Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

by Dani Shapiro

  As I sit here writing this—at a café not far from my house—that urge is part of nearly every minute. Discomfort is kicking my ass on this particular day. I know better—but knowing better sometimes isn’t enough. In the past hour, I have checked my e-mail three times. I sent a note to a friend about a magazine piece she’s helping me with. I received a photo from my husband with a picture of a car he thought I might like. I have gone on Facebook once. I have received two texts.

  Well, that’s okay, you might be thinking to yourself. What’s the harm in taking a couple of minutes to check in online? After all, isn’t a quick glance at your e-mails, Twitter feed, the Facebook status updates of all your friends kind of like a twenty-first-century version of the cigarette break?

  This may be the most important piece of advice I can give you: The Internet is nothing like a cigarette break. If anything, it’s the opposite. One of the most difficult practical challenges facing writers in this age of connectivity is the fact that the very instrument on which most of us write is also a portal to the outside world. I once heard Ron Carlson say that composing on a computer was like writing in an amusement park. Stuck for a nanosecond? Why feel it? With the single click of a key we can remove ourselves and take a ride on a log flume instead.

  By the time we return to our work—if, indeed, we return to our work at all—we will be further away from our deepest impulses rather than closer to them. Where were we? Oh, yes. 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 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.

  CHARACTER

  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, nuanced, 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 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 crossword 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.

  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 judgment: 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.

  DISTANCE

  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 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 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.

  EDGES

  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 contradicting 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, b
ut 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 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 Patricia 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,” 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.

  MONDAYS

  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 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 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.

  FLOW

  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.

  “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 psychology 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 unadulterated 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. And the writer? Well, one solitary writer in her Connecticut farmhouse is backed into a corner of her chaise longue, every muscle tense with effort. She is in the middle. The red hot center. This is what she’s signed on for. She remembers that she is in the ocean with no land in sight, and she is building the boat. This demands all of her attention and holds it. Her coffee has long grown cold at her side. The dogs, sensing her struggle, have slunk out of the room. She is trying, oh, how she is trying, to get it right.

  “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong . . . but time and chance happen to them all.”

  —ECCLESIASTES

  THE BEST PART

  If you show up, if you spend many hours alone, if you wage a daily battle with your inner censor, if you endure, if you put one word in front of the next until a long line of words is formed, a line that could stretch halfway across your home, if you take two steps forward, three steps back, if you grapple with bouts of despair and hopelessness—there will come a time when you can sense that the end is not too far away. This will carry its own quiet but unmistakable confidence. You will cast aside your doubt, your skepticism, your fear that perhaps you’ve been fooling yourself all along. You can no longer tell yourself it’s never going to happen, because it is happening. Your breath deepens. Your field of vision widens.

  Revel in it. Take your time.

  This is the best part.

  If beginnings are leaps of faith, and middles are vexing, absorbing, full of trap doors and wrong turns and dead ends, sensing an ending is your reward. It’s better than selling your book. It’s better than a good review. When you’re in the home stretc
h, it seems the universe reaches out to support you. It meets you more than halfway. Whatever you still need in order to finish your novel, your story, your memoir, appears as if by the decree of some literary deity who understands just how hard you’ve worked, just how much you’ve struggled, and will now give you a break. A strain of music overheard on the street. A few sentences of dialogue. An interview on the car radio that solves a problem you didn’t even know you had.

  Sure-footedly, you move forward. It’s not so much that you know where you’re going. You may very well not. But the landscape you now inhabit has a quality of déjà vu. Somewhere in the recesses of your imagination, you’ve been here before. You recognize it as it builds. Of course, you think to yourself. Exactly. It isn’t you, writing now. Not quite. This thing you have built in the dark, that has felt so many times like it might be your undoing, is now leading you along like a gentle giant. You don’t know what the ending is—but you have a feeling about it. There’s a tonal quality. Perhaps an image. There will be a moment—today, tomorrow, three weeks or two months from now—when you’ll write a sentence and then stare at it, dumbfounded. It has caught you unawares. You can’t be on the lookout for it. You can’t will it, or force it, and you don’t have to, because it will feel inevitable. Everything has led to this.

  EXPOSURE

  I can almost always feel the comment—more question than comment, really—in the second before it’s spoken. The air stills and my nerves ready themselves, sensing imminent danger. What’s it like to reveal so much about yourself? The person saying this searches my face for signs or clues–-confirmation that this is, in fact, the case. There is the groping for words. A nod to the strangeness of the interaction. Perhaps even, in certain cases, the faintest whiff of distaste. Then, finally: How do you do it? Don’t you feel exposed?