Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  I loved this young woman—her old soul, her stubborn streak, her huge heart—and so I wish I could tell you that her story turned out well. That, as her classmates believed, her early book deal presaged a lifetime of literary achievement and even personal contentment. Instead, she pushed to finish the novel, and it was published to little fanfare. Reviews were mixed. Critics were respectful of her talent but found the novel to be frustrating, undisciplined, uneven. Within a couple of years, it was out of print. She disappeared, ostensibly hard at work on her second novel. I lost touch with her but kept my eye out for her new book. It never came.

  She taught, here and there. To my knowledge, she never published anything ever again. Not a story, not an essay, not a book review. Once, I ran into her in a Brooklyn restaurant and she was still that same, trembling creature, but now she had a brittleness to her, a distractibility that hadn’t been there before. A number of years later, I received an e-mail with her name in the subject line and I knew she was dead. She had died of a heart attack in an East Village bodega at the age of forty.

  Look, it’s easy to sit here—my eyes brimming at the memory of her, at the loss of her—and speculate how it might have been different. If you change one thing in a narrative, everything else changes, too. What would have happened if she had waited, if she had taken the time to shape the book, to deepen it, to allow it to become its best possible self? If she had spent longer, writing in the dark?

  A number of her classmates went on to have writing lives. They are novelists, short story writers, editors, professors. For some, it took five, ten, twelve years after graduation for their careers to take hold. A story here, a story there. Drawers full of rejection slips. Novels abandoned, buried in closets. Plenty of days, no doubt, filled with hopelessness, regret. Those writers who once wept in my office now know what it takes to build a creative life. To wake up each day and start anew. To shrug off humiliation, rejection, uncertainty. To avoid the impulse—like reaching for a drug—to skip steps, succumb impatiently, send out work before its ready. They have learned that there is no brass ring. That we can never know how it’s going to turn out. That the race is not to the swiftest. I wonder if they think of her.

  WHAT IS YOURS

  I am a Jewish girl from New Jersey. Have I ever wished I came from somewhere else? That the soil that grew me wasn’t New Jersey—which, while the birthplace of Philip Roth, is not a state known for its great literary landscape the way, say, Mississippi is (Faulkner! Welty!) or New England (Bishop! Dickinson! Thoreau!) or Nebraska (Cather!). But “geography is destiny,” said Heraclitus. So is childhood. The atmosphere I breathed in as a child remains with me still. It is the basis of my material—my clay, my marble, my palette. It’s what I’ve got.

  Only child, older parents, their contentious marriage, observant Jew, religiously conflicted, suburban upbringing, child model, rebellious teen, tragic accident—are, on their own, just a list, but when woven together, begin to form nubs and knots, the texture of a fabric. Every writer has a fabric. The most intense moments of our lives seem to sharpen and raise themselves as if written in Braille—this is where our themes begin to take hold. Explore deeply enough and you will find strange and startling questions to grapple with on the page.

  We do not choose this fabric as if browsing the aisles at Bloomingdale’s. We don’t get to say, Hey, I really prefer that writer’s life circumstances. I think I’ll take the Southern Gothic childhood, the crazy alcoholic mother, the gunshot in the barn. It doesn’t work that way. Whether or not we are fond of our tiny corner of the universe, its all we’ve got. If we try to control it, if our egos get in the way and we decide that we want to be, say, a lyric poet, or a political satirist, or a writer of best-selling mysteries, or whatever it is that we think would be cool or important or fun, well, that is the surest way to a dead end and heartache. It is the truest lesson I know about writing—and about life—that we must always move in the direction of our own true calling, not anyone else’s.

  And so, when I am quietly at work, I can just about see my mother in an enormous, floppy hat and gardening gloves, beads of perspiration on the back of her neck, her freckled arms. I can catch a whiff of the oil refineries along the Jersey Turnpike. As if from a great distance, I hear the garage door opening, signaling my father’s return from his job in the city. Wahoo, he would call to my mother. His briefcase on the floor. His loosened tie. Wahoo, I’m home! The whoosh, whoosh of the pool-cleaning machine that circled the turquoise blue like a snake. The quiet Sabbath lunches, our three forks scraping against plates. The sadness I couldn’t grasp, the suppressed rage. His bottles of pills. Her closets stuffed with designer clothing. The solo trips. The separate beds. My beautiful parents, their unrealized, unarticulated dreams slowly slipping from their grasp. Their love for one another, hopeless. The air thick with what was unsaid.

  The unsaid.

  I am spending my life trying to say it.

  That is what is mine.

  ECHO

  When we are coming to the end of a piece of work, we may become aware of a desire to tie up all the loose ends. To wrap up the package in a pretty bow, every character, every situation resolved neatly. We have spent hundreds of hours inside the dilemmas, the internal lives of these characters, and very often we have fallen in love with them. We want to know, and we want the reader to know, that everything’s going to turn out all right. Like the ends of those made-for-television movies that flash into the future, allowing us to see the fates of all the characters, we may be tempted to force resolution.

  But think about life for a moment. If, in creating a world on the page, we are attempting to hold a mirror up to humanity, to illuminate something about our lives as we live them, how often do our stories end neatly and to our satisfaction? No. We are left with loose ends. We don’t know what will happen next. We try to make sense of what has already happened, to understand the inherent messiness. To move forward in the darkness. That is part of our job, and it is most definitely the job of literature.

  When I consider endings, I think of music—in particular, the experience of sitting in a concert hall at the end of a performance. If the music has hit its mark, a singular connection has been made and is being broken. But this break doesn’t happen all at once. When those last notes have sounded, they linger. The music doesn’t screech to a halt. It can’t. We—the listener, the reader—have to lean into it. To meet it as it hangs in the air, as it fades away, until finally it is only memory.

  All that sound! An orchestra filled with musicians making music—violins, violas, cellos, flutes, bassoons, French horns, drums, cymbals—is alive. So much has gone on! So much invested, felt, experienced. The final notes are played—the last page is turned—and then there is the echo. It vibrates through the concert hall. The audience, the reader, waits—and in waiting, participates. In that echo is contained the chaos, regret, untold joy, loss, randomness, possibility. In that echo there exists the shape of the future, and the impossibility of our knowing it. That echo is the longing—there is nothing more human than this—for all that comes after.

  BREAK

  In the years we’ve spent writing, children may have been born. Loved ones may have died. Perhaps we’ve moved from one home to another. Or been rocked by a health crisis, a betrayal, a divorce. And of course, there are the smaller fleas of life. But somehow we’ve kept at it. We’ve followed our headlights through the fog. We’ve muddled through on days when the air around us has quivered like jello. We’ve shown up, even when showing up was the last thing on earth we wanted to do. And now, as we seem to be approaching something that looks suspiciously like the end, we wonder what we have on our hands. What is this unwieldy thing? Will it hold together? Will it make sense—to ourselves, much less to anyone else? What have we done?

  We may slow to a crawl at this point, not because we’re savoring the moment, but because we’re experiencing flashes of abject terror, a terror that disguises itself as the truth. We become convinced
that we’ve spent years of our life on something that makes no sense, or not enough sense. Something that will never find its way into the world, or worse, will be roundly ridiculed, or worse, ignored. Who were we to think we could make this creative leap? What lunacy made us think we could take these images, thoughts, sounds, phrases, memories, and ideas floating before us like dust motes, and craft them into a story that might speak to others?

  But there’s good news: the door isn’t locked. You can escape. If you find yourself wanting to step away—if you’re hunched over your notebook or your screen with every muscle in your body tense from the secret certainty that you’ve wasted months (years!) on this impossible thing before you—then step away. If you’re nearing the end, you’re in no danger of losing whatever it is you already have on the page. The momentum of all that work—those days when you stayed in the chair—will be there to support you. If beginnings require fortitude, and middles stamina—if, to paraphrase Annie Dillard, your work is a lion in a cage in your study, a wild thing you must visit every day in order to reassert your mastery over it—endings ask of you only that you take a step back. A day off? Two? Three? A long walk? A drive in the country? A bath? A few stiff drinks with a friend? All of the above? Go for it, I say. Take a break if you need one. Turn down that noisy mind and come back to the page later. That wild animal has taken a nap and is sitting contentedly in a corner of your study, chewing on the rug. You will finish. You have fashioned a world. It’s terrifying and exhilarating. If you have a pulse, this is exactly how you should feel. What have you done? You don’t know yet. When you’re ready, sit down again anew. You’ll find out.

  DANCE

  When we moved from the city to the country, I discovered that our small town (population 3124) was the improbable home to two well-known dance companies. These troupes had a complicated history with each other: scorned lovers, defectors, enemies, grudging admirers. You could spot the dancers across the café, or in the aisles of the local market, or gassing up their cars. They were lean, of course, and sinewy, with veined arms, rounded biceps, clavicles that could cut through ice. But it wasn’t just the sheer, crazy beauty of them among the often soft and paunchy New Englanders as it was the grace of them.

  When I was invited to sit in on rehearsals I became fascinated not only by their process, but by my response to it. I related intensely to what I was seeing in the rehearsal hall, even though it technically had nothing to do with the way I spent my own days. I was often inert, almost always alone. Sometimes, during a long writing day, I’d catch a glimpse of myself, a reflection in a mirror or a window, and be startled that I even had a physical form. These dancers were in constant motion, electrifyingly, necessarily corporeal and present. Still, I felt a kinship with them. The essence of our work—whether the forming of a shape or a sentence, a dance or a novel—comes from the same willingness to fall, to fail. To surrender.

  All through that long, hot summer, I spent hours each day watching dances being made. One of the artistic directors was reading Emily Dickinson. Why? Were there the beginnings of a dance—a gesture—to be found in the poet’s distilled words, as old and deep as geodes? I asked him, and, shrugging, he told me he didn’t yet know. I didn’t know, either, what I was doing there as I listened to the soft thuds bare feet made as they hit the hard wood floor. The heavy wind of bodies pulled through space. The rise and fall of rib cages, panting from the exertion. Limbs glistening with sweat. These bodies and their relationship to one another became, for a while, my poetry.

  To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories—to know that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing—is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, “When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.” This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don’t know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring.

  BETRAYAL

  The poet was being interviewed onstage. She had recently published a memoir about her father, an eminent bishop. She was the bishop’s daughter, which was also the title of her memoir. Her father had been bisexual. The secrecy surrounding this fact had thrown a heavy cloak over her childhood and early adulthood, and much of her inner world—depression, anxiety, alcoholism, not to mention her own sexuality—had been tangled up in it. For the better part of five years she worked on this book—probing her memory while at the same time reporting and researching. Along the way she discovered—and met with—the man who had been her father’s great love. The memoir was a tour de force of writing and of living—a valiant and painstaking excavation of a particular truth: her own. Of course she had a right to tell her own truth. Didn’t she?

  As I sat in the audience, I felt anxious for the poet, Honor Moore, who was my friend. She had been visibly trembling as I drove her to the event. Her memoir had caused an uproar in her family. She had committed an unpardonable sin, it seemed. She had broken ranks to tell the story that had been kept secret for decades. Several of her siblings had written letters to The New Yorker, where an excerpt had run, expressing their outrage. These letters were followed by an avalanche of toxic online comments. A gentle poet, a teacher of writing, she was now a lightning rod for controversy. Some were saying she should have known this would happen. Others, that the book was a calculated bid for the kind of publicity a poet would not normally receive. Either way, she was this moment’s poster child for literary betrayal.

  Onstage her interviewer ran through questions about voice and narrative, poetry and memoir, and then brought up the letters to The New Yorker.

  “Can we talk about your family’s response to the book?”

  Honor was wearing an ankle-length black skirt and a flowing blouse, with flat shoes that seemed to anchor her to the ground. Her gray-black hair shone in the spotlight. She was not a young woman. She had been through plenty.

  “I believe that we don’t choose our stories,” she began, leaning forward. “Our stories choose us.” She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed, was steady. “And if we don’t tell them, then we are somehow diminished.”

  Diminished. The word went through me like a bolt. I pulled out the small notebook I carry with me and scribbled down what she had just found the grace to say.

  There it was. All of it. I thought of my favorite passage in the Gnostic Gospels: If we bring forth what is within us, it will save us. If we do not bring forth what is within us, it will destroy us. And what the Bhagavad Gita has to say about dharma: Better is one’s own dharma though imperfectly carried out than the dharma of another carried out perfectly.

  I knew about the struggle for authenticity. The mining for words to collect together what felt impossibly broken. I wanted to gather up in my arms all that was lost to me. I wanted nothing less than to remake my world. A writer afraid of her own subject—whatever it might be—is a frozen creature, trapped in the inessential. Diminished.

  “It steadies me to tell these things,” wrote Seamus Heaney in his poem “Crossings.” Honor had written a story that was essential to her. She had faced herself on the page: her demons, her fears, her own fallibility. In order to tell her story she’d included others—mother, father, siblings, lovers—because she hadn’t lived in a vacuum. She was her own narrative’s central character, but there were other necessary supporting ones. My mother’s voice came flooding back to me. What right? How dare you? An aunt’s coldness that never thawed after my first memoir was published. An uncle’s only comment a request that I insert errata into future editions to correct a misspelling of his wife’s name. A half-sister, on a meditation retreat in Poland (on the train tracks of Auschwitz), who repor
tedly overheard a group of people discuss my second memoir—a book in which she does not appear—and interrupted them to announce: I’m the evil half-sister.

  Janet Malcolm has called journalism morally indefensible. “The business of art is theft, is armed robbery, is not pleasing your mother.” Joan Didion referred to writing as the tactic of a secret bully. We will do what we must. Our lives are our material. (My mother once asked me if I really needed to include, in an essay published in The New York Times, the details of the first nonkosher meal she ever ordered in front of me—a bacon cheeseburger. Oh, yes. Yes, I did.)

  Will I ever be entirely comfortable with the ruthlessness of revelation? Will you? Mostly likely not. It’s an uncomfortable existence we’ve chosen—or perhaps that has chosen us. But still, I do not believe that we are monsters. We search for the line between what is essential—and possibly hurtful—and what is superfluous—and possibly hurtful. We become aware of our own power and try to use it wisely. There is no room for clever pot shots. For making ourselves look good at another’s expense. For using our pen for revenge. The stakes are high. The stakes are love and—yes—honor, and moral responsibility. We ask ourselves why—Why this story? Why this moment? Is it necessary? If we are vigilant, we will know when we are betraying others and when we are in danger of diminishing ourselves.

  LOST FINGERS

  When the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was eighteen, his left hand was badly burned in a fire and he lost the use of his third and fourth fingers. He was told he’d never play the guitar again—but instead, he used his two good fingers for solos, his injured ones for chord work, and created his own musical style. He compensated for his weakness—he worked with it, he understood it—and in so doing, developed something stronger and richer because of it.