Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  These traces that live within us often lead us to our stories. Joan Didion called this a shimmer around the edges. Emerson called it a gleam. “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,” he wrote in his great essay, “On Self Reliance.” “Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.” Because it is his. That knowledge, that ping, the hair on our arms standing up, that sudden, electric sense of knowing. We must learn to watch for these moments. To not discount them. To take note: I’ll have to write about this. It can happen in a split second, or as a slow dawning. It happens when our histories collide with the present. When it arrives, it’s unmistakable, indelible. It comes with the certainty of its own rightness. When I first met my husband, at a Halloween party, I thought: There you are. It’s a bit like that with our subject matter. We don’t walk around trolling for ideas like people on beaches with those funny little machines, panning for coins; we don’t go looking on the equivalent of match.com in search of Emerson’s gleam. But when we stumble upon it, we know. We know because it shimmers. And if you are a writer, you will find that you won’t give up that shimmer for anything. You live for it. Like falling in love, moments that announce themselves as your subject are rare, and there’s a magic to them. Ignore them at your own peril.

  PERMISSION

  If you’re waiting for the green light, the go-ahead, the reassuring wand to tap your shoulder and anoint you as a writer, you’d better pull out your thermos and folding chair because you’re going to be waiting for a good long while. Accountants go to business school and when they graduate with their degrees, they don’t ask themselves whether they have permission to do people’s taxes. Lawyers pass the bar, medical students become doctors, academics become professors, all without considering whether or not they have a right to be going to work. But nothing and no one gives us permission to wake up and sit at home staring at a computer screen while everybody else sets their alarm clocks, puts on reasonable attire, and boards the train. No one is counting on us, or waiting for whatever we produce. People look at us funny, very possibly because we look funny, strange, and out of sync with the rest of the world after spending our days alone in our bathrobes, talking only to our household pets, if at all. I can’t imagine what my UPS delivery guy thinks when I crack open the door to sign for a package. There’s that weird lady again. My husband, who has been a successful journalist and screenwriter for most of his adult life, was in his forties before his father stopped asking him when he was going to get a real job.

  Sure, there are advanced degrees in writing and various signifiers that a career might be under way, but ultimately a writer is someone who writes. And a writer who writes is one who finds a way to give herself permission. The advanced degree is useless in this regard. No writer I know wakes up in the morning and, while brushing her teeth, thinks: Check me out, I have an MFA. Or, for that matter, I’ve published x number of books, or even, I’ve won the Pulitzer Prize. There is no magical place of arrival. There is only the solitary self facing the page.

  It’s strange and challenging, glorious and devastating, this business of being a writer. Every day, a new indignity. The rejection is without end. Almost any short story you ever see published in The Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s has been rejected first by The New Yorker. Press many of us—including those you’d think might have moved beyond this—and you will discover that we can quote you the most painful passages from our worst reviews. We can give you a list of critics who are dismissive of our work. We’ll tell you which judge on what academic committee blackballed us. On some mornings, these rejections, reviews, enemies seem to stand between us and our work like a mutant army. Who are you to give yourself permission to write? They seem to shout. We writers are a thin-skinned, anxious lot, and often feel like we’re getting away with something, that we’re going to be revealed, at any moment, as the frauds we really are.

  Whether you are a writer just mustering up the nerve to sign up for your first weekend workshop, or filling out your MFA applications, or one gazing moodily out from a big poster in the window of your local Barnes & Noble, you are far from alone in this business of granting yourself the permission to do your work. Masters of the form quake before the page. They often feel hopeless and despairing. They may also fall prey to petty musings. They have days in which they simply can’t get out of their own way.

  But when we give ourselves permission, we move past this. The world once again reveals itself to us. We become open and aware, patient and ready to receive it. We doesn’t ask why that particular slant of sunlight, snippet of dialogue, old couple walking along the road hand-in-hand seems to evoke an entire world. We give ourselves permission because we are the only ones who can do so. There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.

  READING

  On my desk, propped between two Buddha-head bookends, are my most essential books. Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, and Thomas Merton’s Thoughts In Solitude are always in this small grouping. For several years, I kept Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Alice Munro’s Runaway close by as well, because they were two contemporary works that, when I read them back-to-back, unlocked the mystery of close third person narration. Right now, in a pile next to my chaise longue, are this year’s editions of The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays, just so I always have something to dip into.

  When I meet someone who wants to be a writer, and yet doesn’t read much, I wonder how that works. What would provide you with nourishment, with inspiration? I’m focused on my own writing, students sometimes say. I don’t have time to read. Or they tell me they’re afraid of being influenced, as if they might catch the voice of another writer like a virulent strain of flu. But reading good prose is influence. When my son was little, he used to imitate Johnny Damon’s batting stance, or Roger Federer’s topspin forehand. In this way, he began to learn how to play. When we follow the intricate loops of a Pynchon sentence, or pause in the white-space minimalism of Carver, we are seeing what is possible, and we bring that sense of possibility to the page.

  Reading is also camaraderie. It is a challenge, a balm, a beacon. “Who would call a day spent reading a good day?” asks Annie Dillard. “But a life spent reading—that is a good life.” I try (most of the time I fail, but still, I try) to begin my day reading. And by this I do not mean The New York Times online, or the Vanity Fair lying on the kitchen table, or the e-mails that have accumulated overnight, and which I open at my own risk. The roulette of the in-box! An enticing invitation to a private online sale of gourmet Himalayan sea salt, a high school nemesis emerging from the ether—whatever it is, it’s the opposite of reading. It pulls you away, instead of directing you inward.

  Fill your ears with the music of good sentences, and when you finally approach the page yourself, that music will carry you. It will remind you that you are a part of a vast symphony of writers, that you are not alone in your quest to lay down words, each one bumping against the next until something new is revealed. It will exhort you to do better. To not settle for just good enough. Reading great work is exhilarating. It shows us what’s possible. When I start the morning with any one of the dozens of books in rotation on my office floor, my day is made instantly better, brighter. I never regret having done it. Think about it: have you ever spent an hour reading a good book, and then had that sinking, queasy feeling of having wasted time?

  TOEHOLD

  For some writers, it’s a character. For others, it’s place. And for still others, it’s plot, or a snippet of dialogue. What’s our way into the story? When do we have enough to begin? If we’re climbing a mountain, we need something to grab on to. We wedge our foot into a crevice in the rock and pull ours
elves up. We are feeling our way in the dark.

  We have nothing to go by, but still, we must begin. It requires chutzpah—the Yiddish word for that ineffable combination of courage and hubris—to put down one word, then another, perhaps even accumulate a couple of flimsy pages, so few that they don’t even form the smallest of piles, and call it the beginning of a novel. Or memoir. Or story. Or anything, really, other than a couple of flimsy pages.

  When I’m between books, I feel as if I will never have another story to tell. The last book has wiped me out, has taken everything from me, everything I understand and feel and know and remember, and . . . that’s it. There’s nothing left. A low-level depression sets in. The world hides its gifts from me. It has taken me years to realize that this feeling, the one of the well being empty, is as it should be. It means I’ve spent everything. And so I must begin again.

  I wait.

  I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was “not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life.” Colette’s words, along with those of a few others, have migrated from one of my notebooks to another for over twenty years now. It’s wisdom I need to remember—wisdom that is so easy to forget.

  A number of years ago, I was in the midst of this waiting, and was growing impatient, despondent. This time, I was convinced, was different. This time, I really had nothing. The well was never going to fill up again. This kind of thinking usually leads me to ruminate about applying to medical school, and then I rapidly come to the conclusion that I’m too old, and can’t even help my son with sixth grade math. I had the faintest hint of a new idea, but it was not something that felt alive inside of me. I felt no spark, saw no shimmer. The idea—and I knew enough to beware of free-floating ideas—had to do with a daughter who was estranged from her mother. The mother still lived in the small rural town, in the same house where the daughter had been raised, and now she was dying, so the daughter was forced to return to the place of her childhood.

  Yeah, I know. Sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? A variation on a theme of books we’ve all read. The daughter wasn’t clear to me. The town was abstract, and I didn’t even feel like writing a novel set in a small town. I had just done that. I had no sense of the nature of the estrangement. I went on like this for months—doing nothing, until one day, I was driving to New York City with my husband. It’s nearly a two-hour drive from our house to the city, one which we do often. Michael was driving and I was looking out the window at the blur of the familiar landscape, when suddenly the entire novel came to me in a rush.

  The story didn’t take place in a small town, I realized. The mother lived in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side. In fact, she lived in the Apthorp, a building at Seventy-ninth Street and Broadway. On the twelfth floor. In a rent-stabilized apartment that she had bought when the building went condo. Her name was Ruth Dunne. She was a famous photographer who had taken provocative photographs of her daughter as a child. For years, I had been fascinated by Sally Mann, well-known for a series of controversial photographs of her children. I had wondered what had happened to the children, particularly the oldest daughter—what must it have been like to be her mother’s muse?—but Sally Mann had never shimmered for me before, nor had the Apthorp, a building I had walked by countless times. But suddenly, here it all was. The mother, the daughter, the estrangement.

  That was it. I had it—the toehold—my way to begin climbing the mountain. My novel, Black & White, presented itself to me during that car ride as if it had been waiting behind a curtain. Why that particular car ride on that particular day? Who knows. The easy silence between my husband and me. The familiar route. The overcast sky. It was the first time in my writing life that place had come first in defining a new piece of work. The moment I understood that the action took place in the Apthorp, the characters began to reveal themselves to me. Your way in will not always be the same. There are no rules, and you cannot force it, but you can show up every day and practice the art of waiting.

  SEEDS

  Once, while visiting Los Angeles, a friend urged me to see her healer. She wouldn’t tell me anything about how this healer practiced his craft. “Trust me. Just go,” she said. So I made an appointment. My friend was a walking advertisement for the healer; she was radiant, joyful. I was not, nor had I ever been, joyful. I had moments of contentment, but euphoria wasn’t in my emotional range. I parked my car in front of a bungalow, then pulled open a painted wooden gate and walked through lush gardens to a converted garage in back, where the healer—a tall man with flowing gray hair and lively blue eyes—explained to me that he would be plucking out the seeds of childhood sorrow and pain, so that they would no longer be sprouting tangled weeds in my adult life.

  I sat opposite him on a sofa, and answered a series of questions.

  Parents?

  Dead.

  Children?

  One.

  Married?

  Happily.

  After a little while, the healer came over to me and placed a hand on my solar plexus. “You have many beings inside of you,” he said. “Are you ready to release them?”

  I nodded, though I felt as if I was acting in a play. I focused on a painting of the Buddha sitting in a field of psychedelic flowers. The healer made slow circles just below my rib cage.

  “What was your mother like?”

  “Difficult.”

  “And your father?”

  “Kind.”

  “Your mother’s mother? Were you close?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “What did you call her?”

  “Grammy.”

  The circles got faster. The healer instructed me to lean forward and exhale forcefully, three times. And again. “There,” he said, his gaze trailing away, as if watching someone leave. “Now repeat after me: Go to the light, Grammy.”

  “Go to the light, Grammy.”

  My own voice rang in my ears.

  “Again.”

  “Go to the light, Grammy.”

  The process was repeated for my mother, my father, several aunts and uncles, and finally the healer asked if I’d had any childhood pets.

  “A dog.”

  “What kind?”

  “He was a poodle.”

  “Name?”

  Here I hesitated, embarrassed. It wasn’t even a name I had made up. I copied our neighbors, who had named their poodle first.

  “Poofy,” I reluctantly answered.

  “And you loved Poofy,” the healer said.

  Honestly, I didn’t remember feeling very fond of Poofy. He was a bit short on personality. But I reached back in my memory for that small body, that curly black bundle.

  “Good,” the healer said. He seemed to be watching Poofy trot out the door along with Grammy. “Now tell him it’s okay to go.”

  “Go to the light, Poofy,” I said. “Poofy, go to the light.”

  At the end of the hour-long session, my solar plexus was sore from all the rubbing, but I didn’t feel much else. My friend had promised that I’d feel changed, transformed. That I’d feel an infinite ease. Instead, I felt silly and a little sad. As I drove the streets of Los Angeles, I thought about my parents, my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and even Poofy. Did I want them to leave me? Did I want them to go to the light? The healer had talked about seeds. Even if those seeds could be plucked—the healer had made a pincer out of two fingers and pulled through the air—it seemed to me that they were important, and that getting rid of them might not be a good idea at all.

  Who are we without everything that’s ever happened to us? And if we are writers, how can we do our work without the grounding of our own history? Flannery O’Connor once wrote that anyone who has survived his childhood has enough material to last a lifetime. Those seeds are the material. When I am writing, when it’s going we
ll, I have traveled to the place inside of me where I can locate them. They’re very small, and not always easy to find. The way my grandmother said my full name, emphasizing the first syllable. Dan-eile. The crinkle of newspaper beneath Poofy’s feet in the kitchen. My father’s favorite piece of music: Dvorak’s New World Symphony. The shortcut through the woods to school, the canopy of trees. These are words, phrases, faces, animals, street corners, strains of music that I need to hold on to, even if they sprout tangled weeds, even if remembering them causes the sadness and inevitable pain of loss. They contain within them the whole world.

  THE BLANK PAGE

  Michelangelo saw a statue in every block of marble, “shaped and perfect in attitude and action”—an angel waiting to be released. The woodworker George Nakashima believed that when a true craftsman brought out the grain that had been imprisoned in the trunk of a tree, he “found God within.” I’ve long envied those artists who work with materials such as these—clay, marble, granite, wood—because I imagine the feeling is one of collaboration. The material itself contains the shape, the solution. It imposes limits, parameters. If the artist looks and listens carefully, the answer will be revealed: an arm, a thigh, a pattern, an angle, the drape of a robe.

  The blank page offers no such gifts. When we greet it, we are quite rightly filled with trepidation. What are you? we wonder. What will you yield to us? The page gazes impassively back. It will give us nothing. It will take everything. It isn’t interested in how we think or what we feel. It doesn’t care if we fill it with words, or if we crumple it up in despair.