by Dani Shapiro
COMPOSING
Most of us compose directly on screens at some point in the writing process. Desktops, laptops, iPads, and variations thereof. Walk into any Starbucks, or down the aisle of any train or plane and there we are, our faces made ghostly by the bluish-white light cast from our devices. But the screen can make our work look neat and tidy—finished—before it is. We can swoop in, search and replace, cut and paste, highlight, delete, and all the while the screen absorbs the changes and still looks the same. If you’ve never tried it, see what happens if you write a draft of something longhand. Before long, you’ll be forced to x out whole sentences. You’ll draw circles and asterisks and arrows. You’ll change your mind about what you’ve crossed out, and write “stet” in the margin. It will look messy, because it is messy. It should be that: a beautiful, complicated mess. Who knows? Maybe only one sentence will remain. Maybe the whole order will be upended. You’ll be able to see a road map of your progress as you build the architecture of your story. The poet Mark Strand has made art of his drafts on canvas, in which doodles and scribbles and columns fill up the space with what the poet Jorie Graham calls “a mildly feverish black cursive.”
This fever is lost on the screen. The evidence of the mind making the thing—made visible in the cross outs, the thick rewriting of words over other words, the fanciful sketches—a cloud, a camel, a man in a hat—that seem to ride the waves of language, the places where the pen grows dark and forceful, nearly stabbing in its intensity. This is work being made in real time. Work that reveals its scars.
But—unless we are poets—there are practical considerations to writing longhand. Your hand gets a cramp. You become afraid of losing the notebook. Though I begin most of my creative work in a notebook, when I reach thirty or forty pages, I type a draft into my computer. What if there was a fire? A flood? The irony that my work stored on a cloud feels safer than the solid weight of a spiral-bound notebook, does not escape me. But at least for a while, the circles and squiggles, the x’d out sentences, the asterisks and inserts covering every inch of every page have served their purpose. They remind me that my work is changeable. That there is play in this thing I’m doing. I’m a child, finger-painting. This color? Why not? There is joy—rather than industry—in putting pen to paper. A sense of possibility, discovery.
For the past dozen years, I have used a particular brand of spiral-bound notebook—dark blue, the insignia of a prep school I did not attend emblazoned on its cover. I’ve become a little obsessive about these notebooks. They can only be found in one bookstore, in my in-laws’ hometown. Whenever I visit, I stop by the prep school bookstore and stock up. I carry home armloads of them. I live in fear of running out, or—horrible thought—that they might be discontinued. Why these notebooks? They’re nothing special to look at. I have no connection to the school, other than its location in the town where my husband grew up. The reason I’m attached to them is simple: the first time I randomly happened to write in one of those notebooks, the work went well.
We are, many of us, superstitious creatures. We think there may be reasons our day flows in the right direction. A favorite necklace, a penny found on the sidewalk, a crystal we tuck into our pocket, a private mantra—we may rely on talismans to help us along. But I’ve never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.
Pick a notebook, any notebook. If you compose well in it, you will become attached. Choose a pen that feels right. It could be a beautiful, expensive fountain pen, or any old BIC. Whatever feels good in your hand. Okay—this is your notebook, and this is your pen. Balance the notebook on your lap or set it on a table. And wherever you are in your work, start there. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the sound the pen makes as it moves across the page. Now, doodle something. Write a few sentences. Scratch them out. Write a few more.
CHANGE
I had just published Slow Motion when Jacob was born. In the first sentence of that memoir, I refer to my parents’ car crash as the event that divided my life into before and after. What I didn’t know—I was in my early thirties and single when I began the book, in my midthirties and engaged to be married when I finished—is that a life containing only a single “before and after” moment is indeed a fortunate one. “My life closed twice before its close,” said Emily Dickinson. After my father’s death, I carried those words around in the back pages of my Filofax for years. I intuited the truth in them, though I couldn’t have yet imagined how a life could close twice—or even more—before its close. I thought it was kind of like a one-per-customer thing.
But then, when Jacob was six months old, he developed seizures that led to a diagnosis of a rare and nearly always catastrophic disorder known as Infantile Spasms. Seven out of a million babies are diagnosed each year with this disorder, and only 15 percent of them survive. Most are left blind, physically impaired, or brain damaged. As I sat in the doctor’s office hearing these dire statistics about the infant I was holding in my arms—pain engraves a deeper memory—everything I cared about in the world was distilled into a single moment. Looking down at my only child on that late autumn afternoon, I knew that if he wasn’t okay-–if he wasn’t part of that small percentage of babies who make it—that my life would be over. I believed the loss of a child would be the only pain from which it would be impossible to recover. And in that doctor’s office I was staring straight into the dark heart of that likely outcome.
Over the next weeks—a frenzy of trying to calibrate the experimental medication that came via FedEx from Canada, of doses around the clock, of waking a sleeping baby at three o’clock in the morning to drink down the medicine that was or wasn’t going to save him, and then the months of vigilance that followed: was that a seizure or just a hiccup?—my usual way of moving through life was no longer possible. I could not hover at an outsidery distance. I was not filing away details for later. Being a writer offered me no protection. In Lorrie Moore’s story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” a surgeon tells a writer-mother that her baby has a Wilms’ Tumor. (“Is that apostrophe s or s apostrophe,” she asks.) The writer argues with her husband, who wants her to sell a story about it. She calls what is happening to them “a nightmare of narrative slop.”
I had always shaped narratives out of my life’s most painful and difficult circumstances. I had held to a belief—as necessary to me as a heartbeat—that this was a redemptive act; to create a coherent narrative out of sorrow or grief was genuine and worthwhile. But as I fought for the survival of my own child the failures of narrative seemed to taunt me. John Banville wrote about Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her only daughter: “Against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art. Especially not art.”
Each day, I climbed the stairs of our Brooklyn brownstone to my third-floor office and stared blankly at the wall. I was a writer who couldn’t write. A writer who didn’t see the point of writing. Words on paper couldn’t save my child, and they could no longer save me. It felt as if I had chosen to spend my life in the most frivolous way possible, making up stories. Narrative slop. Why wasn’t I the research scientist who had invented the drug that was stalling our son’s seizures? Now that was important. What if he had decided to become a poet instead? What then?
But writing was how my husband and I both made our livings, and we had a mortgage and doctors’ bills. I had to write. I had no choice. I continued to stare at the wall until—it took the better part of a year—a story started to form at the center of the most shaken place inside of me. As my boy began to heal, I began to write a novel about maternal anxiety. What else was there?
I was a big, quivering heap of maternal anxiety. I wondered if I would ever find any other subject interesting, ever again. Love and the terrifying, concomitant potential of loss, were, for a long time, my only subject. I had been forever altered by our brush with catastrophe. It was written on my body. My instrument had changed. And I now understood that it would continue to change. That there would be more befores and afters ahead. Fighting it was futile, impossible. Accepting, even embracing this, was the true work, not only of being a writer, but of being alive.
BEGINNING AGAIN
We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, or a memoir or we may be nearing the finish line on a piece that has taken us years. But wherever we are in our work, we have never been exactly here, today. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need. The solitude of an empty home, a walk through the woods, a bath, or half an hour with a good book—the echo of well-formed sentences in our ears. Whatever it takes to begin again.
When I was first learning to meditate, this idea of beginning again was revelatory. It still is. The meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg speaks of catching the mind scampering off, like the little monkey that it is, into the past, the future, anywhere but here, and suggests that the real skill in meditation is simply noticing that the mind has wandered. So liberating, this idea that we can start over at any time, a thousand times a day if need be. I see many parallels between the practices of meditation and writing but none are more powerful than this. Writing is hard. We resist, we procrastinate, we veer off course. But we have this tool, this ability to begin again. Every sentence is new. Every paragraph, every chapter, every book is a country we’ve never been to before. We’re clearing brush. We don’t know what’s on the other side of that tree. We are visitors in a foreign land. And so we take a step. Up the stairs after the morning coffee. Back to the desk after the doorbell has rung. Return to the manuscript.
It never gets easier. It shouldn’t get easier. Word after word, sentence after sentence, we build our writing lives. We hope not to repeat ourselves. We hope to evolve as interpreters and witnesses of the world around us. We feel our way through darkness, pause, consider, breathe in, breathe out, begin again. And again, and again.
TICS
I’m upstairs working when I hear a strange thumping sound coming from below, and I can’t resist investigating. Any excuse to get up and stretch. I follow the sound to my dining room and catch sight of a blur of red slamming itself against the window. A cardinal is hurling itself at its own reflection in the glass. Does it think it’s fighting another bird? Or mating? The poor thing keeps at it. Slam. Then back to the tree branch. It must be dazed but it doesn’t learn its lesson. Slam. Wings fluttering. Black eyes, black beak highlighted against the red. Slam. I want to help it but know I can’t.
Things we do repeatedly are evidence of our own nature. These might be physical gestures: twirling hair, drumming fingers, biting nails. We might pour ourselves a glass of wine at six o’clock every evening. We might talk to ourselves or sing in the shower without even knowing it. We might have actual tics: a throbbing muscle under one eye, a shoulder that lifts involuntarily. When it comes to the writing life, we have these impulses, too. And—unlike our friend the cardinal—we can learn something about ourselves and our process if we pay close attention.
When I finished my novel Black & White, it had been through multiple drafts and close reads, but it wasn’t until the book was in production that I received a note from a copy editor. “Do you realize,” she wrote, “that the word muffled appears eleven times in this manuscript?” Muffled. The copy editor referenced the pages on which the offending word appeared. Sounds were muffled. Feelings were muffled. How had I not noticed? Muffled is not a word I use regularly in conversation. What had happened? How had I not caught this, in read after read?
The more I thought about it, the more I understood. And fortunately I still had time to do some small but important revisions—which didn’t have to do simply with removing the muffleds, but rather, with realizing that each time I unconsciously repeated the word, I was not close enough to the interior life of my main character. She had been her mother’s muse as a child—posing nude for a series of provocative photographs—an experience that continued to haunt and define her life as an adult. If you had asked me, while I was writing Black & White, if there were any direct autobiographical components to it, I would have told you no. But in fact I had been a child model myself. As a three-year-old, I was the Kodak poster child at Christmas, displayed on billboards all over America. And though the experience wasn’t nearly as traumatic as the one I gave my main character, it was strange and confusing to be the Orthodox Jewish Christmas poster child. Those feelings were buried for me. Muffled. Those places in my manuscript—that unconscious repetition—were signals that I needed to dig a little deeper. What was being muffled? What was beneath that overused word?
Our tics are a road map to our most hidden and sensitive wounds. My husband has pointed out to me that when I describe my parents’ car accident or Jacob’s illness, I tend to fall back on the exact same language. My father was killed, my mother had eighty broken bones. Rare seizure disorder; seven out of a million babies; only 15 percent survive. I do this—and I would wager we all do—because I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to revisit the pain, and so I go on automatic pilot. Eighty broken bones. Fifteen percent. I prefer to skim the surface, hit the main points, and move on, thank you very much. But if we are interested in delving deeply, if we are students of the observed life, we’d best take a good hard look at these easy fallbacks. Repeated words. Familiar phrases. Consider them clues. When you discover them, slow down. In fact, stop. Become willing to press against the bruise—it’s there anyway—and see what it yields.
STRUCTURE
I recently had a long phone conversation with a writer working on a first novel. This writer, a former journalist and television producer, had reached a low point. She was intensely frustrated by her lack of progress. I could hear it in her voice. She sounded strained, confused, almost angry at her book, as if it were a truculent child. Why wouldn’t it behave? Structure was her problem, she told me. She had characters she loved and felt she knew well. She was halfway through the manuscript, and had outlined the rest of it, but now she found herself stuck.
At the word outline, I began to see a red flag waving. I had a feeling that I knew the problem. It is common among writers who have been journalists, reporters, editors, business owners, attorneys, or pretty much any career that rewards concise and ordered thinking. It stands to reason, of course, that we ought to know where we’re going before we set out—doesn’t it? The outline serves as a literary form of a GPS. We wouldn’t get into our car and head to an unfamiliar destination without plugging the address into our GPS, would we? We are comforted by that electronic voice—mine is a British woman who always sounds slightly miffed—telling us that our destination is ahead on the right.
Except that when it comes to creative writing—by which I mean the kind of work that the artist Anne Truitt describes as “the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity”—outlines are not necessarily helpful. We need Doctorow’s fog. If we know too much about where we’re going, the work will suffer along the way. It will convulse and die before our eyes. We’ll end up dragging along a corpse until finally, exhausted, we just give up.
Outlines offer us an illusion that we are in control, that we know where we’re going. And while this may be comforting, it is also antithetical to the process of making work that lives and breathes. If we are painting by numbers, how can we give birth to something new? Jorie Graham also describes Mark Strand’s poems on canvas in this way: “The columns swerve, making these abstract paintings, as in: what makes the shape move is the mind making mistakes
, or taking change on, or trying out variations until the right one appears and stills the mind.”
The mind making mistakes. This is what makes the shape move. Such a magnificent idea, and one to hold on to, that the mistakes themselves are what make the work alive. Structure may emerge in the middle, even may announce itself once we’re in over our heads, in the thick of it, having relinquished control. Then, then, the architecture begins to whisper to us. We may have thought we were building a Gothic cathedral, only to find that the shape is an adobe. We may realize that our beginning is not the beginning at all, and that where we are, on page one hundred and sixty-five, is actually the starting point. We may realize that a minor character has taken over. That the book needs a prologue set fifty years before the story begins. It isn’t always pleasant, when the true structure reveals itself, because it often means a lot more work. You may need to shore up the foundation, or perhaps you’ll have to build an entirely new one.
My husband has a recurring fantasy in which he’s a bricklayer. He finds something immensely satisfying in the idea of laying one brick at a time, not moving forward until that brick is cemented in place. He returns to this fantasy because it’s the opposite of the writing process, which he likens to building a skyscraper in a swamp. You don’t know—you can’t know—whether the bricks you’ve layed on top will be supported by the bricks at the bottom. There’s only one way to find out, and that is to build the thing, regardless.
