Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  In the country, when I opened the front door, the only signs of life were a bluebird, a hawk circling overhead, a white-tailed deer, the occasional fox. I was left with myself, and I hardly knew what to do. The hours would take on no shape unless I shaped them. I had managed to have a routine for all of my writing years prior to moving to the country—I had written four books that way—but I began to see that it had been a series of habits strung together. Not a practice.

  Practice involves discipline but is more closely related to patience. I was nearly forty years old when we left the city, and I had mastered a series of skills that allowed me to be productive. I knew how to find a good café in which to work. I avoided meeting friends for lunch (or, god forbid, breakfast) because it disrupted my writing day. I knew how to wear earphones to tune out the sound of jackhammers on the street below. But in the sudden absence of cafés, noise, or nearby friends, my old habits no longer served me. I had to rethink everything. Surrounded by nothing but space and silence, I saw that up until then, I had been reacting to the ready distractions of city life, like a spinning top, the slightest bump against anything—a person, a red light, a shop window—and off I might go in another direction. Yes, I got my work done. But at what cost?

  One of the cornerstones of Buddhist philosophy is the notion of dharma—the Sanskrit word that, loosely translated, means teaching, or wisdom, or life’s path. Practice is about engagement with one’s own dharma. The articulation, the expression, day after day after day, of our truest selves. Writing, it seems to me, is dharma practice. If we are patient, if we place ourselves in the path of possibility, we just might find our own rushing current—more powerful than that of any city street.

  Lives are made up of days. Days, made up of hours, of minutes, of seconds during which we make choices, and those choices can become practice. When it comes to the practice of writing, it cannot be distraction that propels us but rather the patience—the openness, the willingness—to meet ourselves on the page. To stop being at the mercy of what we surround ourselves with, but rather, to discover our story.

  “Practice,” said the great yogi Pattabhi Jois to the students gathered at his shala in Mysore, India. He was eighty, maybe even ninety years old and I am certain he was speaking as much to himself as to them, as good teachers always do. “Practice and all is coming.”

  INHERITANCE

  My father is buried in a massive Brooklyn cemetery where wild dogs roam in the night and the elevated train rumbles overhead. I get lost each time I visit his grave, and wander among tombstones until I find it. He is surrounded by his grandparents, his parents, a brother, a few cousins. His second wife is buried in her own family’s plot, a few hundred steps away. It was startling when I came upon her headstone: the dates bracketing her brief life, just beneath her surname, Shapiro. My father’s first wife is buried somewhere in New Jersey. I remember attending the funeral with my half-sister. His third wife—my mother—is also buried in New Jersey, down by the shore, near the chicken farm where she grew up. She is buried in her family’s plot. When she was dying, my mother made it clear that she did not wish to end up in the Brooklyn cemetery; she did not want to spend eternity with those people, the ones she had disliked with passion for more than forty years. I feel sorry for you, my mother said from her deathbed, eyes gleaming. You’ll have to visit your parents in two different cemeteries.

  In my basement, on the other side of the wall from Jacob’s playroom (piano, ukelele, bean bag chairs, and half-finished board games scattered across the floor) I have the detritus of my family’s life. It’s all just thrown in there in a jumble. Most boxes have remained unopened for these nearly ten years since my mother’s death. Some are labelled in her hand: “Peru,” or “delicate,” or “important papers!” Her wedding dress—ankle-length ice-blue tulle with a French lace bodice, the height of fashion for a second wedding in 1957—is not packed in mothballs as it should be but, rather, is tossed across a bench next to our wine cellar as if waiting for the ghost of my young, glamorous mother to come along and dance in it once more. Also in this mess—which my husband keeps suggesting we tackle on some rainy weekend—are my childless aunt’s fifty-year-old golf clubs, my uncle’s framed medical diploma and a basketball signed to him by the NCAA-winning Rutgers basketball players, for whom he was team physician.

  “Where does the pain go?” asks Donna Masini in her poem “Eye of the Skull.” The poet has come from the dentist, where she’s just had a cavity filled. She walks down the street, her mouth numb, when she notices a crazy woman behind her. “An older woman / dressed as a young girl. She had gone to a good school / liked good things. Had had them too. You could tell. / She is screaming into herself, into the air. Vulgar things, shouting them to no one in particular / that I can see.”

  I remember reading this poem with a shock of recognition. It was shortly after a spate of losses: my father, grandmother, and two uncles, all within a year. My mother was living in a rehabilitation center. My remaining relatives had stopped speaking to each other. Bad blood boiled to the surface. My relationship had ended. I read Masini’s poem and identified with both the numb poet and the crazy woman. I knew the pain went somewhere—I was quaking from it—and also afraid of it. I was afraid that if I let myself fully feel the accumulation of those losses, the enormity of them, I would become the crazy woman. I would go to a place from which I’d never be able to recover, to return. “What is trapped in the bones, the gearlike teeth / that join the two fused cramped parts / of the skull? What clenches and curls in the marrow? / Did the pain surface, just then? Did all that / numbed pain come in one great rush?”

  I needn’t have worried. To write is to have an ongoing dialogue with your own pain. To scream to it, with it, from it. To know it—to know it cold. Whether you’re writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln, a philosophical treatise, or a work of fiction, you are facing your demons because they are there. To be alone in a room with yourself and the contents of your mind is, in effect, to go to that place, whether you intend to or not. I recently met a writer who is also a psychoanalyst. She laughingly recounted a conversation at a dinner party, in which she told the man seated next to her that she was doing post-doctoral training in trauma. “You want to do that?” he asked her, baffled that anyone would choose to do such a thing.

  Just as I know that a holy mess waits for me on the other side of the wall from Jacob’s playroom, I also know that it’s only a representation (all that stuff!) of the holy mess inside of me. The ghost of my mother who died confused and angry. The ghost of my father who I still talk to every day. The golf clubs and medical diplomas of aunts and uncles left in the hands of the last person for whom it will have any meaning. What clenches and curls in the marrow.

  The mess is holy. What we inherit—and how we come to understand what we inherit—is all we have to work with. There is beauty in what is. Every day, when I sit down to work, I travel to that place. Not because I’m a masochist. Not because I live in the past. But because my words are my pickax, and with them I chip away at the rough surface of whatever it is I still need to know.

  NOT ALWAYS SO

  The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once said that all of life can be summed up in these three words: not always so. We plan on our day going in a certain direction? Not always so. We expect a friend or relative to behave the way they always have? Not always so. There is the pattern, and then there is the dropped stitch that disrupts the pattern, making it all the more complex and interesting.

  Stories are about the dropped stitch. About what happens when the pattern breaks. Though there is a certain poetry in the rhythm of the everyday, it is most often a shift, a moment of not-always-so, that ends up being the story. Why is this moment different? What has changed? And why now? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions when we’re at work. This shift can be a massive one (here I am thinking of the dystopian novel in which the very rhythms of the universe are called into question: the sun no longer predictably rises
in the east or sets in the west; a meteor is hurling toward earth; the oceans are rising), or it can be as subtle and internal as the Steven Millhauser story, “Getting Closer,” in which a nine-year-old boy on vacation with his family feels, for the first time, a searing, wordless awareness of time’s passage.

  Why are we writing about this moment, and no other? And what can we do—stylistically, structurally, linguistically—to get inside it? How can we reveal the innards, the pulsing truth of this character who is—let’s face it—at some sort of juncture, because if he isn’t, why would the story be worth telling? The Millhauser story takes place within the span of just a few minutes. It unpacks, layer after layer, the dawning consciousness of its nine-year-old protagonist. The action of the story, so to speak, involves the boy dipping his toe into the water for the first time that summer. That—in terms of external action, in terms of plot—is it. Nothing else happens. Can you imagine Millhauser having to answer the question, What are you working on? while he was writing that story?

  But what goes on internally in “Getting Closer” is gripping to the point of leaving the reader breathless. We are guided deep into the inner world of that boy, tracing thought after thought until we are him, we become him, and this is literature doing its job, which is to penetrate the surface, to dismantle the ordinary, to find the dropped stitch, to show us that we are—all of us—built of these not-always-so moments, that they mark the turning points of our lives.

  GRAVY

  I am on the chaise longue, cross-legged, my computer nestled into a cushion on my lap. It’s my best time to be writing–-first thing in the morning, before I’m distracted by those “fleas of life.” The house is empty. There is nothing stopping me from getting to work. Except that I can feel it: a restlessness, an unease. I’m about to get in my own way. The Internet beckons. The book review due next week feels suddenly pressing. The galleys and manuscripts piled across my office are calling my name. The previous night’s dreams hover just at the edges of my consciousness, throwing me off balance.

  It’s so easy to forget what matters. When I begin the day centered, with equanimity, I find that I am quite unshakable. But if I start off in that slippery, discomfiting way, I am easily thrown off course—and once off course, there I stay. And so I know that my job is to cultivate a mind that catches itself. A mind that watches its own desire to scamper off into the bramble, but instead, guides itself gently back to what needs to be done. This kind of equanimity may not be my nature, but I can at least attempt to make it my habit. I was a young writer when I first read Donald Hall’s memoir, Life Work, but I still remember the way he described a “best day” spent on the New Hampshire farm he inherited from his grandparents: “This morning, when I have worked over as much prose as I wish to, when I feel tired, it’s 10:00 A.M. I’ve been up five and a half hours, and over the last four hours I have done my day’s work. It’s 10:00 A.M and the rest of the day is gravy.”

  Hall goes on to describe the rest of this ideal day’s activities —this gravy—in great detail: he dictates the changes he’s made to his manuscript, gathers the tapes of letters he dictated while watching the previous night’s Red Sox game, and delivers it all to his (yes) typist. He shaves. Reads a friend’s manuscript. Proofreads an index. Now it’s time for lunch. He takes a nap with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and—he matter-of-factly lets us know—they have sex. Then he takes his dog for a long walk. Comes home, reads the day’s mail (letters from old friends and acquaintances, and requests and invitations, most of which he politely declines). Maybe he does an errand or two—nothing taxing, just the grocery store or filling up the car with gas–-and then he picks up the clean pages from his typist and it’s back to work for a few more hours. The day ends with dinner and another Red Sox game, during which he flosses his teeth and again dictates letters.

  A stunning example of a writer who accepts and understands that his work is the only thing that will save him. His tone is the same throughout, focused—gently, quietly, but unshakably, it seems—on the task at hand. He is a writer who (at least on the best day) does not succumb to inner or outer pressure but, rather, knows that what he calls “absorbedness” is the answer—the only answer. Through all of life’s twists and turns—those fleas—he turns to work the way his grandparents turned to the soil, to the harvest, which waits for no one. He operates with a tempered sense of urgency. His daughter gives birth; his elderly mother falls ill; he is diagnosed with a tumor in his liver; his wife—we know, reading this book years after it was written—his wife will die tragically young, of leukemia. Still, there is this day, and there is work to be done. This absorbedness does not come from a cold heart—no, quite the opposite. It is a hedge against mortality, against depression, against indignity, against misfortune, against paralyzing sorrow. It is not a magic pill but, rather, a stark fact. After his own cancer diagnosis, Hall writes: “If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.” There is this—only this. It would be good to keep these words in mind when we wake up each morning. Get done what you can. And then, the rest is gravy.

  THE CAVE

  I once heard this story from a friend of Joyce Carol Oates. The writer was sitting at the breakfast table at home in Princeton with her husband, Ray Smith. Ray was reading the paper when he happened upon a review of Joyce’s new novel. He asked if she wanted to see it.

  “No,” she replied.

  No?

  “If it’s a good review it will ruin my writing day, and if it’s a bad review, it will ruin my writing day. Either way, I intend to have a writing day.”

  I don’t know whether this story is true but I like it anyway. The understanding that excitement—whether the happy kind or not—will make the work all but impossible. It gets a person revved up. And a revved up state is not useful. A writer in the midst of a piece of work might do well to think of herself as nineteenth-century neurasthenic: frail and easily startled, best off bundled in a blanket with a cup of tea, in a lawn chair, perhaps, gazing out from Magic Mountain.

  I like excitement as much as the next person. Perhaps even more than the next person. But I get overstimulated easily, and I can feel my brain shorting out when I have too much going on. And it doesn’t take much: a good piece of news, a nice review, a longed-for assignment, a cool invitation, and suddenly I can’t think straight. The outside world glitters, it gleams like a shiny new toy. Squinting, having lost all sense of myself, I toddle with about as much consciousness as a two-year-old in the direction of that toy. Once I get a little bit of it, I am conditioned to want more, more, more. I lose all sight of whatever I had been doing before.

  One of the strangest aspects of a writing life is what I think of as going in and out of the cave. When we are in the middle of a piece of work, the cave is the only place we belong. Yes, there are practical considerations. Eating, for instance. Or helping a child with homework. Or taking out the trash. Whatever. But a writer in the midst of a story needs to find a way to keep her head there. She can’t just pop out of the cave, have some fun, go dancing, and then pop back in. The work demands our full attention, our deepest concentration, our best selves. If we’re in the middle—in the boat we’re building—we cannot let ourselves be distracted by the bright and shiny. The bright and shiny is a mirage, an illusion. It is of no use to us.

  If there is a time for that brightness, it is at the end: when the book is finished and the revisions have been turned in, when you’ve given everything inside of you and then some. When the cave is empty. Every rock turned over. The walls covered with hieroglyphics that only you understand—notes you’ve written to yourself in the darkness. But it’s possible that something interesting has happened while you’ve toiled amid the moths and millipedes. Once you’ve acclimated to cave life, stumbling toward the light may have lost some of its appeal. What glitters looks shopworn. The sparkle and hum of life outside the cave feels somehow less real than what has taken place deep with
in its recesses. Savor it—this hermetic joy, this rich, unexpected peace. It’s hard-won, and so easy to lose. It contains within it the greatest contentment I have ever known.

  CONTROL

  “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all morning, and took out a comma,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “In the afternoon, I put it back again.” Let’s face it: most of us are perfectionists. We spend our days searching for the perfect turn of phrase. And we consider this a good time. Who else would care so much about getting it right? Who else would need the silence, the uninterrupted stretches of time, the special mug, the favorite pen? We ponder each word, aim high, strive for both music and meaning. We know that one is nothing without the other. But we are not in control, and perhaps the silence, solitude, mug, and pen are our way of dealing with the fact that we are not masters of any universe—not even the universe of our own creation. Annie Dillard refers to this lack of control as a structural mystery: “Sometimes part of a book simply gets up and walks away. The writer cannot force it back in place. It wanders off to die.”

  We can’t know when this is going to happen; when a book or a story is going to just up and change on us. If we are creating a living, genuine work of art—if we are approaching it with creativity and openness—this not only can, but will happen. The structural mystery Dillard writes about is a part of the process. So how do we make peace with the knowledge that every word, every sentence we write may very well hit the cutting room floor? Well, we don’t make peace with this knowledge. We willfully disregard it. We find the rhythm of our process—the dance between knowing and not knowing—and we discover, along the way, how best to see the work clearly for what it is.