“Hi. I’m Brian.”
“Hi, Brian!” we say.
His gaze scans the room, never landing long enough on anyone to make a connection. His feet shuffle. He opens and closes his mouth, until, at last, “And I’m a writer.”
We let out collective breaths and applaud. “Welcome, Brian!” We are jubilant that someone has made the first move. Jubilant that we can all immediately start the comparison game, our minds happy to be free to disconnect once more from the direct experience of the moment and instead, joy of joys, invest in tinkering with someone else. At least I’m not as bad off as he is. Wow, he’s a mess. I’m so together compared to him. Thank goodness he spoke and not me. Is anyone looking at me? Is now a good time to go and get another cup of coffee? Maybe I could step outside now, even though I don’t smoke, just so no one will think I could be anything like this guy . . .
“It’s been three days since I last wrote anything. Seven months since I sent anything out. Five years since I published anything.”
Now the room is still. We hold our cups midpath to our mouths. We want to look away, but we can’t. We’re witnessing the train wreck we’re all a part of. He’s no longer someone “other.” He and we are the same, and he’s bought into the biggest illusion of all: the Writer’s Wheel of Suffering.
The Writer’s Wheel of Suffering is that great writer’s hamster wheel we’ve all taken a trip on at some point. It is the wheel that keeps us leaping from one illusion to the next, chasing the invisible carrot that we believe will take our suffering away. All this jumping around makes the wheel spin faster, which causes us to become more afraid of stopping the wheel and, heaven forbid, getting off it. After all, chasing illusions has become so familiar and comfortable we perceive it as reality.
Suffering leads to suffering. Chasing illusions results in an attachment to the chase. Writers love to lament the state of publishing, the hackwork being published, the lack of time to write, the need for more money, more solitude, more companionship. Put a bunch of writers together and, within moments, someone will bring up a reason to be suffering. Don’t buy into this. It may feel real. It may feel like the only choice you have if you embark on the writer’s path, but it is not. You can make other choices.
Sometimes I feel as if writing classes should be less about the craft of writing and more like a support group. Craft goes down pretty easily. It’s not hard to demonstrate how to make a sentence better or to point out a logic flaw in an idea. The ever-increasing ways in which we can make ourselves suffer—the lengths to which we’ll go to ensure that we are suffering—never cease to amaze me. I watch it in myself too. We suffer when we take ourselves out of reality and view ourselves as individuals outside of normal life experiences. “Real” writers don’t have a blissful writing experience every moment. Published authors still get rejections. Really good books don’t always sell. That’s the experience. That’s the norm. Don’t fight that by thinking your experience should be different.
A student in my class last semester commented that he could tell things to our class that he couldn’t tell anyone else, including his wife, because she wasn’t a writer. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of his comment, and I do see the value in meeting in groups with common interests, I’ve noticed that writers attach a great deal to the idea of being different from everyone else. Imagine: back of the hand pressed against the forehead, body in a slight swoon, “No one understands me!” Follow it up with a deep sigh, and then look around quickly to see if everyone is paying appropriate homage to the Great Misunderstood Writer.
It’s OK to smile a little now. Laugh even. It’s OK to admit that you recognize part of this Great Misunderstood Writer within yourself. This writer begins sentences with: “If only I had enough money, I’d . . .” or, “If only I had six months off, I’d . . .” or, “They just publish shlock these days. There’s no room for real literature anymore.” Or, “Everyone knows those contests are fixed.” Or, “I got passed over by this editor because all she wanted was (fill in the blank with your most hated type of book).” Starting to get the picture? Try taking a look at these statements for what they are: ways of not participating in the reality of your direct experience by either attachment or aversion. Direct experience is nonnegotiable, but the stories you make up about it can change, and as they change, you’ll find freedom and space.
If you understand that suffering arises when we want our current experience to be something other than what it is, you’ll see how much we, and not events, bring about our suffering. Take care not to get caught in the wheel’s spokes here. I’ve seen too many talented writers spin their lives and gifts away by being too attached to a particular outcome or too intent on avoiding something in the writing itself, or in their careers. When this occurs, we are ultimately having a clash with the contents of our minds. Recognize this is an internal issue, and know that you can regain power over the choices you make. If you perceive you are a victim to outside forces, you are sentencing yourself to a lifetime on the wheel.
When I was learning to play piano, my mother told me, “If you don’t practice, you’ll never get any better.” But I never had to be told to go to my room and write. I wrote because writing was the most important thing to me. I thought about writing when I wasn’t writing. I thought about what my future as a writer might be. I thought about being the youngest person ever to publish a book (a dream that was dashed quickly when an eight-year-old boy published a book). I thought about being the first female president of the United States and I thought about being a concert pianist, but I knew those two dreams were really just dreams. Not only was I certain writing was possible for me, I knew it was inevitable. I practiced the piano because my mother told me to and because I wanted to play well, but I didn’t have a lot of fire for it.
As a child, I couldn’t imagine ever not loving every minute of writing. I couldn’t imagine the time not being mine to do with as I pleased, or a time when I felt I had nothing to write about. But those times arrived as an adult, and I was caught off guard. I felt betrayed by writing, and I felt that if I couldn’t do the only thing I ever wanted to do, then I might as well sell out to Evil Corporate America and make a zillion dollars. I did sell out to Evil Corporate America for a while, but I didn’t make a zillion dollars, and, more important, I never lost the pull to write. Not that I always wrote, mind you, but I felt sharply the absence of writing in my life if I didn’t practice. I felt guilty when I didn’t write, and the longer I stayed away from writing, the more attached I became to my reasons for not writing. The more attached I became to those reasons, the more power those reasons had—not because those reasons were authentic or valid, but because I’d imbued them with the power to alter the way I chose to see my life and the role of writing in my life.
Every semester when I invite my students to introduce themselves and chat a moment about why they’re in the class, inevitably someone (often many someones) will say, “I need to take a writing class so I will write.” Essentially, they’re asking someone else (me) to be their mother—their outside reason for writing, just like my mother was my outside reason for practicing piano. That’s OK. I understand that one of my primary roles as a teacher is to provide a structure. We tend to need outside motivation to get started doing something, even, ironically, if it’s something we claim to want to do more than anything else. Ultimately, though, each student must find his or her own way, and each student must cultivate the desire to practice from within. Any outside motivation for practice will at some point fall short. A class or two can kick-start you again. A dedicated writer’s group can sustain you when you feel like everything you write is garbage. But no one is standing over your bed with a whip or a carrot. There’s you and you; best find a way to negotiate that relationship so that you can serve your writing and, subsequently, the rest of the planet. We need more people doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
Being able to write, not simply to organize or punctuate, arises when you are able to be
at ease with the unique games and distractions your own mind is tossing around. Certainly, we’re all unique and are going to experience slightly different manifestations of the spokes on the Writer’s Wheel of Suffering. I’ve been paying attention for a lot of years to myself and my students, and I’ve come up with the following illusions that form the spokes of the Writer’s Wheel of Suffering:
Illusion of Time
Illusion of Thoughts
Illusion of What a Writer Is
Illusion of Identification
Illusion of Control
Illusion of Distractions
Illusion of Publication, Success, and Fame
Illusion of Money
Let’s take each of these illusions in turn. Our end-of-section exercises will help you look at the roles each one plays in your writing life.
CHAPTER 9
Illusion of Time
Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
—William Faulkner
My grandfather built the house the character Joey lived in on the Warner Brothers’ television series Dawson’s Creek. My grandfather lived on that land in Wilmington, North Carolina, his entire life. He also built the pier, where Joey and Dawson flirted with each other, and he and my uncle rebuilt it after each hurricane that swept through the coastal Carolinas. My father grew up on that land, hunted quail there, picked figs.
When my grandmother died in 1996, my sister and I inherited the cornfield that ran alongside her property and my aunt inherited the house. In 1997, Dawson’s Creek came to Wilmington and somehow discovered my grandmother’s home, which was the perfect location for Joey and Dawson’s Creek, which is really Masonboro Sound, which is really where we caught crabs every summer in green nets, screaming when they cut loose and scurried across the gray boards of the pier to dive back into the creek. Dad told us an alligator lived there when he was growing up. Sometimes he’d find it when he was swimming in the creek with his sister and his dogs, at least until he contracted polio in 1948 and spent time in an iron lung and then the rest of his time with a right leg shorter than the left, wearing elevated orthopedic shoes to bring him into balance.
My grandmother walked to the pier, where Joey and Dawson had their first kiss, when my father told her we were moving to Arizona. She cried crocodile tears and claimed she’d miss us. Maybe she did. Shortly after my grandmother died, my aunt agreed to lease the house to Warner Brothers for the show, and before we knew it, my father’s childhood home was on prime time television.
When my father died in 1987, I was young enough, nineteen, that I would have enjoyed watching Dawson’s Creek had it been on the air then. When he died, his family did not come to Arizona where we were. They stayed in Wilmington and held a memorial at my grandmother’s house, soon to be Joey’s house. I always wondered what it was like to hold a memorial service for him without his wife and children. A memorial service for all the people who knew him before he met my mother, before we moved to Arizona—the people who knew him when he could still run, when he was still balanced, left and right, moon and sun.
In Dawson’s Creek’s fifth season, Dawson’s dad died suddenly in a car accident along a stretch of road that my dad knew well. Dawson was nineteen, as I had been, and in his first year away from home at college, also as I had been. A wake was held for his father in Dawson’s sprawling Southern house, just across the creek from Joey’s house, overlooking the same body of water where my dad had swum with the alligators until he couldn’t swim anymore.
Cast members in mourning clothes walked onto the expanse of emerald lawn, a color only found south of the Mason-Dixon Line. People repressed their grief, ate finger foods, and awkwardly embraced the widow. Dawson’s father’s ghost hung everywhere. He played with my father’s ghost, who I felt clung to the walls as well, though I have come to see that perhaps I affixed him there, in 3-D color, so I would always know where he was.
The fireplace where we had spent so many Christmases was on television—a centerpiece for Dawson’s family’s mourners to gather, leave teacups and biscuits, and be silently grateful that death hadn’t visited them so intimately. The floor where my grandmother had read Little Black Sambo to me had been recarpeted a brilliant red for the TV show. But everywhere in the house on the television screen, death hung.
Fifteen years and three thousand miles away, I watched the episode in my air-conditioned living room in Arizona. My body cried out as if it was 1987. As if Dawson’s father was my father. As if my grandmother still lived in her house and wasn’t many years dead. As if I hadn’t spent ten thousand dollars in therapy already. As if time was not linear, but a loop, and Dad was dying over and over and over, equally, every time I rewound the episode. It felt the same, like someone had reached into my belly and pulled out my intestines one foot at a time. It felt the same, whether on TV in 2002 or in my “real” life of 1987. The television program was the play, the dream, the performance, but nothing about its impact was less real than when I had gone home to my apartment alone the first night after Dad died and felt with hurricane intensity that I had to nail him to the wall before I lost him or I would come entirely undone. Was the TV ghost real and my father’s ghost the illusion? I have no language for this.
I have tried for years to write about the absurdity of witnessing my grief on TV on a set that isn’t a set, but my dead father’s childhood house. I hear the monkey of illusion laughing, chattering as I spin in a time warp I’ve created based on an illusion that time is linear, that it stops and starts and can be contained by a battery and a plastic watch face. An illusion that a story can be contained by a single beginning and a finite end. That the very foundation of my life had been real, or, more accurately, had been more real than anything else I could remember or imagine. Yet the script of Dawson’s Creek created a bridge that spanned fifteen years to touch emotions in me that had clearly never moved. Dawson’s Creek showed me in HDTV the absurdity of linear time.
Dawson’s dad and my dad can die again any time I pop the tape in. The story is a circle, broken only randomly by my decision to press pause. The story is unattached to my perception of it. It has nothing invested in whether I cry each time I press play. Dawson’s dad can be frozen, midcrash, as long as I have the tape stored. He can remain pinned to the wall of the set that isn’t a set until my body moves him. I can experience my dad’s funeral again, two decades later, because the memory of it never moved. I can be thrown back twenty years in time because of a trigger image on a television screen.
Memory is supposed to be fluid, but often in the throes of trauma, we burn our own DVD of the story. When memory becomes fixed it’s no longer true to the nature of memory, which is supple and shifting, choosing details that are pertinent to the current situation. If we solidify a story in our memory, our mind freezes, and the part of our body that carries that memory freezes and we become more rigid and less flexible. As we freeze memory, we freeze time. Only, of course, time cannot stop. Or more accurately, our relationship with time does not stop.
Let me be clear. Time, like your mind, is a tool for your use. An awareness of time ensures that you pay your bills, get to work, show up for your wedding, and remember to vote. An awareness of time helps you manage the things you must juggle in any given day. But time is not a master. Time is an arbitrary ordering of daylight and moonlight. If you ever doubt that, just think about time zones and the international date line. Either it’s noon or not, right? Either it’s Monday or it’s not, right? Think about the towns in the United States where one side of town is on Central Time and one side of town is on Mountain Time. Random. Arbitrary.
Time can appear to stretch or shrink based on your perception of what is occurring. Pleasant events seem to go by more quickly than less-pleasant activities. But the truth is that time just passes. It neither speeds up nor slows down—in no small part because it does not exist. It’s a human creation designed to help us bett
er manage our lives. It’s as random as calling the sky blue and the grass green. Remember this so you won’t be fooled by its perceived importance.
Don’t let notions of time determine how successful your writing is. There are no breakout novelists. There are writers who have worked and worked and received rejection letter after rejection letter, and when their first novel appears (which is really the seventh one they’ve written) they (if they’re lucky) get lauded as a “new” talent. They’re not new. They’ve toiled away, day by day, word after word, until something was published. Don’t be fooled by the media’s need to jump on the newest, fastest, youngest, prettiest thing. It’s irrelevant. You write whether you get published or not. You write whether you have a good review, a terrible review, or, perhaps worse, no review at all. You write when it’s sunny and when it’s cloudy. You write when you’re in your twenties, your forties, your eighties—not because you’re being showered with financial rewards, but because you’re a writer. Let time be the river it is. Let that river carry you from one book to the next. There is no overnight anything.
If you need to think in terms of linear time, then use ten years and ten thousand hours as an average benchmark for a writer before you begin to see some fruit from your labor. Those ten years are spent not in sitting around a coffee shop talking about being a writer, but in writing, studying, reading, revising, revising, revising. Those ten years are spent accumulating more than a few file drawers of rejection slips, and those ten years are spent having to defend your statement “I am a writer” to people who want to know when your book (which isn’t finished or has already been rejected a hundred times) is coming out. Those ten years are spent being a writer. Those ten years can become fifteen years, or they may be only eight years, or for the unusually gifted and lucky, just a few years. But don’t hang your hat on being a success after your first class or first story publication. Time is neither friend nor foe. Time is a tool. Use it and forget about it.
The Writing Warrior Page 5
