Crash Course

by Robin Black

  And so, some alternate advice: Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out more work. Because as wonderful as the rest of it may be, conferences, Twitter, writing groups, and so on, if they are more than you can handle, that’s okay. But if you stop writing and stop sending your work into the world, that is not okay. That is giving up.

  In my heart of hearts, I believe this is the real message.

  Meanwhile, another summer has gone by. I am facing any number of potential rejections and disappointments. Who knows how my next book will be received? Or the next story I write? The range of possibility is mind-boggling. But at least I have once again protected myself—perhaps neurotically, perhaps wisely—from that one intolerable vulnerability. A bit wistful about what I have possibly precluded, but only a bit, both the envy and the relief just more rituals of my writing life, by now.

  The Dreaded Desk Drawer Novel

  In an ideal world, if you start your career a couple of decades after you’d hoped, whatever urgency you feel will result in productive efficiency. For me, that has sometimes been the case. But there is a fine line between constructive urgency and the kind of panic that is anything but useful—a line that unfortunately I have crossed.

  When I started writing my first novel, I was forty-two, working on short stories at the same time, including those in my collection. The stories were endlessly exciting to me, little puzzles with which I became obsessed, and I loved writing them, even though for every one I finished, I abandoned more than I can recall.

  That part could be disheartening, but I began to recognize it as my work style—many projects happening at once, a lot of pages never making it off my hard drive. I was a writer who needed to play with ideas in order to learn skills, and in order to find the words containing heat. And though the pace frustrated me—after all, I was “older” with no sign of book publication yet—I also accepted the process, in large part because, with each finished story, I felt a sense of accomplishment. And I could publish stories individually, so even without a book, and even as I discarded close to eighty percent of the short fiction I wrote, I received the thrill that publication brings.

  •

  At the same time, I began hanging out with writers more and more, some through my MFA program, others in Philadelphia, where I live, and I started hearing a lot about the “desk drawer novel.” It seemed like a phenomenon people took for granted. “And then, of course, there’s my starter novel. That thing will never see the light of day.”

  Their casual tone flipped me out. My confident stance: I do not have time for that.

  After all, these writers were talking about novels they had written in their twenties! Maybe their early thirties! It was one thing for me to toss out failed stories, but to put years into a full-length book and then abandon it? At that rate I’d be in my fifties before I published a novel! There was just no way. I had started one, I was progressing with it, and it was The Novel. It had to be.

  So great was my determination that I actively ignored clear signs that there were problems with The Novel even as I steadily added more and more pages. I never questioned why I wouldn’t show it to the friends who normally read my works in progress, not even my mother, whom I trust with just about everything I write. And I didn’t pause to probe why every time I opened The Novel on my screen I felt a kind of detachment, a sense of confusion over why this novel was my novel, what it had to do with me. I had always understood why I wrote the stories I wrote. The themes resonated for me, the plots fascinated me. I couldn’t wait to share them with readers—and none of that was true of this longer work. Yet the word count went up, the scenes accumulated. I labored on, barely letting myself know what I knew—a bit like a married person who can feel the union crumbling and is frantically staying busy to avoid the truth.

  I even went so far as to sell it as part of a two-book deal, when I was about three years into the project. I didn’t sell it on the basis of the many pages I had (which I still wouldn’t show anyone, even my agent) just the first fifty, and a summary of the rest. There was nothing cynical or duplicitous about the sale. It would be fine, I told myself, convincingly enough. The story collection would come out first and by then, the novel would have survived its awkward adolescence and somehow blossomed into a book of which I could be proud.

  But things don’t always go as one plans, much less as one hopes. My editor didn’t want to publish the stories first. She wanted me to take a few months to whip the novel into shape so we could move forward. And on one level that was thrilling. I was just shy of forty-seven when I sent in the draft, so I could still get that novel out in the world before I turned fifty—the arbitrary goal I had set.

  That fall and winter I worked and worked and worked, feeling increasingly as though I were working on some random manuscript that kept inexplicably materializing on my computer screen. The situation, the location, the people all felt alien and uninteresting. But maybe that was just fatigue, I told myself. Maybe working on anything for so long leads to inevitable boredom. No writer has perspective on her own work, I reminded myself. So I pushed through my doubts, got it into the best shape I could, tried to believe that I was being too hard on myself, and hit send.

  And then I waited. And waited.

  The day of reckoning came several weeks later when I was called to New York to meet with my editor and her assistant. The vibe in the room was not good, my capacity to rationalize, ebbing fast. Nobody said anything harsh but nobody said anything enthusiastic either, and as the other women in the room went through the copious changes they thought should be made, discussing their responses to the characters, I felt very little beyond the desire to say, I know this isn’t my best work, I’m so sorry that I wasted everybody’s time, and cut the meeting short.

  I didn’t, but I must have conveyed something of what I felt, because my editor never handed me her notes, though they were extensive, and she had initially said that she would. Shortly after that meeting, she decided to publish the story collection first.

  Even then, I didn’t give up. As difficult as this is for me now to believe, I was so horrified at the thought of having wasted more than four years on a “starter novel,” that I simply couldn’t bear the thought of starting again. And so for another six months, I dug away at the thing, changing the point of view, changing the tense, removing one character, putting in another, aware of two things as I did: First, that these are common revision practices and don’t by themselves mean a manuscript is doomed. And second, that this particular manuscript was doomed.

  I pronounced it officially dead a few months before my story collection came out. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. Imminent publication was the nail in the coffin of my denial. While I knew the stories might find detractors, as all books do, I also knew I could stand behind them as my best work. But no amount of effort would make this novel into something I wanted out in the world. Possibly, it could be patched together into an okay book, but never into one of which I would be proud. My editor was gracious—perhaps relieved—and sent me off with the mandate that I try again, and write the best novel I could write.

  I used this as an excuse to replace my old computer, and I have never looked at those files again.

  My awareness of my age plays many roles in this story, some conflicting. I stuck with the first novel longer than made sense, because I couldn’t bear to have “wasted” years, to postpone the dream any longer, a set of emotions that fueled some impressive denial. But of course, ignoring my gut feeling that the book warranted abandonment only led to my wasting more years.

  It’s easy to be irritated with myself, but this is a terribly challenging balance to strike for those of us who feel the pressures of time. It is hard enough to judge one’s own work under any circumstance, and harder still when a kind of panic distorts your view. How do you respond to that urgency productively, s
avoring the days and making the most of the months, while not letting awareness of age, even mortality, morph into the sort of anxiety that warps your judgment?

  I’m not sure there is a single answer, but I know where I took my wrong turn.

  C.S. Lewis writes, in a very different context: “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

  Well, maybe not exactly despair in this case. After all, I am talking about a modest professional setback, and not the religious struggles of a lifetime, as Lewis was. But for sure my privileging a comforting fiction over a truth I pretended not to know cost me years that might have been far better spent, ones that I could ill afford to lose.

  Because, in the end, of course, it wasn’t the story on the page that tripped me up. It was the story that I told myself.

  My Parent Trap

  There isn’t much about parenting that I don’t know. Mothering, specifically. An important caveat though: I mean, mothering with a good dose of privilege, including, critically, financial security. But within that fortunate realm, I have been at this mothering thing for more than half my life. I have been a happily married mom, an unhappily married mom, a single mom, a blended family mom, a stay-at-home mom, a working mom. I have a child with special needs. I have children who are academic superstars—and have their own challenges, nonetheless. Children who have been through depressions. Children who have periods of being angry at me. Children who have had trouble separating from me. I have straight children. I have a gay child. I had a married child—and now I have a divorced one.

  Write what you know, they say. Mothering is what I know. It’s where the bulk of my experience lies. And I love being a mother. I’m one of those mothers who touches base with her grown kids nearly every day, who counts them among her closest friends. I send treacle-sweet texts with hearts and baby animal emoticons. I end each phone call with a giant “MWAH!”—and so do they. It’s all a little revoltingly cute…And yet…

  When my story collection came out, a collection very much about relationships between parents and children, I was often asked—in carefully worded terms—why a notable number of the mothers in the book were so…whatever the opposite of warm and fuzzy is. So severe. So unsentimental about their children. Where was the gushing? The snuggling? Where the adoration? The idealization?

  It was a funny set of questions, but a fair one. Funny, because the kind of mother missing from the bulk of my stories is in many ways the kind I have been, the kind I am. And my own mother, while not sugary sweet, is anything but cold. So whence these rather severe women I had created, all viewing their offspring with a decidedly jaundiced eye?

  I wasn’t really sure.

  After the stories, when I started to try (and try, and try) to write a novel to replace the one I had abandoned, all of my attempts were again heavy on parent/child themes. That wasn’t a conscious decision, but an unexamined continuation of the assumption that I should write what I know. I was aware, as I began each failed attempt, that the mothers in these pieces were again unsentimental to the point of being acerbic. Their relationships with their children were uniformly cool, bordering on frosty. They saw flaws far more easily than they perceived any characteristics you might term lovable. And I saw that these forays were only that: forays. None made it much past fifty pages, though a few did make it that far. But then I grew bored, and the projects died, one by one, one and all.

  Many elements contributed to my sudden undying attachment to the novel I ended up writing, but a vivid aspect was my decision to make my central couple childless. Not only that, I made my narrator, a woman, motherless as well. I took the subject of maternity out of the center of the work.

  A confession: I love being a parent, but I do not find the subject of parenting particularly interesting. I have learned this about myself by reading my own fiction—and by producing it. In spite of having written so much about mothering, I’m not notably keen on parent/child relationships in stories or novels—especially when it comes to young children. Friendship has led me to read some stellar novels primarily on the subject, but going by jacket copy alone, I would be unlikely ever to pick one up.

  (I’m tempted here to offer explanations for my preferences, but doing so would imply that this particular preference requires a defense beyond the fact that some of us are interested in some things, others of us in others. And it shouldn’t need such a defense, and so I won’t.)

  I didn’t know that motherhood wasn’t particularly my thing, fictionally speaking, during the eight years when I wrote my story collection. Maybe, with my children still so young, my footing in the writing world unsteady at best, I couldn’t let myself know that. Maybe my brain was so filled with those concerns that I couldn’t imagine beyond them. The subject seemed to belong to me. My evolving theory is that these cold mothers of mine were a kind of grudging, unconscious compromise between the fact of motherhood being my primary area of expertise for all my adult years, and my own intellectual neutrality on the subject. It seems possible, even likely, that those chilly women are the embodiments of my ambivalence not about mothering but about my assumption that I had been elected by fate to write about it—a lot. I imagine them now, these severe moms, as stand-ins for my saying outright, “I may have been a stay-at-home mother for all my adult life, but please do not assume that means I’m some kind of baby-crazy, sentimental nurture machine, endlessly fascinated by the subject of the mother-child bond. Because I’m not.”

  But that’s just me. Well, it’s me and the many (many!) aspiring writers I know who have told me some version of: “I know I’m supposed to write what I know, but I’ve been a housewife for twenty years. And no one wants to hear about that. I don’t even want to hear about that…”

  Or actually this isn’t even about just me and them. Full-time stay-at-home parents can’t be the only people who find a disconnect between the life they have led, through choice or fear or who-knows-what, and their creative, intellectual concerns. (Nor do all stay-at-home parents find the subject distant from their creative selves, as I now do. It is not, after all, an inherently uninteresting subject.)

  Perhaps, though, it’s no coincidence that being a stay-at-home mother led to a timidity of imagination in me, one against which I still fight. We “full-time” mothers are not culturally encouraged to be bold or adventurous in matters intellectual. I have only to conjure the indulgent condescension of acquaintances, when I first admitted to “wanting to write,” in order to remember just how discouraged I was to do so—much less to write about anything outside the realm of child-rearing. (A shocking number assumed I meant children’s books.) Some of that has changed, I think, I hope, with the internet, with greater communication from home to home, from home to outside world, but when I was in the thick of it, endless antiquated messages about what it meant about one’s intellectual capacities to be home with the kids still came through, unmistakably demeaning.

  To the extent that the advice to “write what you know” honors a writer’s history, though that history may be different from what is traditionally deemed “literary,” the advice is doubtless affirming. But “write what you know” can also be a limiting mandate that assumes that you are artistically shackled to your life as lived. And that is bad—for many reasons, including that authenticity of experience is by no means the only kind of authenticity that produces the best work. Authenticity of passion is at least as mighty an engine, I would think.

  When I was writing my novel, on the inevitable low days, when I had lost the thread—not of the plot, but of the project—I would fall back on the old advice, “Write the book that is missing from your shelf, the one that you wish you could read.” That gave me the inspiration I needed. Not because it reminded me of what I know, but because it reminded me of why I write, why I care about this process at all, why it’s important to me. It reminded me that reading saved
my life when I was an unhappy child, of how liberating storytelling can be particularly from the facts of one’s own existence, how mysterious, how beautiful, how incomprehensible that power, how impossible to understand. How very important a role is played by the unknown in any act of imagination. The book I most wanted to read was a book that could teach me more than I could teach it.

  Does this mean that the next novel I write will be about people who have absolutely nothing in common with me? Will it require decades of research? Flights of fancy the likes of which I’ve never taken in the past?

  I have no idea. And that’s the point. But from now on, when I write a mother who is a little severe on the subject of her children, a little tough, I’ll be doing it on purpose, and not unknowingly voicing a complaint about my own unexamined misunderstanding of the art I am allowed to make.

  AD(H)D II: August 8, 2011

  TO DO1 2

  Work Stuff:3

  Novel, novel, novel4

  Finish PH blurb5

  Talk to H.6

  Put stuff on calendar7

  House:8 9

  1. Call about cushions10

  2. Paint DR chairs11

  3. Kitchen!!!!!!!!!12

  4. Living room?13

  Dinner: Chicken—buy salad?14

  Ask Richie about bike ride?15

  Call optometrist for D.16

  Call for haircut17

  Meds18 19

  1 August 8, 2011, originally handwritten.

  2 For as long as I can remember I have made TO DO lists with the letters all caps. Generally, they are handwritten and I get very compulsive about certain formatting things. The TO DO itself has to be bold—so I go over it many times—and the letters have to be exactly the same size with the T very close to the first O so it almost looks like one word but isn’t quite. I sometimes think of the lists as TODO lists—pronounced pretty much like Dorothy’s dog. It can take me several pieces of paper to get the formatting just right.