“Hey,” says Lillian, one of my characters. “Don’t let us keep you awake.” She presses her hand to my forehead, sinking me back onto the pillow. I burrow deeper under the down.
“Wake up!” It’s Hannah, another character. “I’ve still got more to say to you.”
“Shut up.” This one’s Zöe, the one who’s way too much like me. “You had your turn. It’s my turn now.”
“Ain’t none of y’all’s turn,” says Frank, from my newest novel. “It’s my time now. I’m still stuck in Chinatown.”
I could be asleep, but I’m not. The bed is heavy with all of them here. More are here than choose to speak. There are always more of them than are speaking. Always more.
Two black swans slide across a pond I can’t identify. I think of Freedom Park in North Carolina where we used to go when I was growing up to feed the ducks and crows. I wonder what those black swans are about. Janis Joplin cracks her heart open in Golden Gate Park in 1967 and twenty-year-old Helen feels the blood thumping in her own heart. In her belly, a baby who won’t live to hear Janis wailing. Outside the park, Benjamin, another ghost, circles over Frank’s head in Chinatown. The ghosts of my characters.
Skeleton Woman dances on the dresser, the moon casting her reflection in the mirror, a sight beautiful enough to make me eternally grateful for this life. She nods at me, her jaw a constant grin.
No character has ever visited me who didn’t have something to teach me. No story ever moved through me that didn’t help me move. I have learned this through years of observing my writing and my relationship with it. Knowing that every character, every story or poem teaches me something helps me to get out of my own way. It helps me continue to have faith in what I’m working on even when I can’t see where it’s going. Paying attention and waking up to the lessons of each book and character help me stay more present in my work. It helps me release my desire for a result because I’ve witnessed over and over that the work knows more than I do. I know that if I make a space for it, writing will take me places I cannot conceive of on my own.
The cats sleep in fluffy cat piles. The black swans slide across the surface of the lake. I close my eyes to dream a story. My characters gather around. “We’re here, love.”
My bones sing. What a wondrous gift indeed, to be one of the haunted.
CHAPTER 36
Let’s Do the Limbo
When having a smackerel of something with a friend, don’t eat so much that you get stuck in the doorway trying to get out.
—Winnie the Pooh
Nothing’s more fun than realizing you’re smack dab in the middle of the very place and space you talk to your students about all the time. On the one hand, it validates your discussion. On the other hand, it just plain sucks.
I’ve started four different novels in the last three months, none of which seem to be going anywhere. I do know enough to know that I need to keep following them, but the honest truth is that I am extremely lonely when I’m not living with a bunch of characters. I feel incomplete. I feel like I’m searching for the rest of me.
I received an anonymous postcard this week. I’ve gotten a few of these over the last year or so. The postmark is Vermont. I don’t know anyone in Vermont, so I’m kind of excited to have a secret Vermont admirer. The postcard said: If your train doesn’t pull into the station, go out and find it. Very appropriate for the past few months. Of course, the next logical question is: Go where? Go west, young (ahem, middle-aged) woman, go west? Go east? Go north, south, inside, outside, upside down, underneath . . . Ah, so many prepositions, so little time. But the gist is: move.
Writing limbo takes many forms. Waiting for the characters to speak. Waiting for that call from an agent or editor. Waiting for the answer to your plot conundrum. But waiting isn’t inertia. Inertia will beget inertia, and before you know it, you’ll have a whole inertia dynasty lounging around your house. You’ll be overwhelmed. All the inertia siblings will be fighting over the remote control. Don’t let it get that far. When you find yourself stuck, shake. Move. Walk. Run. Cycle. Don’t let the weight of inertia, which is just a spoke on our Writer’s Wheel of Suffering, keep you motionless.
You have no control over when your editor will call. You have no control over when that plot solution will show up. There’s no tracking number on those things. Break your expectations apart. Change your approach. Rather than ask the question you think you want the answer to (How will Bernard ever get out of the mine shaft in New Mexico?), instead ask Bernard what he’s thinking while he’s stuck in the mine shaft. Let Bernard show you the way out. Ask Bernard what the next right thing for him to do is. Don’t try so hard to make it happen by yourself.
In some versions of Chinese mythology, the afterlife contains a viewing pavilion where hungry ghosts are sent to watch their families. The ghosts can’t interact with their loved ones. They can’t help them. They can’t change the course of events. They can only watch and wait.
There’s a viewing pavilion for us as writers, too. We know a book is out there. We can see its edges, maybe even its title or cover. We might hear a voice or two, see a scene. But we can’t touch it. It dances just beyond our reach; in fact, the harder we try to grab it, the more elusive it becomes. Our job is to remain on the viewing pavilion until the book encircles us with its arms and we smell the ink on the page. You’ll know the difference between the right time to write and the forced time. Remember the words of Leo Tolstoy. “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
During this time of waiting, take notes. Observe your thoughts about the book. Observe your desires, your contractions, and your grasping. Observe what needs you have (need to publish, need to please, need to be famous, need to be rich) and blow them away. Observe your expectations and, one by one, cast them into the sea. We must wait. Waiting is not doing nothing. Waiting prepares you. Waiting creates discipline. Waiting allows you to feel what it’s like to break the tension and then birth the ocean of a story. If we could give birth every day, every hour all of our lives, then we would forget to notice the miracle, which is not possible without the period of gestation.
Never is nothing happening. Never are you not in perfect harmony with the work you are supposed to write. Understand this and your writing will open. Fight this and your work will contract. Both places will teach you.
Writing is much more about listening and waiting than it is about writing. Some of my novels have come to me first through a voice in the very back of my mind. I’ll get a line, or a fragment of a line. Then maybe the same day, maybe the next year, I’ll get more context. Some stories come to me through an image of a place. I don’t know how and I don’t know why. I have simply learned patience. This doesn’t mean I’m not writing during the waiting. I am. I’m exploring, gathering. Like a child taking a basket out into the woods to bring back interesting things, a writer goes out with an empty notebook and gathers without knowing why. Oh, look, a book on Japanese tea ceremonies. “Huh?” says your mind. “You don’t care about that.” No matter. Put it in your basket. You pick up a funky peacock feather at the local craft store. “Huh?” No matter. Gather. You’re suddenly obsessed with corn necklaces. Just notice. Write it down. Keep shopping.
Remember the words of author Judith Claire Mitchell, “Learn to see and then to listen to the ghosts who come to your writing room.” Gather those ghosts to you. Embrace whatever form they take. Don’t try to fix them, change them, analyze them, or order them around. Just put them in your basket. Give them a place in your notebook. They may soon whisper to you or they may jump out of the basket and return at a different time. Love them fully, whatever they look like. Whatever they say. They are yours, and you are privileged to be able to hear them.
CHAPTER 37
Seasons of the Work
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
—George Santayana
I am pulled away from the computer
this afternoon by the smell of rain blowing through my open window. Water! It is late June in the northern Arizona high desert. Time for monsoon season to begin. The temperature has dropped ten degrees this afternoon, and the cats are glued to the window screen, the breeze dancing with their fur. I step outside. There are only a few drops this afternoon, but they’re cold, and there’s the slow promise of thunder. It’s also wildfire season, and a wildfire is burning about sixty miles southeast. So far, it’s charred over one hundred acres. I saw the plume of smoke in the sky yesterday as I drove home from Sedona. This morning, the smoke had blown in over Prescott, raining light ash from the sky. I couldn’t see Thumb Butte through the haze.
Monsoon season makes us come out of our houses to stand in the rain. We gaze at the sky, which is so frequently just a sheet of turquoise blue, and point to bushels of clouds. Wind stirs up the dust from the yard. Lightning brings its fire. A monsoon is a celebration of all the elements, and we, who have so long been deprived of water, can’t help but sing.
The absence of defined seasons in Phoenix made that area particularly challenging for me to live in. As the city has grown, it gets fewer monsoon storms, the heat from the cement and the sprawl having altered the weather patterns. Phoenix has highs between 80 and 120 degrees all year long. My body couldn’t figure out when to rest, when to work, when to play. Prescott, however, is a mile high, with four full seasons, although none of them are extreme. Winter feels like winter. We need scarves and gloves and heat. We need to sleep more and drink warm liquids and soups. Summer is bright and clear, with daylight lasting twelve hours. We need sunscreen and salads and cool water. Living in Prescott has taught me about the seasons of my own body. I couldn’t feel them in Phoenix. I watched as the stores brought in wool and fur coats, gloves, hats, and fleece even though the thermometer read 90 degrees in November.
Writing a book has four seasons, too, although they don’t always occur chronologically. Sometimes the seeds you plant are not ready yet, and no amount of watering, watching, or cursing will make the plant grow before it’s ready. You cannot force a piece of writing. You may choose to put plastic flowers on your kitchen table, but everyone knows they’re plastic flowers.
Discipline in your writing practice will help you listen to its seasons. When is it time to plant? When is it time to gather? When is it time to wait? When is it time to harvest? I understand how seductive the push is to get something done “now.” I too have witnessed and experienced the pain of forcing a piece of work to arrive before it’s ready. That work will not be healthy. It cannot stand on its own. It cannot show you how to shape it into a book. It doesn’t have all the nutrients it needs to be what it was becoming before you cut it out of the earth too early.
In my experience with teaching and writing, books seem to begin first with the powerful force of summer, followed too quickly by the stillness of winter. That stillness can kill a novice writer’s enthusiasm for the work. It can bring up doubts, hungry ghosts, and other “better ideas,” locking you in an endless summer. But if you hunker down and wait, after winter will come spring, and you will see the green buds of the flurry of work you did in summer begin to surface. As the days get longer, your energy will increase, and the book will begin to pull you again, ever and always farther into your own psyche and the mythology of the story.
Observe how this unfolds in your own work. You might use headings such as “Winter” or “Spring” in your writing journal as you explore your process. Never mind that you are writing “Spring” when it is December. Listen to the work. Its calendar is its own.
CHAPTER 38
Texas
If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.
—Buddhist proverb
Before our family moved west to Arizona, I had never been anywhere in the country except up and down the eastern and southern coasts. What I knew of the West came from the prairies in the Little House books and from reruns of Bonanza and the country and western singers Dad liked to listen to: Tex Ritter, George Jones, Waylon and Willie. My seventh-grade friends wrote in my yearbook to watch out for scorpions and buffalo and gunfights. This was what we thought the West was, we children of the South. We thought it was spiny and dusty and dry, with hangings on the square and men wearing chaps and six-shooters. We had our share of poisonous, strange animals in the South, but I knew what they were, and since I wasn’t an outdoors girl, I was generally safe. Scorpions, apparently, lived in people’s shoes. How could I avoid shoes?
We drove west mostly on I-40. I began to understand why the Mississippi River was such a prominent dividing line for the country. Everything east of the Mississippi exploded in greens. Everything west of the Mississippi looked, to me, like an Etch-A-Sketch screen, only there was no way to shake the gray away and make a new picture. We stopped for a night in Henryetta, Oklahoma. The motel had a pool, but the pool water was too green. Our motel room had dark blue velvet bedspreads that seemed exotic to me, and the beds had a coin-operated massage feature. The parking lot was filled with trucks. We heard the sounds from the interstate all night. In the morning, after a breakfast of Cheerios in the motel room, we continued west, the sun behind us.
I-40 travels through the Texas panhandle. Though this is the shortest east-west route through Texas, I thought we would never get through it. I had never seen such barren land. And I didn’t want us to get through it, because with every mile we continued west, the odds of turning back east grew slimmer. I was afraid of what would be in Arizona, or, more accurately, what wouldn’t be in Arizona. And then there was the thing none of us were talking about; we were moving to Arizona so Dad could die. We all knew he wanted to see us have a better start without him than he thought we could have in North Carolina. But we didn’t talk about that, and, looking back, I don’t know if it would have made a difference.
I felt, and still feel, vulnerable in the West, unprotected, waiting for the claws of a hawk to clamp to the back of my neck and carry me off. The space is too wide, the sky too endless, the trees too short. In the south, trees that witnessed slavery still stand tall and solid. Trees there have arms that reach above me and below me, their roots twisting, turning, joining under the houses, under the beds.
Trees in North Carolina were stable. What could I hold onto in the West? No moss softened the bark of the yucca trees. No lichen inched its way over roots that jutted up from under the earth. No leaves fell in piles as tall as me to cushion a fall, or a jump, or to dissolve into the damp earth as winter approached, coating the ground with slippery softness. I could only cling to the dry desert dust, which slipped through my fingers like breath.
The desert is merciless. It bleaches me, turns my flesh into carrion for the coyote or the turkey vulture. Its sun penetrates everything, leaving no shadow, no shade, no safety. I don’t decay here; I fossilize, baked into suspended animation like a tarantula under glass.
At twelve years old, I would have turned back when I saw the bleakness of Texas. I would have gassed up, turned a sharp corner, and returned to the place I knew. We pushed through the wall of sunlight into Arizona and stayed. We kept going west even though no one knew what it was going to be like, if it was going to be a mistake, if we would eventually need to retrace our tracks and go home.
I would have turned back.
When I wrote my first, quite awful, novel, I did turn back. I hit the barren place, the place that offered no light, no hope for what could be in the next chapter, so I decided the book was dead and I abandoned it, a rusted car, along the edge of the interstate. Hope seduced again, and I started a second, also quite awful, novel. I heard the voice of a spider in a prison cell in Salem, Massachusetts, during the seventeenth century. I heard the voice of a woman who had been accused of witchcraft. I found books on the plants and animals of New England. I read up on the burning times. I fell into feminism. Once again, I hit the barren place and abandoned the book.
I wrote my third novel in graduate school, and I had
to finish it or I wouldn’t graduate. Again, I hit the barren place. But I had a deadline, a workshop group, a student loan. So I drove through Texas, more because I had to than because I wanted to. I still would have turned back. But because I didn’t, I became a writer. I finished a project. I stayed with it when it didn’t have anything to say. I stayed with it when its landscape grew gray and sour. I stayed with it while the siren call of another book began its whistle.
There is always a barren place, a place where you feel you don’t have enough supplies, or talent, or hope to cross. This is the intersection where hope becomes faith, and you step forward without knowing where you’ll end up, with your gallon of water, bottle of sunscreen, and big floppy hat. You step forward because you are establishing trust with the writing. It’s waiting to see if you’re just a one-night-stand kind of writer, or if you can make a commitment to the long haul.
Step out onto the freeway with a cardboard sign that says WEST and see who stops to pick you up. Someone will because you’re standing there, surrendered to the work, surrendered to what you don’t know.
CHAPTER 39
Disconnection
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
It’s going to happen. You’re going to be going full throttle for a week, or a month, or a year, and then—bam! You’ll find yourself wondering what on earth you were thinking. You won’t recognize your story. Your characters will stop talking to you. You’ll realize you started the whole book in the wrong point of view, or the wrong setting, or with the wrong character. You’ll sit in front of your computer where previously you’ve been in blissful harmony with the work, and you’ll do nothing. You’ll raise your fingers above the keys, pause dramatically in hopes something brilliant will swoop in underneath your fingertips and start writing again, but nothing will happen. You’ll suddenly read the World’s Most Brilliant Book Just Like the One You’re Writing and go order three gallons of Chunky Monkey ice cream to wash it all away. You’ll realize that the vampire stories you’ve been working on diligently for several years are now passé. You’ll look to heaven or hell or anywhere in between to find your missing muse. You’ll consult old books that once held pearls of wisdom on the writing process only to find them all stupid and irrelevant. You’ll walk into your favorite bookstore where you’ve always found comfort only to see instead a glut of books that no one is buying.
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