Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  There are those writers who need to lay it all out, as fast as they possibly can, very possibly not in order, very often by hand, scribbling, scribbling, gaining as much access to their unconscious mind as they can by letting it loose on the page without self-editing. Some of my friends who work like this refer to it as vomiting. I’d prefer to find a more elegant term for it, but I’m not sure I can. Maybe I’m envious. This is not the kind of writer I am. I’m guessing that the vomiters are also people who can wake up in the morning and leave home with their beds unmade and dishes piled in the sink. Me, I’m not built that way. I make my bed first thing. Pillows fluffed. Hospital corners. And if I were to try to leave the house with a sinkful of dishes, I’d probably spend the day twitching. Which is to say, I am a compulsive, orderly person and my method of working reflects this. I inch forward, a sentence at a time. I read a few paragraphs back, then move forward only when I’m satisfied. Of course, I may be satisfied with a mirage. I may find—months later—that I’ll have to scrap a whole passage, or chapter, or worse. But in the moment, I am making the prose shine, burnishing each word.

  There are as many intricacies to the process as there are writers struggling to find their way. It’s a matter of discovering what works for you, and eliminating the shoulds. My husband will often leap forward and write a scene that he thinks will appear later in a screenplay, because it has come to him in that moment. I could never do this. I need to write linearly, even when the work itself is not linear. I put one foot in front of the other. He pole-vaults from beginning to middle to end and back again, assembling the pieces as they come. He’s also able to work in the middle of the night. My brain shuts off when the sun goes down. I have never worked well at night, prefering the daylight hours when I feel comforted by the knowledge that other people are awake all around me. The vomiters (okay, let’s call them scribblers) feel in control when they are blasting through a story, finding shape as they go. The leapfroggers, like my husband, feel in control when they follow their spontaneous instincts. And me—I polish as I go. This gives me the illusion of control even as I, in the same breath, relinquish it.

  READING YOURSELF

  One of the great paradoxes of the writing life is that our words—chosen carefully, so thoughtfully, with deep focus and dedication—those words once on the page go dead on us. Language is ours only when we are forming sentences, moving elements around, grappling with punctuation, speaking words aloud, feeling them on our lips. While we are shaping a scene into something we can hear and touch and see, that scene lives and breathes. We are inside language like painters, we are working in our medium: the tempera, the thin line, the wet oil on canvas, still in process, still alive.

  But once we commit—once those words dry like paint, are affixed to the page—it becomes nearly impossible to see them. This? We think to ourselves. Our most loathsome critic emerges with a swirl of her cape. Really? What the hell is this? The sentences appear to have been written in another language—a dark dream language, tucked into some musty, inaccessible corner of our psyche. Attempting to discern its meaning is a bit like looking at our own face in the mirror. It is at once so familiar as to be invisible, and so intimate that we turn away, baffled, ashamed.

  Can we ever see ourselves, really? Can we read ourselves?

  It is a powerful conundrum because without the ability to see our writing afresh we cannot do the necessary work. How do we know whether a problem lies with the work, or with our inability to enter it? We need clarity, but not coldness. Openness, but not attachment. We want optimism, but that optimism must go hand in hand with discernment. We’re not looking for a cheerleader, nor a fault-finding judge. We want to read ourselves with equanimity.

  How can we do this? Over the years, I’ve tried everything in an attempt to teach myself how to approach my own work. I’ve carried pages with me, and read them in unfamiliar settings, at odd hours, by candlelight, or at the beach, or on the subway, in an attempt to break my usual reading habits. I’ve changed the font on a manuscript: Garamond versus Times New Roman. I’ve poured myself a glass of wine at the end of a long writing day and sat quietly, pages and red pencil in hand. And while all of these can sometimes be effective (that is, if one glass of wine doesn’t lead to another and another) my best, most secret weapon is this: I pretend to be someone else.

  But that “someone else” can’t be just anybody. Just as in choosing other readers for your work, when you’re deciding who to pretend to be, it is important to choose with care. You’re looking for someone kind but honest. Smart. And inclined to be interested in the world you’re exploring. You would not, for instance, choose as a pretend-reader of your science fiction novel, someone who finds H. G. Wells insufferable and has never watched an episode of Star Trek. You need a pretend-reader whose criticism will be motivated by genuine interest, generosity of spirit, and literary acumen. Someone beneficent and wise.

  If you’re doubtful about this method, think about what happens right after you’ve sent a story, an essay, a manuscript, out to someone for a read. Perhaps you’ve submitted it to a literary magazine, or sent a draft to your editor. Doesn’t it always happen that as soon as you’ve sent it, suddenly you notice something you want to change? You read your own work differently once you’ve shared it because you are—in that moment after you’ve hit the send button, or stuffed that envelope into the mail slot—rereading your work as the person to whom you’ve just sent it. The circle around your work suddenly grows wider. But now that you have a little more room in which to read it clearly, you’ve sent it out. It’s too late.

  So instead, find a quiet spot. Sit for a few moments with your manuscript in front of you. Close your eyes and become this other person, the way an actor inhabits a role. Ready? When you open your eyes the words in front of you will no longer be your own. They will be alive, mutable, and new. You are no longer yourself—in all your intimate fallibility—reading your own chicken scratch. Instead, you are a lucid, kind-hearted stranger—open to the possibilities. You are someone else: optimistic and ready to be surprised.

  DUMB

  We can have high IQs and all sorts of impressive degrees. Some of us can conjugate verbs in three languages, or understand particle physics. Maybe we went to Ivy League schools, or are members of Mensa. But being wicked smart won’t help you when you’re following a line of words on the page. In fact, being that kind of smart can turn out to be a problem. I know a few writers—intellectual, erudite people—whose work suffers for their brilliance. Though there is no such thing as too smart to be, say, a rocket scientist or a neurosurgeon, it is indeed possible to be too smart to be a writer.

  When it comes to storytelling (and it’s all storytelling) I often tell my students that we need to be dumb like animals. Storytelling iself is primal. It’s the way we’ve always come to understand the world around us—whether recited around a campfire, or read aloud in an East Village bar. And so it stands to reason that in order to tell our stories, we tap into something beyond the intellect—an understanding deeper than anything we can willfully engage. Overthink and our minds scramble, wondering: Should we go in this direction? Or that one? Words can become so tangled that our process can feel more like an attempt to unravel the mess we’ve already made. We create obstacles, then strain to get around them. Our minds spin webs that obscure the light. We second-guess. We become lost in the morass of our limited consciousness.

  But when we feel our way through a story, we are following a deep internal logic. The words precede us. We hear them. We sense their rightness. How did I do that, we ask ourselves, once we’ve finished, once the paint has dried, once we’ve worked through draft after draft after draft. Of course, part of the answer is that we’ve worked hard. We’ve kept ourselves in the chair. We’ve created an environment in which we can focus. We’ve read and researched and learned and explored. But there is something else—something we can’t explain, and can’t understand, and that makes us all feel a little bit like maybe we’re
cheating, except that it isn’t cheating, it is the thing itself. How did I do that?

  We are animals, our ears pricked, our eyes wide open. We put one hoof down, then another, on the soft and pliant earth. The rustle of a leaf. The crack of a branch. A passing breeze. We do not stop to ponder, What’s around the corner? We don’t know. There is only this: the bird’s nest, the fawn, the snake curled beneath the gnarled root of an ancient tree. There is only the sound of our own breath. Our pulsing bodies. We are here. Alive, alert, quivering. We are cave dwellers. With a sharpened arrowhead we make a picture. A boy. A bear. The moon.

  BREAKING THE RULES

  Inevitably, I will be in the midst of giving my students some basic, creative-writing-101 type of advice (use adverbs sparingly, keep exclamation points to a minimum, ditto for ellipses) and they will diligently (whoops, an adverb) hunch over their notebooks, scribble down my words as if they’re the gospel, and I will begin reeling off examples of books I love that break those rules. When Andrew Sean Greer wrote The Confessions of Max Tivoli, in which his narrator grew younger and younger with each passing chapter, he wasn’t adhering to conventions of narrative structure. When Marion Winik wrote her tiny, exquisite memoir, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, a jigsaw of elegies to people she had known who had passed away, she was breaking rules. Everyone’s dead? Then why should we care? When Joe Brainard wrote I Remember, a memoir in which every sentence begins with those words, I remember, he didn’t have the voice of some writing teacher in his head, suggesting that he avoid repetition. And when Colum McCann composed Let the Great World Spin, he didn’t ask whether readers would be willing to follow the story lines of his multiple narrators until the threads connected. No. If any one of these writers had allowed their inner censor to swoop in, they may not have written those books. And the world wouldn’t have them.

  My favorite recent works of literature take risks. Unpredictable, unexpected, populated by characters who do the wrong thing, not according to plan. The plan pretty much never goes accordingly in life. Why should it, in literature? Give me a spectacular mess of a novel any day over an overly careful one. Give me kinetic prose, or deeply flawed, complex characters who surprise me. Give me sentences that go on for pages, leaving me breathless. Or, in the case of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, a chapter written in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. Or a series of blank pages, like those we come across in When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams’s meditation on the journals her terminally ill mother asked that she read only after her death; journals, it turned out, that were themselves blank. When we reach that first blank page, when we turn it to find another, then another, we enter Tempest Williams’s experience of what it must have been like to encounter her mother’s empty journals. It’s a breathtaking moment—and a bold one.

  These instances of creative daring are moments of grace. They are moments when we get out of our own way. They break the rules, and break them beautifully. They arrive with no fanfare, but there is no mistaking them. They glide past our hesitation, our resistance, layers of reasons why we can’t, we musn’t, we shouldn’t. They are accompanied by an almost childlike thrill. Why not, the whole universe seems to whisper: Why not now? Why not you? What’s the worst thing that can happen?

  Of course, maybe it won’t work. Maybe the blank pages, the PowerPoint, the repetition—whatever the impossible thing you’re doing—will fall flat. But if you don’t embrace the danger of it, that knife’s edge, that exquisite question—can it be done?—you will never know the pleasure that comes with throwing all those workshop rules, along with your copy of Strunk and White, out the window. You—and consequently we—will never know what could have been.

  SPIT

  At a recent Kundalini yoga class, the teacher asked the assembled group to do a breathing exercise. We all cupped our hands, making small bowls beneath our chins, and then . . . then we spit. We inhaled, then spit. Inhaled, then spit. For what seemed an interminable time but was probably five minutes, we inhaled, then spit. The teacher instructed us to dredge up every single painful thing we could from the recesses of our memory. Every bit of grief, regret, shame, guilt. “This is going to be messy,” she said. “But I promise—nobody’s watching.”

  A few dozen of us sat on our mats on the floor of the meeting house, the late afternoon sun streaming in through the west-facing windows. Chins wet with drool. Cupped hands slimy and damp. The room filled with the deeply strange and disconcerting sound of communal spitting. “Don’t stop!” the teacher urged. She was an improbably beautiful, serene-looking blonde woman who was dressed for class in head-to-toe white. “Whatever you do, don’t stop!”

  Spit, spit, spit. I felt sick after a while. Nauseated. I kept my gaze trained on my cupped hands. Grief, regret, shame, and guilt pooled there. I saw my mother in my hands, not as the vibrant woman she was for my whole life, but as the frail, balding, tufted creature she became in the months before she died. Spit, spit. I saw my father, lying in a coma in the ICU after the car accident. Spit. I saw my half-sister from whom I am hopelessly estranged, her expression quizzical and dismissive. Spit. My son as an infant having seizures. Spit. Every funeral I’ve ever been to. Spit. The married man I slept with. Spit. The friend I betrayed. Spit.

  “Thirty more seconds!” the teacher called out. It felt impossible to keep going. Was I the only one who felt this way? I resisted the urge to take a look around the room. When she finally, mercifully, told us to stop, my stomach was churning. The room seemed to be tilted. I felt simultaneously sickened and cleansed, my insides scoured raw.

  What clenches and curls in the marrow. Why would any sane person put herself through such an exercise? For that matter, why meditation, why therapy, why all the endless self-scrutiny? A room full of people spitting, for gods sake! Aren’t there better things to do on a sunny afternoon? But somehow—though the whole thing was embarrassing and didn’t feel exactly good—I had the sense that what I was doing was—as my writer friends and I sometimes say, good for the work.

  “Know your own bone,” Thoreau wrote. “Gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, gnaw it still.” Of course, the beginning of this powerful piece of wisdom is: “Do what you love.” In order to do what we love—whether we are woodworkers, legal-aid attorneys, emergency room physicians, or novelists—we must first know ourselves as deeply as we are able. Know your own bone. This self-knowledge can be messy. Spit, spit. But it is at the center of our life’s work, this gnawing, this unearthing. There is never an end to it. Our deepest stories—our bones—are our best teachers. Gnaw it still.

  CIGARETTE BREAK

  Back when I smoked, whenever I got stuck midsentence, or needed a breather, I reached for my pack of Marlboro Reds. That pack of cigarettes was never far from me. I kept it near my right elbow, on my desk next to a ceramic ashtray swiped from the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d’Antibes. That ashtray was pretty much always overflowing with butts. In my borrowed room on West Seventy-second Street, I wrote and smoked. Smoked and wrote. The two seemed linked together in a way that did not allow for the possibility that I would ever be able to write without the option of smoking. What would I do when I hit a snag? How could I possibly unstick myself without the ritual of tapping a cigarette loose from the pack, placing it between my lips, striking a match, lighting it . . . the tip glowing red? Without blowing out the match, leaning back in my desk chair, inhaling, exhaling, aiming smoke rings at the ceiling? Even as I write this, more than twenty years after my last cigarette, I can feel the welcome harshness of the smoke in my lungs, the feel of the cigarette between the second and third finger of my right hand.

  By the time I had finished a draft of my first novel, I had quit smoking. My father had died, my mother was in a wheelchair. One afternoon, a tiny Yorkshire terrier puppy in the window of a pet store on Columbus Avenue caught my eye. I went inside, telling myself I was just going to play with him. An hour later, I left the pet store with a crate, puppy food, bowls, a leash, a collar, and a puppy
. I named him Gus—Gustave, because I was reading a lot of Flaubert at the time—and every morning I took him to Central Park. One morning, as I sat on a rock warmed by the sunshine, smoking while Gus romped in the grass, the words I want to live went through my head and I stubbed out what would turn out to be my last cigarette. I want to live.

  But when I went back to work on a second draft of that novel—now no longer a smoker—I was in trouble. I wanted to live, but I also needed to write. Those cigarette breaks had provided me with a ritualized dream time. Smoking was good for the writing. That tapping of the pack, lighting of the match, leaning back, and smoking, allowed for a prescribed amount of time—three minutes? five?—in which I was doing nothing but smoking, gazing out the window at the courtyard below, and allowing my thoughts to sort themselves out.

  Writers require that ritualized dream time. We all have our tricks and tools. Some of us still smoke. I have friends who chew on pens. Or doodle. Friends who pop jelly beans from jars on their desks. Or take baths in the middle of the day. My husband and I recently discovered the power of pistachio nuts: the cracking open of those shells is curiously satisfying. Whatever keeps us in the work, engaged, and able to resist the urge to go do something—anything—else.