This phase of disconnection hits every writer. Don’t make the mistake of taking this phase as the end. Think about it instead like the teenager phase of your book. Remember how fun your kids were when they were teens? Or, if you’re not a parent, remember how fun you were as a teen? Yeah. It’s coming back to you now, right? The rolling of the eyes. The slamming of the doors. The cries of no one understands me. The inability to talk with your mother or father without fighting or crying. The feeling that no one anywhere in the universe has ever been so alone. So different. So strange. So unable to fit into the world you’ve landed in (not by your own choice, you might add).
Disconnection from your work is not the same as the limbo phase. Limbo is that time between projects when you’re not sure where to go next. Disconnection applies to the current project you’re working on. You may feel bored with it. You may find yourself vulnerable to seductions from brighter, shinier projects. In short, you and your work don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. Where’s the writing counselor?
Your book is just going through some growing pains. Its job is to fight with you. To challenge you. To resist the path you’ve laid out for it. Its job is to wrestle itself free from you so it can find its own voice. Your job during this time is to keep showing up. Remain present. Don’t decide you don’t love the work anymore. Don’t decide to send it off to boarding school. Don’t force it to wear a navy blue uniform or take out its piercings. Don’t do what every fiber of your being is telling you to do—hold tighter; don’t let it get away! No. Stop yourself. Back away. Keep your door open. Keep food in the refrigerator. Don’t cut off the bank accounts. This is a critical time in your relationship with your writing. This is the time many a talented writer collapses under the stress of watching what she has loved rebel. It doesn’t have to be this way. Patience. Compassion. Kindness. Space. We are cultivating all these qualities with our breathing, shaking, and writing practice.
Don’t throw up your hands and walk away. Your work wants to talk to you; it just doesn’t know how yet. It needs to find its own identity and then return to you. If you close the door, it can’t come back. Keep showing up. Perhaps focus more time now on journaling or prewriting for a different project, but check in every day on this novel. Check in every day on its well-being. “Are you still there? Are you OK? Do you want to talk? Can I get you anything?” And if the answer is no, or if no answers surface at all, return to your desk and keep working. Here’s where your maturity and practice will pay off. You’ll be able to remain steady while your work goes through its own temper tantrums and identity crises. Your steadfastness will show your writing that you will be there no matter what it does or doesn’t do. No matter how easily the words come, or how hard it is to find them. Your love is nonjudgmental. Your compassion endless.
Now at the risk of sounding too Pollyannaish, let me assure you I identify with the frustration of these troubled-teen times. I tend to want to force my work to do something it is (or I am) not yet ready for. I want to do it all now. But I have to wait. Don’t force. Be steady. Your book will come back to you if you keep the door open. If you keep learning your craft. If you keep showing up. Your book will take you to the next level. Your only task when you feel this disconnection is to step back, keep working, and release your attachment to an outcome. Release your desire for a particular result or a timeline for a particular result.
You’re not going to get very far with your daughter if you keep pushing to know her every secret. If you keep following her around on her first dates. If you keep telling her what college program to major in. You’re going to create tension and friction between you and your work. You’re the writer. Your job is to hold the space. You remain rooted while your work bounces around for a while. You hold the space. There is freedom there.
Don’t let yourself fall victim to judgment. Don’t tell yourself this wouldn’t happen if you were a real writer. A good writer. Even a modestly good writer. This wouldn’t happen if you’d planned better. If you hadn’t taken that new job. If you didn’t just get married. If you didn’t just get divorced. If you’d thought your plot through better. If you hadn’t tried to mimic another writer’s voice. If you hadn’t read so many James Bond books before starting. If you’d gotten an MFA. If you hadn’t gotten an MFA.
Stop.
Breathe.
Shake.
Pay attention.
1. It’s normal to be at odds with your book.
2. It’s normal to not like your book.
3. It’s normal to feel distant from your book.
4. It’s normal to doubt your own ability.
Try to remember what drew you to the book in the first place. You’re starting to see why writing is work. Yes, it’s fun. Yes, it’s fabulous. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it’s hard. It’s many many things. Sometimes all at the same time. Writing a novel is not like working on an assembly line. One part plot, two parts driving question, one part characterization, throw in a dash of dialogue. Voilá. Story. Nope. Not like that.
You’re in the beginning stage. You’re birthing your book. You have to step back and let it evolve. Your job—and your only job when writing a first draft—is to write the next right word. Stay present in the body and belly of your story. Resist the urge to leap into the future of your story, or to hold on to past ideas about your story. One word follows the next. This is not new information. It’s not new advice. One word plus one word plus one word eventually yields seventy thousand words.
A first novel is often just a first novel. It teaches you how to write a book-length work. It is not the book that you will get published. It is often not even very good. It is the book that teaches you how to be a Writing Warrior. It is the work that is necessary to get you where you ultimately can go. No work is ever wasted. I have many first novels. They all taught me valuable things. I thought they were all going to be the “one.” They were not. But they were my companions. And my teachers.
Your job is only to write the next right word.
CHAPTER 40
The Mysteries of Fiction
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
—Vladimir Nabokov
San Francisco’s ghosts are as vibrant as the rainbow flags that fly from the tops of buildings on Market Street. Its ghosts cling to the basement of the Westin St. Francis during the fire after the 1906 quake. They holed up in the wine cellar with a tiny dog, waiting for the rocking and the burning to be over.
The city absorbs everything and everyone. The ruins of the Central Freeway (US Route 101) that collapsed after the ’89 Loma Prieta quake have become a green backdrop for the laundromats and hair salons of the newly gentrified Hayes Valley. The city remembers its opium dens and its slave trade in immigrant labor. The city remembers Mark Twain and has yet to forgive him for his “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” comment. The city remembers the Beats. North Beach, which isn’t what it was, still holds the sound of the pale, white alcoholics who tried to change the world—or at least their perception of the world.
I walk through the Tenderloin with my friend Dex and my husband, Keith. My current novel’s protagonist, Helen, lives there, and I want to get a visceral feel for the neighborhood. Helen is an alcoholic. Her baby, Ellie, drowned at her breast in 1969. Her daughter, Claire, has just packed up and moved to god knows where, she thinks somewhere in Oregon, and her husband, Frank, hasn’t come home from work yet. He hasn’t been late coming home in forty years. She rarely leaves her apartment, which she and Frank have lived in since the late ’60s. Their marriage has become what many marriages become, a familiarity to be borne with a Catholic severity. She didn’t know she relied on his presence until he didn’t return. This night, tonight, June 19, she is venturing out of her apartment. Forty years from the day she and Frank first landed in San Francisco and found themselves in the Haight at a love-in, waiting for the wa
iling of Janis Joplin. She is stepping out, presumably to look for Frank, but even she knows that’s only a story she’s feeding herself. She is stepping out to find her city again, the city that stole her heart, first in the good way, then in the not-so-good way. The city that broke her on its jagged sidewalks and crooked streets. The city that still summons her with the monotonous voice of a Muni railway announcer, Approaching, outbound, two cars, J, J, in three minutes. The city that tricks her into believing she matters, into believing that she has somewhere to go and someplace to be, simply because there are so many options for getting places. Who’s to know that when she gets on a train, she only rides from one end to the other, gets off, and waits for the train to turn around so she can reboard. She can ride all day like that in the underground. As long as she doesn’t come up the stairs into the light, she could ride forever. She thinks of a snippet of a song her father sang to her once, something about someone riding forever through the streets of Boston, but she can’t quite remember all the words. Something about the MTA.
My friend Dex is tall, really tall, which is great when you’re walking through the Tenderloin at twilight and you’re only five feet two. Dex talks to us about the mayor’s policy on homelessness. A motel painted baby blue is blockaded with a black gate. There’s a sign for a public hearing; the property is to be changed from a tourist motel to a residence inn. A legless man in a wheelchair across the street from us has the shakes. New banners adorn the streetlights: Welcome to Little Saigon. The banners are professional and pastel and don’t portray the street we’re walking through. The street we’re walking down has an occasional open Vietnamese restaurant, a barricaded halfway house.
“Got a light?” asks the skinny man in front of the building.
“You know I don’t smoke,” says a fat woman, walking into the building. “I tell you that every night.”
I try to look without looking. Across the street is a perilously thin woman, her limbs all angles and tattoos. She’s pressed into the shoulder of a Latino man, larger, pierced, and laughing. He pulls her across the street. She’s wearing black hose that are ripped from knee to crotch. Her skirt is small enough to be a napkin. They touch, this man and this woman; they touch.
People group in fours and fives, rolling dice, pulling out cigarette after cigarette, puffing a few times, before crushing them out on the sidewalk. Hands slip into pockets and into the hands of men who appear and disappear faster than ghosts. The drugs move around us, a river we can choose to step into or step around. All of us feel the pull of the tide.
Does Helen know how close she is to Union Square? Does she know how close she is to the banking centers of the West Coast? Does she only see 1967? Only see the Haight as it was with the Diggers and the electric light shows and the lost children looking for themselves in tie-dye and glitter? Has she walked down the Haight since Ellie died?
The breath of the Tenderloin is shallow and staccato. It chokes on its inhale and refuses to release all of its exhale. It’s getting darker. Shadows move in the park. Where would Helen go out here? Would she see herself reflected in the face of the homeless man who demanded a dime?
A novel has a four-dimensional world. It is not just outlines and ideas in a color-coded computer file. These outlines and ideas form the skin, perhaps. The outer container. But until the book has its own breath, you have only a corpse. It could be a beautifully preserved corpse, with great sentences and perfect punctuation, but until the book breathes on its own, it’s dead.
There’s a time to build the house for the breath to live in, and there’s a time for the breath to enter. Is this breath inspiration? Yes, and no. It’s the moment when the soul enters the book. Sometimes it comes early, sometimes after years of waiting. The soul can’t come until its time. Don’t quit because the work isn’t moving quickly enough for you, or because you believe a novel is just constructing the house, one chapter after the next, like laying bricks. The more space you have in your house, the more easily the breath can enter. If you’ve cemented all the spaces closed with your ideas and directives, it’s going to take a pretty strong spirit to slip inside.
Try going outdoors to listen for your book. Maybe even try the shaking practice outdoors! Brenda Ueland, in her book If You Want to Write, wrote at length about the importance of walking and writing. When you move your body, you are creating space. Space in your body creates space in your writing. Space in your writing allows for discovery and surprise.
Fiction is, to me, one of the great mysteries of this life. I don’t know why particular characters get under our skins; I only know they do in a triumph of imagination and intellect, a union of body, mind, and spirit. Writers come to classes burning with people’s voices in their heads, burning with desires. Your characters are part of you. They have chosen you, or you have chosen them; it doesn’t matter which way you view the relationship. They’re with you. What are you going to do? What are you not going to do?
Treat your characters with respect. They are not pawns for you. They are not mouthpieces for your agendas. They are fleshy and sticky and complicated. They don’t always follow Aristotelian arcs. They will show you the story. They will give you their arc. Follow their breathing, not your own. Empathy carries you here. Empathy opens your body to their experiences. Empathy allows you to love them fiercely, no matter what actions they take in the story, no matter what parts of yourself they reflect. Your work will bring you what you need.
“I noticed you don’t ever write about your mother,” said a questioner from the audience at a recent reading.
That’s been true. I have had to keep working through what has been freshest, what has held the most energy. Writing moves energy. Writing makes space.
“My new novel is all about mothers,” I say.
And it is, but I don’t yet know what form it will take. As writers, it’s our job to show up. It’s our job to follow a story down false starts and into the streets of the Tenderloin. It’s our job to notice when we put our agenda into it, and pull that part out like a bad tooth. It’s our job to move into the characters’ bodies, minds, and beliefs. Without judgment. Laying down no conditions. Just being ready with a blank page and an empty body.
Just providing space.
CHAPTER 41
Tools
The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.
—Confucius
In the late 1990s, I became obsessed with Frida Kahlo. A few of her paintings came to the Phoenix Art Museum. My best friend and I stood in front of her paintings, almost afraid to speak as we noted the crimson colors, the desperation in the self-portraits, and the dance between love and pain. I watched the 2002 movie Frida and decided I wanted to paint my house in the colors of Frida’s villa.
My greatest gifts in this life do not revolve around the domestic realm. Cooking, cleaning, gardening—these noble arts don’t work well in my world. But what has always worked well for me is my intense desire and drive to do something. Once I decide to do something, I will not be deterred.
Off I went to Home Depot, visions of turquoise, yellow, and orange walls dancing in my head. How hard can painting a house be? I bought paint that looked like the colors I wanted. I bought brushes that seemed fun and festive. I bought a drop cloth and a tray and headed home thinking I could paint the entire house in just a few hours. (I know, I know.)
What I don’t do is quit, even when all signs point to: you’re being an idiot, Laraine. I had bought the wrong paint (who knew there were so many types of paint and that they all did different things?). I had bought the wrong brushes. I hadn’t bought enough paint trays. I had forgotten entirely about something to wash the brushes in. I had no rags. Getting the picture? But I painted. I put on a Bessie Smith CD and I painted into the night. I painted my French doors aqua, but since I had the wrong paint, the paint didn’t stick to the door, so I deliberately pulled a lot of it off and called it “distressed.” I painted d
oorframes purple (but neglected to realize the importance of masking off the door knobs and hinges, or, heaven forbid, removing the door knobs and hinges). I splattered paint across my table by accident and proceeded to run my fingers through it to create an artistic table à la first grade finger painting. I got paint on my clothes (yes, no smock) and in my hair. But I was going to finish, and when I did, I ended up with an aqua-yellow-purple mess that I decided I was madly in love with because it was eccentric (just like me). I was not, under any circumstances, going to either (a) start again or (b) pay a professional to come do it right. So I lived for the next few years in a rather eclectic space that in truth didn’t convey the message of eccentricity. It conveyed the message of sloppiness, inattention to detail, to be blunt, a half-assed effort.
It was arrogance that took me to Home Depot armed with nothing more than a few childhood paint-by-number horse kits under my belt. It was arrogance that told me that painting was easy, requiring no skill, no craft, no technique. It was arrogance that pushed me through the painting process long after I knew I was in over my head and had no idea what I was doing. And it was arrogance wrapped in denial that allowed me to live in that space so long. When I decided to move, I had to sell the house “as is” because of the disastrous paint job inside. I was unwilling to pay to fix it, even then.
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