Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  The daily discipline of this creates a muscle memory. It becomes ingrained, thereby habit. I try to remember this, each morning, as I make the solitary trek from the kitchen to my desk. My house is quiet. My family is gone. The hours stretch ahead of me. The beds have been made, the dogs have been walked. There is nothing stopping me. Nothing, except for the toxic little troll sitting on my left shoulder. Just when I think I have her beat, she will assume a new disguise. I have to be vigilant, on the ready. She will pretend to be well-intentioned. She’s telling me for my own good.

  Maybe you should try writing something more commercial.

  You know, thrillers are hot. Why not write a thriller? Or at least a mystery?

  Sweetheart (I hate it when she calls me sweetheart) no one wants to read a book about a depressed old man. Or a passive-aggressive mother. Why not write a book with a strong female protagonist, for a change? You know, a superheroine. Someone less . . . I don’t know . . . victimy?

  Under the guise of being helpful, or honest, my censor is like a guided missile aiming at every nook and cranny where I am at my weakest and most vulnerable. She will stoop and connive. All she wants to do is stop me from entering that sacred space from which the work springs. She is at her most insidious when I am at the beginning, because she knows that once I have begun, she will lose her power over me. And so I dip my toe into the stream. I feel the rush of words there. Words that are like a thousand silvery minnows, below the surface, rushing by. If I don’t capture them, they will be lost.

  CORNER

  Start small. If you try to think about all of it at once—the world you hope to capture on the page, everything you know, every idea you’ve ever had, each person you’ve met, and the panoply of feelings coursing through you like a river—you’ll be overcome with paralysis. Who wouldn’t be? Just the way we put one foot in front of the other as we get out of bed, the way we brush our teeth, splash water on our faces, feed our animals if we have animals, and our children if we have them, measure the coffee, put on the kettle, we need to approach our writing one step at a time. It’s impossible to evoke an entire world at the start. But it is possible to describe a crack in the sidewalk, the scuffed heel of a shoe. And that sidewalk crack or scuffed heel can be the point of entry, like a pinhole of light, to a story, a character, a universe.

  Think of a jigsaw puzzle—one of those vexingly complicated puzzles that comes in a big box. Almost every family rec room has, at one point or another, seen one of these puzzles, spilled from its box, hundreds of pieces strewn across the floor. It starts out as a fun rainy day activity and—unless the family members are both freakishly patient and spacially gifted—there it will stay, gathering dust until, finally, someone sweeps all the puzzle pieces back into the box and retires it to the far reaches of a cupboard, never to be seen again. Too many colors and shapes! Too many possibilities! Where to even begin?

  This is the writer’s mind when embarking on a piece of work. We sit perched in front of our laptop screen, or our spiral-bound notebook, or giant desktop monitor, and—we freeze. After all, it’s so important, isn’t it, where we start? Don’t we need a plan? Hadn’t we better know where we’re going? The stakes feel impossibly high. We’re convinced that first word will dictate every word that follows. We are tyrannized by our options. All sorts of voices scream in our heads. First person or third? Present tense or past? The span of five minutes? Or two hundred years? What the hell are we doing? We don’t know.

  Build a corner. This is what people who are good at puzzles do. They ignore the heap of colors and shapes and simply look for straight edges. They focus on piecing together one tiny corner. Every book, story, and essay begins with a single word. Then a sentence. Then a paragraph. These words, sentences, paragraphs may well end up not being the actual beginning. You can’t know that now. Straining to know the whole of the story before you set out is a bit like imagining great-grandchildren on a first date. But you can start with the smallest detail. Give us the gravel scattering along the highway as the pickup truck roars past. The crumb of food the wife wipes from her husband’s beard. The ripped bottom of a girl’s faded jeans. Anchor yourself somewhere—anywhere—on the page. You are committing, yes—but the commitment is to this tiny corner. One word. One image. One detail. Go ahead. Then see what happens next.

  A SHORT BAD BOOK

  One of my dearest friends began her last novel—one that went on to become a prizewinning best-seller—by telling herself that she was going to write a short, bad book. For a long time, she talked about the short, bad book she was writing. And she believed it. It released her from her fear of failure. It’s a beautiful strategy. Anyone can write a short, bad book, right?

  A while back, I was looking through a file on my computer in which I keep drafts of all my essays and stories and book reviews, and I realized that each one of these dozens of pieces had begun with the same phrase rolling through my head: here goes nothing. It’s my version of telling myself that I’m going to write a short, bad book. Here goes nothing. The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who’s going to read it, what they’re going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page.

  My son Jacob is in a rock band. When he starts learning a new song, he likes to spend a lot of time printing out the sheet music, getting it to look just right before he puts it in his binder. Then, he thinks about the YouTube video he wants to make, the record label who will sign them. All this, before he’s learned to play the thing. I know this feeling well, this fantasy, these dreams of glory. I smile at them in my son, who, after all, is twelve and doing exactly what twelve-year-olds should be doing: trying on different identities for size. But I try to eliminate them in myself.

  Years ago, I received my first big assignment from The New Yorker. On the checklist of dreams I pretended not to have, this was at the top. Now I had the chance. I had a contract for one of those “Personal History” pieces. A deadline. The story, which was an investigation into a family secret—an early, tragic marriage of my late father—was rich and sad and beautiful, and I wanted to do it justice. In the days and weeks after landing the assignment, I sat down each morning to write, and nothing happened. As I sat at my desk on West Ninety-second Street in Manhattan, instead of making the journalistic and imaginative leap into the world of Brooklyn circa 1948, I pictured my story in the pages of The New Yorker. What would it look like in New Yorker font? Would it have an illustration? What would the illustration be? Maybe they’d want an old picture of my dad. I made sure I had several of these around, should the photo department call.

  I couldn’t write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing. Most published writers will tell you that the moment they hold the book, or the prestigious magazine piece, or the good review, or the whatever in their hands—that moment is curiously hollow. It can’t live up to the sweat, the solitude, the bloody battle that it represents.

  I did eventually tire of my fantasies of being published in The New Yorker, and just got down to work. I set my alarm clock for a predawn hour and stumbled straight from bed to desk in an attempt to short-circuit the cocktail party chatter in my head, which went something like: Oh, did you read . . . Yes, brilliant . . . and a National Magazine Award to boot, and started with one word, and then another, then another, until I had a sentence. Here goes nothing. Eventually, I had pages. They were imperfect, maybe even bad, but I had begun. And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark
.

  A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

  It doesn’t really matter what or where it is, as long as it is yours. I don’t necessarily mean that it has to belong to you. Only that, for the time that you’re working, you have what you need. Learning what you need to do your best work is a big step forward in the life of any writer. We all have different requirements, different ways of working. I have a friend who likes to write on the subway. She will board the F train just to get work done. The jostle and cacophony—she finds it clears her mind. Me? You’d have to shoot me first. For one, I’m a wee bit claustrophobic. Also, I need solitude and silence. I have friends who work best in coffee shops, others who like to work in the same room as their partners. Friends who have written multiple books at their kitchen tables. Marcel Proust famously wrote in bed, and so did Wendy Wasserstein. Gay Talese, the son of an Italian tailor, dresses in a custom-made suit each morning and descends the stairs to his basement study. Hemingway wrote standing up. One writer I know works best late at night, a habit left over from the years when she had young children under her roof and those were the only hours that were hers alone.

  As I write these words, I am sitting in a small chair upholstered in a blue-and-white checkered pattern, my feet resting on an ottoman. I am in a guest bedroom in a large and empty house that belongs to a friend. My own home just a few miles away is uninhabitable because of a freak autumn blizzard that caused a loss of power all over New England. For the past couple of days I have burrowed into this chair and haven’t moved for hours. I learned to make myself a cappuccino—caffeine being one of my requirements—using my friend’s machine. I’ve worked well in this blue-and-white checkered chair. In this strange time-out-of-time, while my son has been sledding with friends and my husband has been driving around helping marooned motorists, I have been here in the silence, save for the hum of the generator. No one knows where I am. The Internet is down. The phone won’t ring. There is no laundry to do, no rearranging of the spice drawer. And so this guest room in a borrowed home has become my room of my own.

  We writers spend our days making something out of nothing. There is the blank page (or screen) and then there is the fraught and magical process of putting words down on that page. There is no shape, no blueprint until one emerges from the page, as if through a mist. Is it a mirage? Is it real? We can’t know. And so we need a sense of structure around us. These four walls. This cup. The wheels of the train beneath us. This borrowed room. The weight of this particular pen. Whatever it is that makes us feel secure in our physical space allows us to make the leap, hoping that the page will catch us. Writing, after all, is an act of faith. We must believe, without the slightest evidence that believing will get us anywhere.

  Recently I was wandering through one of my favorite stores in a town near my home, and I saw a chaise longue. It wasn’t just any chaise longue, it was the perfect chaise longue, the one I had been dreaming of, the one I hadn’t even known existed. Delicate yet sturdy, covered in an antique Tibetan blanket . . . oh, how I wanted it. It wasn’t cheap, and I’m not in the habit of buying furniture on impulse, or really at all. I took a photo of the chaise with my phone, and occasionally, in the days that followed, I’d sneak a peek. I went back to the store often enough that the saleswoman asked me if I was coming to visit my chair. Finally, I plunked down my credit card, feeling slightly sick to my stomach. There are a lot of things we need in our home more than a chaise longue covered by an antique Tibetan blanket. A generator, for instance. But I had to have it, and here’s why: although I have an office in my home, it had grown stale. My desk was piled high with papers, mail, and various forms that had nothing to do with my writing life. My office had begun to feel like a prison rather than a sanctuary. It’s walls no longer supported me and the view out my window might as well have been of a brick wall rather than a lovely meadow. I needed a change. I knew I would write well, that I would curl up and read well, in that chaise longue. I would settle myself on that soft Tibetan blanket, my notebook in my lap, books strewn all around me. Safe and secure in that space, I’d dare to dig for the elusive words.

  In my yoga practice, I have been taught to begin in mountain pose. Mountain pose—standing with feet slightly apart, with head, neck, and pelvis in alignment, eyes softly focused, face relaxed—is a grounding pose. Until we can feel the ground beneath our feet, supporting us, we cannot attempt the other poses: eagle, dancer, warrior. We need to be rooted before we can fly. And although those other poses might look more challenging, sometimes it feels as if mountain pose is the most challenging of all. To be still. To be grounded. To claim one’s place in the world.

  TRACTION

  In our New Jersey neighborhood when I was young, a family called the Adlers lived a few blocks away. If you can have a crush not just on one person but on an entire family, I had one on the Adlers. The father, mother, two sons and daughter seemed to be everything my small family was not. Their house was alive with comings and goings. Cars and bicycles filled their driveway. They always had visitors for weekend lunch, and dined outdoors in warm weather, the sound of their easy conversation drifting through the hedges that separated their backyard from the street. They were content with each other—a family who sought out the company only of itself.

  Most Sundays, I would ride my bike in circles around their block until one of them would notice me and wave me over. The kids were all older than me, and they took me in, sort of the way you’d take in a cute but needy stray cat. I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they would gently tease me. Harvey and Eddie Adler would tell me that they’d wait for me and marry me some day. They were both in medical school, and on weekends they’d bring home girlfriends—beautiful, sophisticated, long-haired young women who wore stacked-heel boots and dangling earrings, who were in law school or did social work or advertising. I wanted to be them. I wanted to skip my teenage years entirely and leapfrog into adulthood. I wanted out of my parents’ quiet house and the feeling I couldn’t shake that something was very wrong.

  Sorrow had by then taken up a permanent place in our home. My father injured his back and underwent spinal-fusion surgery, which at the time was quite dangerous. Now I understand the chronic pain that would have driven a man to sign up for an operation that carried with it a real risk of paralysis. But back then, I watched my father fade into an angry, rigid, stricken figure who hung in traction from the door of our den, the folds of his neck squished around his face by a brace, watching Hogan’s Heroes. I didn’t know about the failures, both real and self-perceived, that had become too much for him to bear. I didn’t know about the Valium and codeine that he had begun to abuse. I didn’t know anything about my parents’ marriage except that a brittleness existed between them, the air so dry that it seemed always ready to ignite.

  It would be twenty more years before I would get the assignment from The New Yorker and, through the writing of it, begin to understand. I exhumed the ghost of my father’s early marriage to a young woman who was dying of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as she walked down the aisle. A woman whose name had never been uttered in our home but who was later described to me, by relatives and friends I interviewed, as the love of his life. As a writer, I assembled and arranged the pieces of my grieving young father on the page until they became a portrait—true to memory, reporting, imagination. A collage and an elegy.

  All I knew then, with the canny survival instincts of a teenager, was that the Adler house was way more fun than ours. Harvey and Eddie played tennis with me, and on another neighbor’s court I became a strong player, slamming the ball boy-style, low over the net, but mostly I was eyeing Eddie’s thighs, his blond hair glistening in the sun. That tennis court, those young medical students, their noblesse oblige willingness to call me into their midst—those were the hours in which it seemed a door opened to a brighter, easier, happier future. Who knew? Maybe Eddie would wait for me.

  The year I turned sixteen, the youngest Adler, a dark, wild beauty named Joyce, was found lying unc
onscious on the floor of her college dormitory room. She’d had a stroke—a freak aneurysm—from which she never recovered. She and I hadn’t been close—I was an interloper, she tolerated me—but I had admired and envied her for what I imagined to be her perfect life. The first time I went to visit her, at a rehabilitation center in New Jersey, she was propped in a wheelchair, her eyes unfocused, her face contorted. She remained quadriplegic and unable to speak, but fully conscious, for the next twenty years until she died. This was my awakening. Randomness, suddenness, the fickle nature of good fortune. These drilled themselves into me, and eventually became the themes central to all of my work. I started sleeping with Eddie Adler when I was seventeen, and he very quickly broke my heart. Things are not what they seem. The Adler parents were never again able to look at me without thinking: Why not you? My father, pale and wincing in pain. A lazy Susan in the center of our kitchen table, slowly filling with narcotics. My mother, who hadn’t paid attention to her wedding vows. For better or for worse.

  From the chaise longue, the subway seat, the borrowed room, we see: a man hanging in traction, his angry wife, the strong, tanned thighs of a callow medical student, a beautiful, ruined girl. We see: a still and silent house, a bicycle circling, a girl who is lost, who is confused by all she sees, for which she doesn’t have language. She will grow up to find the language. Finding the language. It’s what we can hope for.

  SHIMMER

  Ann Sexton once remarked in an interview, when asked why she wrote such dark and painful poems, that pain engraves a deeper memory. Pain engraves a deeper memory. Think of a time in your own life when you have experienced a sudden shock, a betrayal, terrible news. Perhaps you remember the weather, the quality of the breeze, a half-full ashtray, a scratch on the wooden floor, the moth-eaten sweater you were wearing, the siren in the distance. Pain carves details into us, yes. I would wager, though, that great joy does as well. Strong emotion, Virginia Woolf said, must leave its trace. Start writing, grow still and quiet, press toward that strong emotion and you will discover it anew. The Adlers were the first of a particular kind of hurt for me. And so they stayed alive inside of me. They are alive still.