Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (16 page)

We were stuck. We were feeling uncomfortable and lost. And how are we now? More stuck. More uncomfortable and lost.

We have gained nothing in the way of waking-dream time.

Our thoughts have not drifted but, rather, have ricocheted from one bright and shiny thing to another.

If the Internet had been in wide use during the time I quit smoking, I know what I would have been doing in that small borrowed room. I would have spent my days screwing around online. As it is—even after all the books and a lifetime of some pretty decent habits—I still find it enormously difficult to resist its lure. But on the best days, I imagine myself back to a place free of texts and tweets and Facebook messages. Free 159

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of the noise and Pavlovian thrill of an ever-filling in-box. I align myself with Donald Hall, rising with the dawn on his grandparents’ farm; Virginia Woolf in her Bloomsbury writing room; Proust in his bed; Paul Auster making the morning trek to his monastic Brooklyn brownstone studio. And I am back in that room: the blank walls, the empty courtyard, the thin line of smoke spiraling out the window. The vast, wide-open world of the mind drifting, unmoored.

Elderly people are not always craggy, wrinkled, stooped over, forgetful, or wise. Teenagers are not necessarily rebellious, querulous, or pimple-faced. Babies aren’t always angelic, or even cute. Drunks don’t always slur their words. Characters aren’t
types
. When creating a character, it’s essential to avoid the predictable. Just as in language we must beware of clichés.

When it comes to character, we are looking for what is true, what is not always so, what makes a character unique, nu-anced, indelible.

This specificity applies, obviously, to our main characters, but it is equally important when creating our minor characters: the man at the end of the bar, the receptionist in the doctor’s 160

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office, the woman with the shopping bag on the street. They don’t exist simply to advance our protagonist from point A to point B. They are not filler—you know, simply there to supply some local color. There is no such thing as filler or local color in life, nor can there be on the page.

Ask of yourself: How does this character walk? How does she smell? What is she wearing? What
underwear
is she wearing? What are the traces of her accent? Is she hungry? Thirsty?

Horny? What’s the last book she read? What did she have for dinner last night? Is she a good dancer? Does she do the cross-word puzzle in pen? Did she have a childhood pet? Is she a dog person or a cat person?

Not that you would ever supply any—much less all—of these details. But you need to know them. A fairly popular writing class suggestion is to write a complete dossier of your character, complete with geneology, habits, physical traits, and so forth. I’ve never been a big fan of this exercise, because I do believe that the writing of lists and backstory can leach the process of its magic. However, if you live with a character for long enough—and deeply enough—in your imagination, you will know them the way you know a family member. Nothing can possibly stump you. Favorite food? Allergies? Secret shame? Annoying habit? Once formed, our characters occupy some part of our consciousness during our every waking and dreaming moment.

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We—none of us—are ever clichés. We are the sum total of our stories. We may appear to be a type, a certain kind of person—a man, say, with a ruddy complexion, wearing a navy blue blazer with a silk pocket square, white trousers, no socks, suede loafers, a younger, blonde woman on his arm.

Click, click, click,
your mind makes a snap judgement: rich businessman with a trophy wife. But what if this same man just got the news that he has prostate cancer? And that the young blonde on his arm is his daughter who has come to be with him during his upcoming surgery? That he was recently widowed? That he lost all his money to Bernie Madoff?

It is human nature to make these instant assumptions based on fleeting first impressions and our own biases and projections.

But our job as writers is to look deeper. To hold in constant awareness just how much of the picture we may be missing. To train our empathetic imagination on all that we see.

A friend who has had a long and successful career as a comedy writer, tells me that people often ask him how he makes something funny. “I laugh first,” he says. “Then I work backward from there. I don’t think any lasting, timeless piece of art has 162

Still Writing

ever begun with the writer sitting there thinking, ‘oh, god, this is gonna slay them.’” Whether it’s humor or pathos you’re after on the page (and an argument could be made that the two are bedfellows), if you’re feeling it while you’re doing it, something’s probably not right. In the movie
Something’s Gotta
Give,
Diane Keaton plays a successful playwright who laughs and cries and shakes her head ruefully as she sits in front of her computer, gaily writing, but in real life, a writer behaving this way might want to consider changing her meds. Grief, joy, hilarity, rage—all of it becomes the medium in which you work.

You can’t be feeling it and shaping it at the same time. On one of those scraps of paper I carry around in my Filofax, I keep the words of the playwright Edward Albee: “For the anger and rage to work aesthetically, the writer’s got to distance himself from it and write in what Frank O’Hara referred to in one of his poems as ‘the memory of my feelings.’ Rage is incoherent.

Observed rage can be coherent.”

Another friend of mine, a gifted yoga teacher, ended a class once with a guided meditation that reminded me of Albee’s words. As we sat on our mats with our eyes closed, Mitchel asked us to visualize a lit match or an incense stick, burning brightly. Then to imagine the flame going out. The tip burning red. Smoke rising, curling into the air. And finally, the cool ash. That image of the cool ash is one I’ve carried with me ever since, because it seems an apt metaphor for the creative 163

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process. We do not write out of the incoherent flame. Nor do we write out of the smoke. We wait until the ash is cool. It contains much of the matter within it that caused the flame, the smoke. Only now we can touch it. We can stick our finger into it. We can mold it at will. Now we can observe it. Now it is ours.

In his memoir,
Sic,
Joshua Cody—a musician, author, and cancer patient—writes that “the key to any composition, it occurs to me, is to write against an edge, a frame. Put a frame around something, anything—the frame of cancer, say, around a life, and you’ve already gotten somewhere, without even willing it.”

But wait—what does this mean? Haven’t I been pretty insistent about the idea that structure emerges from the writing itself? So what’s up with this frame business? Am I contradict-ing myself? Well, not exactly! I’d like to respond. And, while I’m at it, I’m so pleased that you’ve been paying attention. But a frame isn’t structure. Structure happens within the frame, but it isn’t the frame. A frame keeps you in line. It lets you know when you’ve strayed from your story. A frame, writing 164

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against an
edge,
to use Cody’s phrase, can be enormously helpful in giving you clarity about your particular corner of the crazy-quilt. Your patch of land. Your precise and unique bit of geography. Your world.

For the sake of clarity, let’s think of this in terms of modern memoir. In Tobias Wolff’s
This Boy’s Life,
a frame around the story is childhood, as it is in Frank McCourt’s
Angela’s Ashes,
or Frank Conroy’s
Stop-Time
. In Susanna Kaysen’s
Girl, Interrupted
or Martha Manning’s
Undercurrents,
the frame is mental illness. In Caroline Knapp’s
Drinking: A Love Story,
Pete Hamill’s
A Drinking Life,
and David Carr’s
The Night of the
Gun
, the frame is addiction. In Lucy Grealy’s
Autobiography of
a Face
and Emily Rapp’s
Poster Child,
it’s disfigurement. In Pa-tricia Hampl’s
Virgin Time
and Mary McCarthy’s
Memories of
a Catholic Girlhood,
the edges are defined by spiritual hunger.

In Kathryn Harrison’s
The Kiss,
it’s incest. In Vivian Gornick’s
Fierce Attachments,
it’s the mother-daughter bond.

The frame offers parameters through which you can see your story. Without knowing what these parameters are, these edges, you will be in danger of throwing everything in there: the kitchen sink approach. Not everything belongs. It’s not all equally compelling or resonant. This is true whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction. A frame creates, by necessity, discernment. This, not that. The extraneous, the indulgent, the superfluous fall away. The frame “already gets you somewhere,”

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to use Cody’s words, “without even willing it.” Which is not to say that addiction stories don’t include childhood. Or that a story whose frame is the mother-daughter bond might not also be a spiritual quest. But if you know your frame, if you hew to it, it will create a kind of discipline around the telling of your story. It will require you to make creative decisions. Above all, it reminds you that this is a story you’re telling. Here’s a window. Look through it. What do you see? Sure, you’re standing in a house that contains other windows. You can look through them another time. But stop here, for a while, at this window.

There’s so much to see.

Monday mornings are often a challenge for me. Weekends are devoted to family and friends, to piled-up household chores.

Marketing, sneaker shopping, pantry cleaning. Paperwork.

School tuition. Insurance claims. The printer needs a new toner cartridge. The batteries in the TV remote have died.

We’ve run out of garbage bags. A flurry of e-mails planning my mother-in-law’s upcoming birthday. The deeper I immerse myself in the details—and they are mostly pleasurable 166

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details—of my domestic life, the greater the distance I must travel to get back to the place from which I work.

Monday mornings, the journey back to that place sometimes feels unending. Many writers have some sort of split screen inside of them. On one side, the work. On the other, everything else. Each renders the other not quite real. When working, the rest of life recedes. And when running errands, putting a child to bed, sorting through tax receipts, the world of the imagination slips out of view. We can’t attend to both at once. But this doesn’t mean that writers have to be conflicted creatures, always giving something up, neglecting our families, or our health, or the joys of everyday life, sacrificing ordinary happiness on the altar of art.

Think of this distance we travel between home and work, between family and art, between our everyday responsibilities and the life of the imagination as our own version of a rush-hour commute. We’re not standing on a platform, boarding a train, shouldering our way through crowds on our way from home to office—a ritual that creates its own buffer zone between the two traversed worlds—but we are still making a journey. It’s a solitary trek, and to a casual observer it might not seem like we’re going anywhere at all. We might, for instance, be sitting in the same exact spot. We might be wearing the same clothes we slept in, or maybe we’ve actually showered and put on a semblance of 167

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normal attire. But no matter. We are commuting inward. And on Monday mornings—or after a long holiday, a summer vacation, any time we have been away from the page—we have to be even more vigilant about that commute. We are traveling to that place inside ourselves—so small as to be invisible—where we are free to roam and play. So let the electric company wait. Let the mail pile up. Turn off the phone’s ringer. The voices around us grow quiet and still. We travel as surely as we’re in our cars, listening to NPR, our mug of coffee in its trusty cup holder. We know that once we enter the place from which we write, it will expand to make room for us. It will be wider than the world.

My son recently played his own composition on the piano and sang in front of a sizable audience. Afterward, I asked him how he felt as he was performing. I wondered if he had been nervous or self-conscious. I have never really grown accustomed to playing the piano in public. My fingers shake. My body grows rubbery with stage fright, even when I know a piece cold. It’s a good thing that I spend most of my life alone in a room, rather than in any kind of performance setting, which I could never have survived.

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“I forgot anyone was there,” Jacob told me after his recital. “I was just inside the music.” That’s what I’d thought, watching him. He looked comfortable. Completely at ease.

Un-self-conscious. This struck me as the best possible news.

He hadn’t just forgotten the audience. He had forgotten
himself
. He hadn’t been wondering how his hair looked. He wasn’t panicked about making a mistake. To forget oneself—to lose oneself in the music, in the moment—that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor. It can be the deepest pleasure, though it doesn’t always feel like pleasure. Not exactly.

In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s
Flow,
a book about the psy-chology of optimal experience, the author describes these moments as occuring “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” But he goes on to warn us that this is not necessarily pleasant. We don’t always get to feel unadulter-ated joy when we are in the midst of an optimal experience.

Think of it as joy deferred. The work itself can be challenging to the point of physical and psychic pain. “I hate writing. I love having written,” Dorothy Parker once said. The runner whose thighs burn with every step; the mathematician wrestling with a seemingly impossible equation; the chef tasting his béchamel sauce, focused on the precise balance of the milk and roux.