Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  We all have our lost fingers. Just as what was unavailable to Django Reinhardt informed the way he played music, what is absent—or out of reach—will inform our voice. In part, we write from the tension of what we cannot do. That tension pushes us into dark corners where, Houdini-like, we have to perform feats seemingly beyond our capabilities to wriggle our way out.

  My husband’s latest film project was originally set on a long, sandy stretch of a Florida key where modern high-rises had sprung up like cliffs along the dunes. As he thought about directing this film—as he cast it, secured financing, hired crew—in his mind, the story was always going to unfold against this backdrop of Florida’s west coast, its ocean a precise deep blue, its sunsets fiery orange, reflected against the sliding glass doors and balconies of the condominiums that line the beach. But as the budgetary constraints of filmmaking settled in, it became clear that the film might need to be shot elsewhere—in another state, with no high-rises lining the beach, and different light, and different sunsets. I watched as he struggled with this change of plan. He called me from a location-scouting trip to North Carolina, his voice sounding drained. “We may have to shoot in a house instead of a condo,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s not what I pictured.”

  I thought of Django Reinhardt’s lost fingers. I thought of a friend’s daughter, a dwarf who had become a competitive rider, tall and graceful in her saddle. And I thought of the way I feel—as I near the end of every book I write—constrained by the narrative structure I’ve chosen. We are always coming face-to-face with our limits, or with the limits that the world imposes upon us.

  If we are artists—hell, whether or not we’re artists—it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn’t have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident. To hurl ourselves in an act of faith so complete that our fears, insecurities, hopelessness, and despair blur along the edges of our vision. We stop for nothing. It doesn’t matter that no one has ever done it before—become a blues guitarist with two working fingers, been a dwarf in a show-jumping competition, turned North Carolina into Florida. It is in the leap that the future unfolds, surprising us with what can be done.

  STEWARD

  I need to live by certain rules in order to protect my writing life. When I was starting out, I didn’t understand this. An old friend would call and ask me to lunch, or worse, breakfast, and I’d jump at the chance to get up from my desk for a couple of hours and join the world of real people eating real meals. I convinced myself that I had enough discipline to go out for a bit and then return to my desk, perhaps even invigorated and refreshed. And so I would head out, full of high hopes—a quick lunch, then back to work!—and then, an hour or two later, I would discover that my day was over. I had ruined it with conversation, laughter, waiters offering fizzy water or flat. I had stomped all over it by being out and about like someone with an actual lunch break. Overstimulated, squinting in the sunlight like a displaced nocturnal creature, I’d wander the streets of New York in a stupor. I’d find myself in the dressing room of a boutique, trying on a silk blouse. I’d call another friend and meet for tea. I was out already, after all. Why not just make a day of it, and stay out for dinner? Go see a play in my new silk blouse? Get a nightcap? I’m reminded of a wonderful essay by Amy Hempel on why she chose not to have children, in which she imagines, at one moment, putting her baby down for a nap, then deciding to go out to buy diapers, then taking in a movie, then flying to Paris, having forgotten all about her sleeping baby.

  Holidays were also a problem. Every year, the Fourth of July, or Memorial Day weekend, or Martin Luther King Jr. Day would roll around, and I would feel that I should do whatever it was that the rest of the world was doing. But our work doesn’t know it’s a holiday. Our work requires us to adhere to certain rules—not because we’re rigid or self-absorbed as frustrated friends or family might secretly think—but because it’s the only way we can do it. If we are deep inside a story, we’re in another world—the world we’ve created—which, for the time being, is where we need to live if we are to make it real to ourselves and, ultimately, to others.

  I used to be angry with myself for my inability to live a normal life with normal rhythms, and also be a writer. But I’ve come to believe that normal is overrated—for artists, for everyone. When I was writing Devotion, all but the most essential tasks fell away. My hair got too long; I skipped my annual mammogram; the dogs’ nails went unclipped; the windows didn’t get cleaned; I lost touch with friends. But I took care of my family, and my book got written. That was all I could manage.

  As you near the end, you will likely feel selfish. You will want to do everything you can to protect your instrument—which is to say, yourself—as you inch toward the finish line. This is as it should be, as it must be, if your work is to reach its potential. Embrace this selfishness, for now. Wrap it around you like a quilt made of air. Let no one inside of it except those you love the most. Don’t leave that essential place. Be a good steward to your gifts. This is the first sentence on a list I keep tacked to the bulletin board in my study, an impeccable set of instructions left by the poet Jane Kenyon.

  Protect your time.

  Feed your inner life.

  Avoid too much noise.

  Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.

  Be by yourself as often as you can.

  Walk.

  Take the phone off the hook.

  Work regular hours.

  No to lunch with friends, to the overflowing in-box. Quiet contemplation will lead you to riches, so keep good literature on your bedside table and read for a few minutes before you go to sleep instead of, say, passing out during episode five of season three of Mad Men. Cultivate solitude in your writing space, in the car, at the kitchen table when the house is empty. Get your blood moving. Feel your feet on the earth. Your mind is not floating in space but connected to a body. Kenyon wrote this before the lure of the Internet became like crack cocaine for most writers, so I would add “Disable the Internet.” Find a rhythm. This is wisdom from a poet who died too young. I never knew her but she has helped me as much as anyone I have ever known.

  WORKSHOP

  For twenty years, I have taught writing workshops—under flickering fluorescent lights in a YMCA basement that smelled of chlorine; in a dusty Colorado mining town; in urban university classrooms; on the leafy quads of New England colleges; on a retrofitted crabbing vessel moored on an Alaskan island; in a former monastary in the Berkshire mountains; in a beach cottage in Provincetown; in a sunny antique-filled room high above the Amalfi Coast, where coffee is brought out on silver trays; in my own living room. And still I am nervous before a first workshop.

  I can spot the students, the ones who have come with their fragile egos, the voices in their heads shouting at them that they’re no good, they’re phonies, they’re in the wrong place. Whether they’ve enrolled in a graduate writing program or signed up for a three-day retreat or flown halfway across the world to attend a conference—they’re vulnerable. Some will hardly make eye contact, they’re so shy. Others will posture, full of bluster, about stories they’ve published, or nearly published, or contests they’ve won. They will find their seats—around the table, or on sofas. They will fiddle with the tops of their pens. Dig through their bags for chewing gum. Take one last look at their cell phones.

  At the moment when we finally begin—when I look around the room—they have no idea that I haven’t been able to eat breakfast (or lunch, or dinner). That I have just gone into the ladies room to have a little talk with myself, in which I remind myself that I’m good at what I do—that it pretty much always turns out well. What they see is a woman—a writer they’ve chosen to study with—in front of them, looking calm and comfortable. She’s done this hundreds of times before, hasn’t she? She’s published how many books? She takes her place, draws her legs beneath
her, leans forward. Puts on her glasses. Clears her throat. Hi, everyone.

  A workshop that goes wrong can derail a writer. A teacher who abuses her power and responsibility—either directly or indirectly—can have a lasting negative impact. Laziness, egomania, ineptitude—over the years I’ve cleaned up plenty of other teachers’ messes. And so during these opening hours, my aim is to cast a protective net over the whole lot of them. We—this ragtag group of ten or twelve—are going to become a single organism. A collective unconscious. We are going to set aside our petty concerns and focus, instead, on the sentences in front of us. We will train our best selves—our empathic understanding, our optimism, our critical eye—to understand what each of us is trying to do. We are going to laugh, possibly cry, argue, roll our eyes. But we’re going to do it with respect, and even with love.

  This love is a strange alchemy of mutual recognition. We are, each one of us, wrestling with words, with our futile stabs at some kind of human eloquence. We are solitary by nature but we have chosen to come together because the page benefits from the eyes of others. Because we are unable to see our own work clearly. Because we have developed connections and metaphors that are unknowable to us until someone else switches the lights on. We come to the workshop table—even the most defensive and cynical among us—in an act of faith. See me, we are saying. See beneath my words to the truer words that rush in a river beneath. Plunge your hands into this river. Show me what I have done.

  ASTONISHMENT

  The page—if you spend your life in deep engagement with it—will force you to surrender your skepticism. It will keep you open and undefended. It doesn’t promise comfort. But if you hurl yourself at it, give it everything you’ve got, if you wake up each morning—bruised, bloody, aching—ready to throw yourself at it again, I’ll make you a promise: it will keep you alive to what you see and hear and taste and touch. To what you feel. And that’s what we want—isn’t it? The page will force you to expand your capacity—as if that capacity were a physical thing, a muscle, a ligament you can stretch and extend with regular use—for astonishment.

  One summer when my son spent a month at a sleepaway arts camp, I picked him up along with a friend of his and took them to lunch. We drove down a dirt road, away from the camp—a series of wooden shacks with hand-lettered wooden signs attached to each door: glassblowing, ceramics, sculpture studio, clown, batik, papermaking, jewelry, weaving, radio. Campers spent their days making things: plays, music, tapestries, vases, photographs, rings, chairs. As we hit the main drag—whizzing past suburban strip malls—the two boys stared out the car window as if they’d never seen the world outside before. “Somebody built that,” my son’s friend said, pointing to a local hospital. And then at a statue on the town green: “Probably lots of people had to agree on that. And then somebody made it.” They were astonished, these boys, seeing the familiar—even the banal—in a new light.

  Of course we can’t walk through our days like twelve-year-old boys who have just put on 3-D glasses. Well, maybe we can—or once in a while, maybe we should?—but if we are immersed in the work of finding expression for this life, if we wake up each morning to the possibility of discovery, not only will we have a better shot at getting something worthwhile on the page, we will simply be better. Too often, our capacity for awe is buried beneath layers of perfectly reasonable excuses. We feel we must protect ourselves—from hurt, disappointment, insult, loss, grief—like warriors girding for battle. A Sabbath prayer that I have carried with me for more than half my life begins like this: “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.”

  We cannot afford to walk sightless among miracles. Nor can we protect ourselves from suffering. We do work that thrusts us into the pulsing heart of this world, whether or not we’re in the mood, whether or not it’s difficult or painful or we’d prefer to avert our eyes. When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives—and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by a desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don’t understand. They enjoy surprise. Some of these people are seventy, eighty, close to ninety years old, but they remind me of my son and his friend on the day I sprung them from camp. Courting astonishment. Seeking breathless wonder.

  ENVY

  When my first book was about to come out, my literary agent told me that she had a client whose book was ranked number three on The New York Times best-seller list who was obsessed with the writers who were number two and number one. At the time, I thought this was insane. But I’ve come to see that in the writing life, there is no enough. There is never enough. In the years it has taken us to produce something that might be good, we have made sacrifices. Our personal lives have suffered, or our health. We’ve missed anniversaries, birthdays, school plays. We’ve slept fitfully. We’ve been plagued by self-doubt, paralyzing anxiety, certainty that we’ve really messed up, that this road we’ve been traveling has finally led us to a dead end. But somehow we’ve overcome all that and now we have a book. That we’re holding in our hands. The writer’s single best moment in a book’s publication isn’t the great review in the Times, or the interview on NPR. No, the single best moment in a book’s publication is when the padded envelope arrives via the big brown truck—as my son used to call it—and the UPS delivery guy marches up the front walk and hands it to you. The very first copy.

  Why is this a better moment than being interviewed on NPR? Because when you tear that padded envelope open and hold your book, when you open it and feel the texture of the pages, see the elegant spine and the glossy jacket, as you fetishize this object that you’ve been fantasizing about for . . . well, quite possibly for your whole life, nothing has happened yet. All is possibility.

  But then your book begins to make its way into the world, and it feels a bit like watching helplessly from the sidewalk as your toddler navigates Times Square. You are not in control. No one is, in fact, in control. Not your agent, not your publisher, not your editor, not the lovely booksellers fighting the good fight all over this country. There is something ineffable, wholly unpredictable—something my agent calls “magic fairy dust”—that either happens to a book, or doesn’t. A few of my books have had tiny sprinklings of this fairy dust over the years—but never as much as I’d like. I could give you a list right now of the writers whose books came out at around the same time as mine, or who are at the same point in their writing lives, who have gotten more. It’s hard to admit this. I didn’t want to write this chapter, to tell you the truth. Because envy is an ugly, shameful thing, better shoved under the rug. Except that we all feel it. We have experienced that stomach-churning sickness, that spiritual malaise, of coveting another person’s good fortune.

  If you were to sit a roomful of writers down and administer a truth serum, they would divulge a short list of other writers who they secretly envy, maybe even hate. Every book’s publication has, for its author, a shadow publication—a book displayed more prominently in bookstores, or better publicized, or more widely reviewed. When I was in graduate school, my mentor, Jerome Badanes, published his first novel, The Final Opus of Leon Solomon. The book jacket of Jerry’s novel was muted, dark, almost mossy-looking, as befitted a novel about a Holocaust survivor about to commit suicide. I remember browsing through the stacks at the old Shakespeare & Company on the Upper West Side with Jerry (the bookstore and the man, both long gone now, though if I stand for long enough on the corner of Eightieth and Broadway I can conjure them) and his obsession with a particular, bright orange book jacket. The other novel, the story of a traveling carnival—was also a debut, brought out by the same publisher. It was receiving glowing reviews and selling well. And Jerry—my gentle, wise, compassionate mentor—was not happy about it. Not one little bit. That orange book was his shadow publication. It went on to be a finalist for the National Book Award.

  The agony! The nagging sense of what might have been! There is
always someone who, at this very moment, has more. More acclaim, more money, more access, more respect . . . I see this even when I watch my son with his middle school friends. There are girls in full bloom—girls who are the envy of their classmates, girls who are at this moment as pretty and popular as they will ever be. Boys who’ve had growth spurts and are practically shaving, who are envied by the smaller boys who wonder when—and if—they will ever grow. Observing them, from the sidelines of ball games and dances, I want to jump up and shout: This isn’t it! You think this is it, but it isn’t! Your whole lives are ahead of you with ten thousand joys and sorrows. Of course I say nothing. My son would kill me. But I think about this—about myself and every adult, writer or not, who makes the all-too-human mistake of comparing one life to another.

  When I first learned of Buddhism’s eight vissicitudes—pain and pleasure, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute—I was taught that it is unskillful—that gentle Buddhist word for fucked-up—to compare. We will never know what’s coming. We cannot peer around the bend. Envy is human, yes, but also corrosive and powerful. It is our job to pursue our own dharma and covet no one else’s. And perhaps the greatest challenge of all: to recognize our shadow books and wish them well.

  UNCERTAINTY

  I don’t know how to write a novel. I don’t even know how to write the novels that I’ve written. Once I’ve finished a book—truly taken it as far as I can—I look at it with some of the same awe and incomprehension that I felt when my son was born. As he lay swaddled against me, I opened the hospital blanket and counted ten fingers, ten toes. I took in his fine blond eyebrows, eyelashes. Elbows, heels, rib cage. Ears like seashells. How had he grown inside of me? How was it possible?