I had no idea what a novella was or how to write one, and the excitement I felt as I read her note turned to confusion and then sadness.
Great and enviable things were happening for me. Another student in this situation would have gotten Mary Robison or Kit Reed to help him understand what a novella was so he could write it, and would have been published at age twenty-one, but that wasn’t me. I thought I could choose a destiny. I wanted Jane Smiley’s editor to tell me, Go be a visual artist and forget about this writing thing, kid. I was someone who didn’t know how to find the path he was on, the one under his feet.
This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers.
2
IN MY CLEAREST MEMORY of her, it’s spring, and she is walking toward me, smiling, her lipstick looking neatly cut around her smile. I never ask her why she’s smiling—for all I know, she’s laughing at me as I stand smoking in front of the building where we’ll have class. She’s Annie Dillard, and I am her writing student, a twenty-one-year-old cliché—black clothes, deliberately mussed hair, cigarettes, dark but poppy music on my Walkman. I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m funny. She walks to class because she lives a few blocks from our classroom building in a beautiful house with her husband and her daughter, and each time I pass it on campus, I feel, like a pulse through the air, the idea of her there. Years later, when she no longer lives there, and I am teaching there, I feel the lack of it.
The dark green trees behind her sharpen her outline. She is dressed in pale colors, pearls at her neck and ears. She’s tall, athletic, vigorous. Her skin glows. She holds out her hand.
Chee, she says, give me a drag off that.
She calls us all by our last name.
She lets the smoke curl out a little and then exhales brusquely. Thanks, she says, and hands it back, and she smiles again and walks inside.
Lipstick crowns the golden Marlboro filter.
I soon know this means there’s five minutes until class starts. As I stub the cigarette out, I think of the people who’d save the filters. At least one of them. I feel virtuous as I kick it into the gutter.
In that first class, she wore the pearls, and a tab collar peeped over her sweater, but she looked as if she would punch you if you didn’t behave. She walked with a cowgirl’s stride into the classroom, and from her bag withdrew her legal pad covered in notes, a thermos of coffee, and a bag of Brach’s singly wrapped caramels, and then sat down. She undid the top of the thermos with a swift twist, poured coffee into the cup that was also the thermos top, and sipped at it as she gave us a big smile and looked around the room.
Hi, she said, sort of through the smile. One hundred thirty of you applied, and I took thirteen of you.
A shadowy crowd of the faceless rejected formed around us briefly. A feeling of terror at the near miss came and then passed.
No visitors, she said. Under no conditions. I don’t care who it is.
The class had a rhythm to it, dictated by how she had quit smoking to please her new husband. We were long-distance, she told me at one of our longer smoke breaks. We met at a conference. He didn’t know what a smoker I was until we shacked up. She laughed at this, as at a prank.
At the beginning of class she would unpack the long, thin thermos of coffee and the bag of Brach’s singly wrapped caramels—the ones with the white centers. She would set down her legal pad covered in notes and pour the coffee, which she would drink as she unwrapped the caramels and ate them. A small pile of plastic wrappers grew by her left hand on the desk. The wrappers would flutter a little as she whipped the pages of her legal pad back and forth, and spoke in epigrams about writing that often led to short lectures but were sometimes lists: Don’t ever use the word “soul,” if possible. Never quote dialogue you can summarize. Avoid describing crowd scenes, especially party scenes.
She began almost drowsily, but soon went at a pell-mell pace. Not frantic, but operatic. Then she might pause, check her notes in a brief silence, and launch in another direction as we finished making our notes and the sound of our writing died down.
Each week we had to turn in a seven-page, triple-spaced draft in response to that week’s assignment.
Triple-spaced? we asked in the first class, unsure, as this had never been asked of us.
I need the room to scribble notes in between your sentences, she said.
The silence in the room was the sound of our minds turning this over. Surely there wouldn’t be that much to say?
But she was already on her feet at the chalkboard, writing out a directory of copyediting marks: Stet is Latin and means let it stand . . . When I draw a line through something and it comes up with this little pigtail on it, that means get rid of it.
There was that much to say. Each week we turned in our assignments on Tuesday, and by Thursday’s class we had them back again, the spaces between the triple-spaced lines and also the margins filled with her penciled notes. Sometimes you write amazing sentences, she wrote to me, and sometimes it’s amazing you can write a sentence. She had drawn arrows pointing toward the amazing sentence and the disappointing one. Getting pages back from her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favorite black shirt under the nightclub’s black light, all the hair and dust that was always there but invisible to you, now visible.
In her class, I learned that while I had spoken English all my life, I actually knew very little about it. English was born from Low German, a language that was good for categorization, and had filled itself in with Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon words, and was now in the process of eating things from Asian languages. Latinates were polysyllabic, and Anglo-Saxon words were short, with perhaps two syllables at best. A good writer made use of both to vary sentence rhythms.
Very quickly, she identified what she called “bizarre grammatical structures” inside my writing. From the things Annie circled in my drafts, it was clear one answer to my problem was, in a sense, where I was from, Maine. From my mom’s family, I’d gotten the gift for the telling detail—Your Uncle Charles is so cheap he wouldn’t buy himself two hamburgers if he was hungry—but also a voice cluttered by the passive voice, which is in common use in that part of the world—I was writing to ask if you were interested—a way of speaking that blunted all aggression, all direct inquiry, and certainly all description. The degraded syntax of the Scottish settlers forced to migrate to Maine by their British ruler, using indirect speech as they went and then after they stayed. Add to that the museum of clichés residing in my unconscious.
I felt like a child from a lost colony of Scotland who’d taught himself English by watching Gene Kelly films.
The passive voice in particular was a crisis. “Was” told you only that something existed. This was not enough. And on that topic, I remember one of Annie’s fugues almost exactly:
You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. The passive voice needs gerunds to make anything happen. But too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus: running, sitting, speaking, laughing, inginginginging. No. Don’t do it. The verbs tell a reader whether something happened once or continually, what is in motion, what is at rest. Gerunds are lazy, you don’t have to make a decision and soon, everything is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. Don’t do that. Also, bad verb choices mean adverbs. More often than not, you don’t need them. Did he run quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter?
The chaos by now was with her legal pad and the wrappers, a storm on the desk, building to a crescendo fueled by the sugar and caffeine. I remember in this case a pause, her looking off into the middle distance, and then back at her pad, as she said, I mean, just what exactly is going on inside your piece?
If fiction provided the consolations of the mask, nonfiction provided, per Annie’s idea of it, the sensibility underneath the mask, irreplaceable and potentially of great value. The literary essay, as she saw it, w
as a moral exercise that involved direct engagement with the unknown, whether it was a foreign civilization or your mind, and what mattered in this was you.
You are the only one of you, she said. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it’s on Tunis or the trees outside your window, is what matters. Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible.
3
NARRATIVE WRITING SETS DOWN details in an order that evokes the writer’s experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also radical—no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of “the job.” If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.
We were to avoid emotional language. The line goes gray when you do that, she said. Don’t tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn’t angry, Annie said. She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.
In the cutting and cutting and the move this here, put that at the beginning, this belongs on page six, I learned that the first three pages of a draft are usually where you clear your throat, that most times, the place your draft begins is around page four. That if the beginning isn’t there, sometimes it’s at the end, that you’ve spent the whole time getting to your beginning, and that if you switch the first and last pages you might have a better result than if you leave them where they were.
One afternoon, at her direction, we brought in paper, scissors, and tape, and several drafts of an essay, one that we struggled with over many versions.
Now cut out only the best sentences, she said, and tape them on a blank page. And when you have that, write in around them, she said. Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve written thus far.
I watched as the sentences that didn’t matter fell away.
You might think that your voice as a writer would emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you’d be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free.
After the lecture on verbs, we counted the verbs on the page, circled them, tallied the count for each page to the side, and averaged them. Can you increase the average number of verbs per page? she asked. I got this exercise from Samuel Johnson, she told us, who believed in a lively page and used to count his verbs. Now look at them. Have you used the right verbs? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader. Think carefully—when did this happen in relation to that? And is that how you’ve described it?
I stared comprehendingly at the circles on my page, and the bad choices surrounding them and inside them.
You can invent the details that don’t matter, she said. At the edges. You cannot invent the details that matter.
I remember clearly, in the details that matter to this, going to the campus center on a Thursday morning before class in the middle of that spring to pick up my manuscript from campus mail. This particular essay I’d written with more intensity and passion than anything I’d tried to do thus far. I felt I finally understood what I was doing—how I could make choices that made the work better or worse, line by line. After over a year of feeling lost, this new feeling was like when your foot finds ground in dark water. Here, you think. Here I can push.
I opened the envelope. Inside was the manuscript, tattooed by sentences in the spaces between the lines, many more than usual. I read them all carefully, turning the pages around to follow the writing to the back page, where I found, at the end, this postscript: I was up all night thinking about this.
The thought that I’d kept her up all night with something I wrote, that it mattered enough, held my attention. Okay, I remember telling myself, if you can keep her up all night with something you wrote, you might actually be able to do this.
I had resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t respect it; in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for ridicule. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor. Annie felt the same.
Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science; it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I’m writing.
Talent might give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent—promise, not product. I wanted to learn how to go from being the accident-at-the-beginning to being a writer, and I learned that from her.
4
BY THE TIME I was done studying with Annie, I wanted to be her.
I wanted a boxed set of my books from HarperCollins, a handsome professor husband, a daughter, a house the college would provide, teaching one class a year and writing during the remainder. I even wanted the beat-up Saab and the houses on Cape Cod. From where I stood, which was in her house on campus during a barbecue at the end of the semester, it looked like the best possible life a writer could have. I was a senior, aware that graduation meant the annihilation of my entire sense of life and reality. Here, as I balanced a paper plate stained by the burger I’d just eaten—I had given up on being a vegan, it should be said—here was a clear goal.
If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next ten years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves to each other. Compare yourselves to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.
She paused. This was another of her fugue states. And then she smiled. We all knew she was right.
Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time.
In class, the idea seemed ridiculous. But at some point after the class ended, I did it. I walked up to the shelf. Chabon, Cheever. I put my finger between them and made a space. Soon, I did it every time I went to a bookstore.
Years later, I tell my own students to do it. As Thoreau, someone Annie admired very much, once wrote, “In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at.” She was pointing us there.
1989
WHAT I REMEMBER FIRST is our hands, raised in the air, waving and punching like sea grass in a tide, the procession moving slowly for the AIDS- and ARC-impaired, some of them in wheelchairs. At the beginning of the march, down by City Hall, our police liaison was thrown to the street and handcuffed as he tried to identify himself to one of the cops. He had stepped off the sidewalk, where we were confined, into the street, where helmeted motorcycle cops raced in figure eights and ellipses, in formation. Later, we will listen to him tell us about how the police refused to give him water to take his AZT, and taunted him with reports that some of us had been shot. But for now, he vanishes behind a cloud of riot shields.
We keep moving, eager not to have the march called off, as it is our bluff: at the end of it, we plan to block traffic to protest government inaction in the face of the AIDS epidemic. It is October 6, 1989. A cold, gray San Francisco day, the kind that replicates the mood of a flu, hot and cold, sweaty and chilled. The sun hides. To the bystanders, I think we must look like any theatergoers out for early tickets, except for the crowd of policemen in armor following us, all of them wearing latex gloves.
They confine us to the curb nearly the entire way, making sure we obey the stoplights and let the Friday t
ourist traffic through. We chant, though fairly quietly, chastened by the early arrest, the weather, and the flood of police: our count gives them two cops for every protester.
When we reach the Mint, we throw pennies painted red over the sides of the fence: blood money was the idea, and the very innocence of the gesture stings at me. I wonder if we are deranged, to be meeting these police with arts and crafts. “Spend our taxes back on us!” yells a marcher next to me, as if he suddenly remembers his anger.
At the Castro at last, the traffic makes a break in the police line like a cut vein, and we spill out across the intersection into a circle, linking arms and cutting off all four directions of traffic. Now the chanting is sure and strong. “What do we want? Health care! When do we want it? Now!” And the urgency of tone builds as the police whistle and gun their engines, blaring through their horns that we must clear the intersection or face arrest. In the back of the circle, away from the cops, we begin sitting down. The police cannot see this yet, but a group of motorcycle cops sheers off, headed to the side streets to make their way around to the back, an ancient strategy. At the corner of Eighteenth and Castro, another crowd of people billows out from the subway and finds it cannot cross the street. Some of them recognize friends in our group and wave as they sit down also. It is dusk, rush hour now, and it occurs to me that that corner of the sidewalk will get very crowded.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Page 5
