Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  Remember, as you begin, that you are in a remote and exotic place—the literary equivalent of far eastern Bhutan. It’s a place where no one can find you. Where anything is possible. Where, for a time, you are free, liberated from the expectations and ideas of others. You are trekking, and the vistas are infinite. This freedom is necessary whether you’re working on your first book or your tenth. In order to create a world on the page, you need to push away from the world around you. You must forget its expectations and constraints.

  The time when you’re working on a first book is when the darkness is at its purest and most precious. Someday you may look back on it with longing. No one has yet pinned you to a tradition, told you who you are. You can’t troll the Internet for reviews or commentary about yourself. In the dark, you are free to grow like a moon flower, to experiment without consequences. There are no limits, no definitions. What are your obsessions? In what recesses of your psyche will you find your voice? What rules can you break? Where is the edge and how can you form your work against it? It’s all ahead of you, and this time in the dark will allow you to find out.

  I have spent my writing life trying to get back to the feeling I had in that room in New York City more than twenty years ago. I find it, then lose it, then find it again. I’m a cave dweller, thriving in the most secluded of regions, but I also have a family, students, friends, responsibilities. And so I have tricks and tools. We all do. We shut off the Internet, turn off our phones. We compare brands of earplugs. We pack ourselves off to cabins hidden in the woods. I remember a time when, suddenly, reviews of my work began with a paragraph about the kinds of books I write. I seemed to have reached some sort of midcareer retrospective without having any idea how I’d gotten there. I discovered that I didn’t want to know how I was being perceived. When I’m alone in my writing room, I don’t want to be thinking about what kind of writer I am. What do “they” think are my strengths, my weaknesses? What are my “themes”? In a dark, quiet space, the world recedes.

  There is only one opportunity to write in complete darkness: when you’re at the beginning. Use it. Use it well. The loneliest day in the life of a published writer may be publication day. Nothing happens. Perhaps your editor sends flowers. Maybe not. Maybe your family takes you out for dinner. But the world won’t stop to take notice. The universe is indifferent. You have put the shape of your soul between the covers of a book and no one declares a national holiday. Someone named Booklover gives you a one-star review on Amazon.com.

  So what is it about writing that makes it—for some of us—as necessary as breathing? It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. Time slips away. The body becomes irrelevant. We are as close to consciousness itself as we will ever be. This begins in the darkness. Beneath the frozen ground, buried deep below anything we can see, something may be taking root. Stay there, if you can. Don’t resist. Don’t force it, but don’t run away. Endure. Be patient. The rewards cannot be measured. Not now. But whatever happens, any writer will tell you: This is the best part.

  “You climb a long ladder until you can see over the roof, or over the clouds. You are writing a book. You watch your shod feet step on each round rung, one at a time; you do not hurry and do not rest.”

  —ANNIE DILLARD

  BUILDING THE BOAT

  I was in the middle of my second novel and struggling. Instead of engagement, I felt a nagging worry. Had I lost my way? Maybe I had taken a wrong turn—but where? One afternoon, I met a friend of mine, a poet and novelist, for coffee.

  “I feel like I’m in a boat in the middle of the ocean and there’s no land in sight,” I told him.

  He took a sip of his drink and peered at me over his glasses.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And you’re building the boat.”

  COURAGE

  John Updike once called fiction “nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented.” Engagement with this most subtle of instruments requires a daily summoning of stamina, optimism, discipline, and hope. We are in the ocean, yes. We are constructing the very thing that holds us. We have nothing to latch on to. If beginnings and ends are shorelines, middles are where we dive deep, where we patch holes, where we risk drowning. This is no time for half measures. We must meet the page with everything we’ve got. We must lay every last bit of ourselves on the line, to, in the words of Annie Dillard, “spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.”

  You might think this requires fearlessness. I used to think so, too, which was a problem because I am anything but fearless. Shellfish, bees, thunderstorms, airplanes, snakes, bears, random allergic reactions, black ice are only a few of my phobias. I am not a risk taker, not in the physical sense. You won’t catch me hang gliding, or even waterskiing. But when I’m alone in a room—say, on the chaise longue, from which I haven’t budged since my first cup of coffee, the sky an overcast gray, the house empty—I am compelled to take risks. Because there’s no point, really, in spending one’s life alone in a room, out of rhythm with the rest of humanity, unless the stakes are high. What will today bring? I hold my breath, dive down. Come to the surface, gasping, empty-handed. I catch my breath, then dive again. Maybe this time. I reach for treasures in this underwater landscape. Ones that only I can see. Ones that, should I discover them, will be mine and mine alone. I suppose this requires a certain kind of courage. But courage and fearlessness are not the same thing. Courage is all about feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

  Who would sign up for such a life? Most days it feels like lunacy. Sometimes it occurs to me that not everyone in the world spends their time in this manner. That it probably isn’t healthy. I have a lot of friends who are writers, and I think we recognize in each other a slight shell-shocked, glazed-over quality, a sensitivity—possibly covered up by humor or defensiveness or a few drinks—that comes from our daily grappling with the page, that subtle instrument of self-examination. My husband used to be a foreign correspondent, and when he gets together with other foreign correspondents, inevitably conversation turns to a particular bar in Nairobi, or a street battle in Mogadishu, or the merits of a particular bodyguard. They speak a language only they understand. The same is true with my writer friends. How’s it going? The question is proffered delicately. What are you working on? We watch one another keenly, like soldiers keeping an eye out for one another on the battlefield. Are we holding it together? Are we growing? Are we forging new ground? Or have we succumbed to fear? Are we using irony as a defense? Or falling into self-parody? Have we become too clever, too cynical, too sentimental?

  Unlike other artists—dancers, sculptors, or cellists, say—as long as we hold onto our faculties, writers can continue to grow creatively until we die. The middle of a writing life is much like being in the midst of a book itself. Here we often discover our weaknesses and our strengths. Here we are in the hard, hard work of articulating the story itself. And, just as our lives are shaped by moments, hours, and the passing of days, stories are shaped by sentences. By movements of characters through time. By the quiet tenacity with which we enter the stepping stone of each word.

  This kind of tenacity is not a static state, an exotic destination to which you travel and then cross off the list. Each and every day that you approach the page, you are reaching for it once again. At times, it will elude you. At times, it will seem to have abandoned you. But in the face of this, be persistent, dogged, patient, determined. Remember that this moment, this day, is one stitch in a tapestry of days. Remember that you cannot—should not—see the shape unfolding before you. Spend it all anyway. Gamble with your whole self.

  MUSES

  Though it defied the natural order of things, I always believed my mother would outlive me. After my father’s death, even the smallest exchange between us exploded into a battle of wills. It seemed there was only room in this wor
ld for one of us—and when it came to survival, she was the stronger, tougher one. On the dedication page of my first memoir, Slow Motion—though my mother was barely speaking to me at the time of its publication—I wrote that she had taught me something about survival. Faint praise? That I am here—on the chaise longue, in the house on the hill, my son at school, my husband at his writing office in the village down the road, the dogs, yes, the dogs, asleep at my feet, their bones making a deeply comforting thunk as they sink to the floor—the very fact that I am here—my computer balanced on my lap, the half-finished cappuccino, the midlife reading glasses pinching my nose, the pile of galleys and student work to be read on the table next to me—that I am here writing, and my mother is dead, continues to amaze me.

  It was just the two of us. She demanded loyalty, which effectively meant distancing myself from the rest of my family, with whom she didn’t get along. After six months in rehab, she recovered from her injuries and I moved her into a rental apartment on West End Avenue in New York City, just a few blocks from where I lived. She remained on the Upper West Side—in various apartments on Riverside Drive, and later, on West Eighty-sixth Street—until she died eighteen years later. Still, today, when I am in that neighborhood, I see an elderly woman. She’s being pushed by an aide in a wheelchair, or she’s using a cane, or she’s striding down Broadway. Something in her regal posture—the proud lift of her chin, her chic bouclé jacket—reminds me of my mother and for an instant I think that it’s all been a mistake. She’s not dead after all. She fooled us—the coroner, the funeral parlor, my husband who identified her body—and she’s returned to haunt me. She’s at Zabar’s, picking up some French Roast. She’s sitting outside Le Pain Quotidien on a warm spring day, in a dark coat and sunglasses. For years after she died, when the phone rang I still checked the caller ID, screening for her name.

  Shapiro writes about matriarchy.

  Shapiro writes about mothers and daughters.

  About estrangement.

  About the complexity of familial love.

  My mother can be found in most of my work. I have written countless essays and stories in which she figures, directly or indirectly. She once tracked me down in a beauty salon in New York City where I was getting a bikini wax. I had been avoiding my mother—and she burst through the door to confront me. A short story eventually emerged from that moment. How could it not? She has been—more than any other person in my life—my muse. It has been said that the blessing is next to the wound. All my life, I have attempted to peel back the layers. I do so not out of anger, or recrimination, or revenge, but rather, in the hope—tears are in my eyes as I write this—that under all those layers I will find something tender and genuine, something I can hold in my hands like a fragile baby bird. There, there, I will whisper if I ever locate it. We didn’t do such a good job of this. Let’s try again.

  TRUST

  At some point, it becomes impossible to see our own work clearly. We’ve gone over our sentences so many times that their very meaning begins to break apart and become just squiggles and lines on the page. We’ve worked for so many months on a draft that we now have it committed to memory, and it seems carved in stone. Immutable. Irrevocable. We no longer see clunky language or typos. Why are so many characters wearing bathrobes? Or clearing their throats? Or eating pasta?

  We all need outside readers. Each one of us benefits from a fresh set of eyes. But how do we know when we’ve reached this point? Some writers only show their work when they’ve finished multiple drafts of it. Others share on a regular basis with a trusted reader. My husband Michael is my first reader, and most evenings I read him a bit of what I’m working on. The most I’ll ever get out of him in the way of praise is a long pause, followed by “good,” or the rare “that was really fucking great.” Most of the time, he has notes for me. These notes can range from comments about word choice, to issues with the structure, or concerns about cloudy logic. Sometimes I bristle—but usually I come around. The main thing is, I know he wants me to write the best book I possibly can. We’re in this together. And he possesses none of the characteristics that are to be avoided when thinking of considering early readers for your work: envy. Indifference. Comparison. Laziness. Dishonesty. Lousy bedside manner. Secret agenda. Rudeness. Hostility. Poor boundaries. False enthusiasm. Lack of discernment. Inattentiveness. Distractibility. Did I mention envy?

  We’re so vulnerable when we share new work. I once had a student who was unfazed speaking in front of huge audiences for her job as a CEO. But the first time she read a piece of her memoir aloud in my small private workshop, her voice shook, her hands trembled, and her eyes welled up. So much is on the line. We’ve revealed ourselves on these fledgling pages. The unconsidered response can be devastating. I have had wonderful readers over the years, and destructive ones. Once I made the mistake of showing a piece of a novel to a colleague too early, and her comments—while meant to be helpful and supportive—were so off the mark that they derailed me. I’ve also made the mistake of giving pages of a new piece to a writer who was unaccustomed to being in that position, and who treated them in a cavalier manner (she glanced at them and called me from her cell phone while at a hair salon), which both hurt and offended me.

  I remember the first time I left my infant in the arms of a friend to run across the street to buy diapers. She was about to be a mother herself, had nieces and nephews—she knew her way around babies—but still, entrusting my weeks-old infant to her for ten minutes felt nearly impossible. It can feel the same with a manuscript. It’s your baby, after all. So choose your early readers wisely. Think about your reasons for sharing. Examine your own motives. Why now? Are you ready? Or are you just trying to impress someone? Do you want to be told that you’re a genius? (I once slogged through eight hundred pages of a friend’s first draft, then discovered that he had been anticipating only praise. When I told him that there were far too many female characters on their knees performing mind-blowing oral sex, our conversation was over, and the friendship unfathomably lost.)

  Ask yourself: Why this person? Will she treat my manuscript with respect? Read it with close attention? If you find one or two genuinely helpful readers—ones who are able to speak with you about your work in a way that helps you—consider yourself lucky. Return the favor whenever you can. When we apply what we know to the manuscript pages of a friend, when we do our best to understand what the writer hopes to accomplish, we are completing the circle. We do this for each other because there is precious little we can do for each other. We’re alone in our rooms, in our heads. But we can reach out a hand. Who better than us? After all, we’ve been there, too.

  RHYTHM

  Three pages a day, five days a week. When working on a book, this has been my pattern for my entire writing life. I spend most mornings writing my three pages, and I revisit them in the afternoon. I scribble in the margins, thoughts about edits, word choices. Sometimes I reread them before I go to sleep. I cross out paragraphs, I rearrange sentences. I ask questions that I hope to answer in the light of the next day. These pages are where I begin the following morning, because those notes give me a way in. If I begin by implementing the changes, before I know it I’m back inside the manuscript, already at work. I’ve evaded the pitfalls and distractions that often lie in wait for me.

  Some writers count words. Others fill a certain number of pages, longhand, have a set number of hours they spend at their desk. It doesn’t matter what the deal is that you strike with yourself, as long as you keep up your end of it, that you establish a working routine for yourself, a rhythm. I prefer to think of it as rhythm rather than discipline. Discipline calls to my mind a taskmaster, perhaps wielding a whip. Discipline has a whiff of punishment to it, or at least the need to cross something off a list, the way my son Jacob does with his homework. (Big sigh. Got it done.) Rhythm, however, is a gentle aligning, a comforting pattern in our day that we know sets us up ideally for our work.

  Three pages a day, five days
a week. Do the math. I do, all the time. Fifteen pages a week. Sixty pages a month! A novel-length manuscript in half a year! Let me stop you right there. I have never written a novel-length manuscript in half a year. In fact, two years would be fast for me, and usually it’s closer to three years, or more. So what has happened to my well-established rhythm?

  I’ll tell you what happens: it fails, it falls apart, it gets interrupted. William Styron once referred to this quandary as the “the fleas of life.” He went on to say that “writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word—life.” The dog has a vet appointment; the school play is being performed at noon; it’s flu season, a snow day; who knew there were so many long weekends? The roof springs a leak; the neighbor’s house is under construction; a friend calls in a crisis. Life doesn’t pause to make room for our precious writing time. Life stops for nothing, and we make accommodations. There is no stasis, no normal, no such thing as a regular day; only this attempt to create a methodology. Having a rhythm is no magic pill. Without a doubt, we will be pulled away. At times we will be frustrated and unproductive. But if we have our one way of working—a number of pages, or hours, or words—we will eventually return to it. This return won’t be easy. The page is indifferent to us—no, worse. The page turns from us like a wounded lover. We will have to win it over, coax it out of hiding. Promise to do better next time. Apologize for our disregard. And then, we settle into the pattern that we know. Three pages. Two hours. A thousand words. We have wandered and now we are back. There is comfort in the familiar. We can do this. Breathe in, breathe out. Once again, just as we’ve been doing all along.