documentary Up series, by Michael Apted, in which he follows a group of British schoolchildren beginning at age seven, and then every seven years up through middle age, has the tag line: Give me the child until age seven, and I will give you the man.

  Well, yes and no. If we examine a moment’s interactions and details, we can cast out lines, like fishermen; there are infinite ways a life might unfold. If someone were to have observed me at age seven, the trajectory through my early twenties might have shown up like the faintest crease a fortune-teller might see in the palm of a hand. If someone had drawn an arrow from my parents’ unhappiness back through my family’s history, which included some alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and a complex legacy of secrets, then perhaps one could have imagined a rough patch down the road. But, as in the blooming of an orchid or the metastasis of a tumor, the conditions had to be right. If I hadn’t crossed paths with that particular man would something else, equally or perhaps even uglier, have happened? Or would the shadow of that particular danger have passed over me? Throw any variable into the mix—a phone call, a different turn, a stranger walking into the room, a new friend, a caring mentor, a thunderstorm, a broken lock—and everything changes. Suddenly you’re telling a different story.

  What happened next could not have been etched into the palm of any hand. The winter of the year I was twenty-three, my parents were driving home during a blizzard and my father passed out behind the wheel of their car. My mother was in the passenger seat. He was wearing a seat belt. She was not. Two weeks later, my father died from his injuries. By the time my mother was pried by the jaws of life from the wrecked car, she had eighty broken bones. In my memoir Slow Motion, I write about my parents’ accident. I write about being a twenty-three-year-old college drop out trying to disengage myself from my married boyfriend, subsisting on a diet of white wine and scotch and saltines. I write about my grief at the loss of my father; taking care of my mother; ending, final
ly, my destructive relationship; returning to college. On the cover of a paperback edition of Slow Motion, the subtitle reads: “a memoir of a life rescued by tragedy.” This is marketing-speak, fraught and complex events reduced to a sound bite. The tragedy of my parents’ accident changed everything for me, but it didn’t rescue me.

  What is true is that I became a writer. It had begun many years earlier, under the covers, with a flashlight, scribbling letters filled with lies. It had roots in my solitary childhood. It grew within the girl of seven, fourteen, twenty-one. But after the accident, conditions were right. I was broken open, no longer innocent or oblivious. I had a story to tell—a story I was not necessarily ready to tell, but that didn’t matter. (Fail, fail better.) I was compelled to follow every faint crease, to become a student and translator of my experience. To reach into the past. To continue my relationship with my father on the page, to keep him—to keep all of them who died during that long, impossible year, including my grandmother and two uncles—alive. Language became my navigational tool. With every word, I pulled myself a little bit further out of the abyss. With every sentence, my focus sharpened. With every story, I began to form myself from the inside out.

  WRITING IN THE DARK

  I wrote my first novel in a borrowed room down the hall from my tiny New York City apartment. Each morning, I would pad barefoot to that room, still in my pajamas, a mug of steaming coffee in my hand. I spent a couple of years there, smoking cigarettes, staring out the window into the interior courtyard. I’d write, smoke. Write, smoke some more. I felt pressure, yes, but the pressure had entirely to do with the novel itself, and not with the outside world. The outside world did not yet exist for me. I wasn’t thinking about editors and agents and literary success. There was no Facebook or Twitter. I didn’t know the first thing about the business of writing. Of course I cared about being published. I had a lot to prove—to myself and to others. I wanted the affirmation that I wasn’t deluded. I needed to show my shattered mother, my fractured family, my dead father, and my skeptical friends that I might amount to something after all. But it was the work itself that drew me in, then threw me a lifeline and saved me.