Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  “Maybe I should just throw my outline out the window,” the fledgling novelist half-joked. I leapt. “Yes!” I nearly shouted into the phone, probably scaring her half to death. But then what, she wondered. Working with no signposts, no game plan is so frightening, such an anathema to most of us.

  “Do you feel connected to your main characters?” I asked.

  Yes, she told me. These characters were her whole reason for wanting to write the book. She was deeply invested in them and felt she had to tell their story.

  I gave her, then, one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, from Aristotle’s Poetics: “Action is not plot,” wrote Aristotle, “but merely the result of pathos.”

  This is not just advice about writing, but about life itself, the whole megillah, the human catastrophe. If you have people, you will have pathos. We are incited by our feelings—by the love, rage, envy, sorrow, joy, longing, fear, passion—that lead us to action. Plot is really just a fancy word for whatever happens, and structure is a fancy word for how it happens. Plot can be as intricate as a whodunit, or as simple as a character experiencing a small but significant shift in perspective. But invariably it comes from the people we create on the page.

  If you are creating something real, structure will reveal itself to you eventually. Look—there’s the vista. You lay the bricks. Moments connect. History and heritage ripple through the present. A voice emerges like a strain of music. And then—through the fog—a shape. It may not be what you expected. It may not even be what you hoped for. But it will be yours.

  CHANNEL

  Agnes de Mille, who revolutionized musical theater by choreographing the dream ballet sequence in the 1943 Broadway hit Oklahoma!, confessed to her lifelong friend Martha Graham that she found the success of Oklahoma! strange and disheartening. She preferred her earlier dances, which had largely been ignored. She didn’t think the ballet sequence was her best work by a long shot—only “fairly good.” She went on to tell Graham that she had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that she could be.

  Later, Graham told this to de Mille:

  There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not hear it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even need to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

  I have kept Martha Graham’s advice tacked to the bulletin board above my desk for the past twenty years, and have returned again and again to the ideas it contains. No satsifaction whatever at any time. I find this bracing, honest, enormously comforting. Very possibly only a writer would find the notion of no satisfaction whatever at any time enormously comforting. But I do. It reminds me that I signed up for this, after all. I signed up for a life in which my job is to do my best possible work—to keep the channel open—while detaching myself from the end result. How I feel about my own work is none of my business. “We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great,” wrote Thomas Merton. Satisfaction should not be—cannot be—the goal.

  There is tremendous creative freedom to be found in letting go of our opinions of our work, in considering the possibility that we may not be not our own best critic. As I sit here on the chaise longue in a ten-year-old ratty cardigan and my sweatpants, squinting through my reading glasses at my computer screen, as I plan the rest of my day (student work to be read, a book to review, a speech to write, a few small essays to think about) what I am struck by is the fullness of this, this writing life. My job is to do, not to judge. It is a great piece of luck, a privilege, to spend each day leaping, stumbling, leaping again. As is true of so much of life, it isn’t what I thought it would be when I was first starting out. The price is high: the tension, isolation, and lack of certitude can sometimes wear me down. But then there is the aliveness. The queer, divine dissatisfaction. The blessed unrest.

  SECOND ACTS

  My husband and his screenwriter friends often talk about what they call “the second act problem.” Another way of putting this would be the “middles” problem. Classic screenplay structure is broken into three acts. Act One builds on a brilliant premise. Act Three results in a startling conclusion. But the middle is all about the art of execution. How well do you know your characters? Do their actions reveal their interior lives? Does their behavior make emotional and psychological sense? Is the story moving forward, or bogging down? Middles demand form and consciousness. Otherwise, we risk falling into a baggy and bloated muddle of randomness.

  Just as the middle of a life requires discernment and discipline, so does the middle of a story. We take a step back, we see where we are. We think about the shape we are making. Is it intentional? Or are we being buffetted by chance? This crafting of story—the honing of the muddle in the middle—can assume many forms. The classic narrative arc—a beginning followed by a slow and steady rise, culminating in an apex that then leads gracefully to an inevitable end—is only one of many tools at our disposal. As writers, we are able to play with time. So why not? Why don’t we? We don’t have to start at the beginning. We may want to start in the middle and retrace our steps backward. Or begin at the end and tell the rest of the story as prelude.

  But we can only know this when we get there. We may make the painful discovery that our shiny premise has run out of steam. We may find out that the story we thought we were telling has changed on us in interesting and exciting ways. Whatever we find there marks the start of the real work of discovering our structure. The question of how we tell the story, how we structure the narrative so that it will tease out the inner workings of our characters’ most intimate lives, of this pathos they find themselves experiencing at this particular moment, in this particular place—this how, which might seem mechanical, a question of rudimentary craft, is anything but. The narrative choices are endless. We can choose a single point of view or multiple points of view—a solo or a chorus. We can zoom way in and tell the story through the lens of one character, or pull back, use a wide angle, create an omniscient, God-like narrator. We can create a series of stories or chapters that only connect to one another glancingly, but to great effect, the way Joan Silber does in Ideas of Heaven, or as Jennifer Egan does in A Visit From The Goon Squad, or as does Michael Cunningham, who creates an operatic narrative out of three disparate characters’ lives in The Hours.

  But there are no shortcuts. We are often further along than we like when the true nature of a piece asserts itself. We have to toss out those fishing lines, follow their arcs, and see where they land. Then we have to sit there. It will quite possibly be a good long while before we know whether we’ve landed in Idaho’s Salmon River—or in an unfortunate, mosquito-infested swamp.

  At the risk of sounding like a Dr. Seuss story (the how and the who went out to play . . .) I mean to suggest that premises are lovely but—as anyone who has written themselves straight into a wall will tell you—middles are where you have to tough things out. Ideas fall apart. All that promise vanishes when facing the cold, harsh light of making something out of it. Middles challenge us to find our tenacity and our patience, to remind ourselves that it is within this struggle—often just at the height of hopelessness, frustration, and despair—that we find the most hidden and valuable gifts of the process. Just as in life.

  ORDINARY LIFE

  An infant’s dire prognosis. A father’s sudden death. A mother’s broken bones. In a passage from Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending, a character considers t
he question of accumulation: “You put your money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack—there you just lose your original stake. But in life? Here, different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also accumulation, the multiplication of loss, of failure.”

  The two greatest shocks I have experienced—my parents’ accident and my son’s illness—ignited in me what had been an already flickering flame of awareness—some might even say a hyperawareness—that life is fragile. That bad things have happened and, without a doubt, will again. That to love anything at all is to become able to lose it. Some days, this awareness gets the better of me. Anxiety sets in. I grow impatient and controlling. Or I retreat from the world. But more often than not, this burden of accumulation feels like a gift. It has taught me that ordinary life—or what Joan Didion calls “ordinary blessings”—is what is most precious.

  We are revealed to ourselves—just as our characters are revealed to us—through our daily actions. When making my son’s breakfast, I try to focus simply on cracking the eggs, melting the butter, toasting the bread. It doesn’t get more elemental than that. As I drive down country roads taking Jacob to school, I remind myself to focus on the way the sunlight plays on the surface of a pond, the silhouettes of cows in a field. I’ve learned that it isn’t so easy to witness what is actually happening. The eggs, the cows. But my days are made up of these moments. If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen—I may just miss my life.

  When I first started out, I thought that my characters and their circumstances had to be somehow large. I wrote a novel about a famous artist. Another about a psychoanalyst who had been through a public humiliation. I loved these characters, and they were real to me. But they weren’t ordinary. When I turned to fiction again after writing my memoir Slow Motion, in the wake of Jacob’s illness, it was an ordinary family that began to play around the edges of my mind. Perhaps I had come to see that life’s greatest revelations are contained within the everyday. Virginia Woolf knew this. Her Mrs. Dalloway was a just a woman going about her business. It was her interior life that rendered Clara Dalloway extraordinary. Gustave Flaubert knew this. Emma and Charles Bovary were regular people trapped in a bind. Faulkner said that it is “the problem of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.” The illuminating of that conflict—one that resides inside every heart still beating—is itself a thing of beauty because it allows the reader to experience empathy, oneness, identification. It allows that greatest consolation of literature, which is to pierce our separateness, to show us that, in this business of being human, we are not alone.

  Marilynne Robinson, who in her novels Housekeeping and Gilead masterfully reveals the interior lives of characters who are at once ordinary and indelible, once said this in an interview with the Paris Review: “You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as ‘beauty.’ Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! Or look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.”

  It is the job of the writer to say, look at that. To point. To shine a light. But it isn’t that which is already bright and beckoning that needs our attention. We develop our sensitivity—to use John Berger’s phrase, our “ways of seeing”—in order to bear witness to what is. Our tender hopes and dreams, our joy, frailty, grief, fear, longing, desire—every human being is a landscape. The empathic imagination glimpses the woman working the cash register at a convenience store, the man coming out of the bathroom at the truck stop, the mother chasing her toddler up and down the aisle of the airplane, and knows what it sees. Look at that. This human catastrophe, this accumulation of ordinary blessings, of unbearable losses. And still, a ray of sunlight, a woman doing the wash, a carcass of beef. The life that holds us. The life we know.

  SECRETS

  When we speak of a character’s inner life, we are talking about what is thought but left unsaid. What motivates action but remains hidden—perhaps even from the character herself. Perhaps even—quite possibly even—from the writer herself, at least when first discovering the story on the page. We don’t know our characters all that well when we start out. Even if we’ve compiled complete dossiers, even if we’ve written whole family trees, still, we discover our characters’ obsessions, their secret shame, their hidden guilt, their base desires, their most private longings, as we go along. We can’t possibly know that when we begin. And so it’s in the middle—just as is true of our own lives—that we make some of our most stirring discoveries.

  In her essay on writing, “Outlaw Heart,” Jayne Anne Phillips asks the question: “Which of us become writers, and why?” If it were possible to trace the roots of any writing life back to it’s very inception, to the seeds, to the tender shoots deep within the fertile ground, we would inevitably find ourselves in the territory of childhood. If we write in order to make sense of the world around us, where else but in childhood does this need to know, to understand, take hold? Sometimes my husband and I are in the midst of a conversation in hushed tones about some grown-up matter—a friend’s divorce, a betrayal, a financial concern, another friend’s miscarriage—when suddenly our son tunes in from the other room where we had thought he was busy doing homework.

  What? He calls out to us. What are you talking about?

  Nothing, we respond.

  No, really—what?

  Grown-up stuff. And if forced, our tempers short: None of your business.

  In her essay, Phillips writes about her novel Shelter, in which the characters are children. “It has its genesis in my childhood self, not in what happened to me, but in how I thought, in the nameless implications I perceived and the echoes of those implications, heard for years. There were secrets, and somehow those secrets became my responsibility.” Phillips goes on to write that “we children who become writers evolve into a particular genus of angelic spy, absorbing information, bargaining with ourselves, banking on the possibility that we might someday intervene in the dynamics of loss, insist that sorrow will not be meaningless.”

  Whether war reportage or childhood memoir, a sprawling family saga or the slimmest and most elliptical of stories, we are that child, straining to hear. We have taken in way more than we know, more than we understand, and we write in order to find out: What’s true? What happened? How can it be? And what can be done?

  Our parents often want to shield us from their own heartaches, their own histories, for as long as they possibly can. I didn’t need to know about my mother’s first failed marriage, or my father’s loss of his beautiful young bride, or my uncle’s suicide attempt, or my aunt’s mental collapse. I didn’t need to know about them, but I absorbed them anyway. I overheard, I snooped, I intuited. My parents tried to protect me, but to be a parent is ultimately to fail to protect. Just recently, a mother of one of my son’s classmates was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Our boy and his friends will have a front-row seat to the stark fact of premature loss. As much as I don’t believe in secrets, I, too, stumble when relaying some hard bit of information to my son. I don’t like using words like heart attack, cancer, divorce, terroris
m, prison, war, death. I don’t like to use them, but to omit them from my vocabulary is to create a redacted document—the black bits stand out.

  Whether an overheard whisper or a gruesome story comes across on the nightly news, we angelic spies live out our childhoods with a knowledge growing inside of us, spreading like moss in a dark place. When we become writers, we are driven by the echoes of those implications—of what we feel and intuit but cannot know. As we set our stories down on the page, our inner life becomes the only tool we have with which to reenter that dark place. Our eyes adjust. We don’t see everything. Phillips writes that we “live in the dim or glorious shadows of partially apprehended shapes.” We mine the secret life, our responsibility. We make it our business.

  PRACTICE

  I wrote my first novel in that small, borrowed room down the hall from my apartment on the Upper West Side. My second novel was written in a modern high-rise on the Upper East Side when I was parched, lonely, and briefly married to the wrong person. I wrote my third novel in a series of apartments and in a house in Sag Harbor, deeply absorbed in my work, with only my Yorkshire Terrier for company. I met my husband when I was just a few chapters into my first memoir. I remember giving him a piece of it to read one weekend, and lying in bed in a cottage near the beach, listening to the pages rustle in the next room, anxious about what he would think. By the time I wrote my next novel, I was a mother—a frightened one in the wake of Jacob’s illness. I began that book in our Brooklyn brownstone, and revised it once we’d moved to rural Connecticut. My books since then have all been composed in that same Connecticut countryside. The meadows. The stone walls. The dogs. The quiet.

  When we first moved to our house in the country—a house that prompts visitors to inquire where we buy food, whether Jacob has any other kids to play with, and what on earth we do all day—our friends were taking bets. Oh, you’ll be back, they said. We were urban creatures, after all. When we first moved into our house, I didn’t like being alone. It felt strange, isolating, even dangerous. Scenes from Stephen King novels and Brian De Palma films played out in my head. I imagined midnight break-ins and bears clawing through cans in the garage. I woke up each morning to stillness. Silence. In New York, the world was a rushing stream. If I wasn’t sure what to do, the city supplied plenty of ideas. I could be carried along by the momentum of that current—decisionless, actionless, but in motion.