Crash Course

by Robin Black

  3 I always put Work Stuff first. That is an entirely meaningless fact.

  4 The repetition of the word novel here is because it’s really more of a cheer than a statement of fact. Novel, novel, novel. You can do it, you can do it! Gooooo novel! The one thing it doesn’t mean is that I’ll work on my novel.

  5 This is my fourth or fifth blurbing experience. I’ve just started to realize how bloody difficult it is, even when you like a book a lot, to find things to say that don’t sound like you bought them at the blurb store. Nobody gets to be fearless, heartbreaking, or insightful anymore. Nor can anything happen time and again. No sentences can begin with the word “with” as in: “With rare insight, this fearless author will break your heart time and again.” That shit is over. But it doesn’t leave me with an easy path.

  6 H. is Henry, my agent. We don’t have any business to discuss, but we’ve become good friends and it’s been a while. Mostly, we talk about our kids. This shouldn’t really be listed under “Work.”

  7 It has only just occurred to me, at the age of 49, that by writing things on a calendar, one increases the chance of doing them.

  8 This spring, we considered moving out of our house in the ’burbs and into Center City, Philadelphia. But then (after seeing the prices in the city) we realized that it makes a lot more sense to stay here until our youngest is out of high school (three more years) but that as we’re staying here, we had better spruce the place up a bit. This has become a huge, huge project. It is eating up our lives. But not in a bad way.

  9 In the handwritten version, there is a little drawing of a house to the left of this word.

  10 I made the mistake of ordering cushions from Calico Corner. They charge the earth which in a decent, fair world would mean they do a good job. But in fact they did it wrong and I have to take them back. I have written “Call about cushions” here but what I really need to do is drive out to Calico Corner and return the cushions. I just really don’t want to do that. “Call about cushions,” translated, really means: “Shit. I cannot believe I have to drive the effing cushions all the way out to Devon just because THEY did a crummy job. Maybe if I put it off, Richard will do it with me on Saturday.”

  11 I have a bad history with these chairs. Ten years ago, I started to re-cover them, then midway through the fourth chair—of six—decided I hated what I was doing. So there they have been, semi-covered ever since. Now, I have decided to paint them in that shabby chic, distressed kind of way. But I finished two chairs about a month ago and haven’t started the others yet. People in this house are not optimistic.

  12 The exclamation marks are a howl of anguish. The kitchen is a disaster area and the odds of my cleaning it are low. Maybe the exclamation marks are a cry for help. Kitchen help.

  13 Again, the punctuation here means as much as the words themselves. We have lived in this house for 16 years and I have never known how to decorate our living room. It’s a funny shape. We don’t really use it—we hang out in the kitchen. And it is now infested with moths—they lived in our couch (which has been in our driveway for a month now) and on the wool rug (which has been de-mothed and moved to a less conspicuous spot). So, this particular list item is a little miscategorized on a TODO list as I don’t really mean to do anything. And I don’t really need a reminder to wonder what the hell to do with the living room. But there it is.

  14 I won’t buy salad. It says “buy salad?” because we are trying to eat healthily and I want to think I will buy salad. But I won’t.

  15 We are also trying to exercise more. But the odds that my husband and I will go for a bike ride at 6:30 when he gets home are negligible. We never have, though this is a frequent feature of my TODO lists. Again, this entry is there mostly to make me feel like I am a better person than I am.

  16 My son needs to have his eyes examined. This will actually get done.

  17 This one will probably not get done. I have a lot of difficulty committing to haircuts. I usually have the idea of getting a haircut on the list in some form or other for at least two months before any appointment-making takes place.

  18 There are some prescriptions that need to be refilled—for my ADD. In theory they help me do things like execute the tasks on my TODO lists.

  19 Hmmmmm. . .

  The Art of Ripping Stitches

  Lingering on various hard drives in my possession right now are the abandoned beginnings to at least two hundred short stories. Some are mere opening lines, but several dozen stretch as long as fifteen pages or more. Twenty or thirty are fully drafted; I have just never been able to revise them to my own satisfaction. I may go back to one or two over time, but probably not. In other words, for every one of the eleven stories in my first book I have started approximately twenty more.

  Which means that every time I begin a story, I do so in the knowledge that the odds are pretty slim that I’ll ever finish it, that the overwhelming likelihood is that I will work on it for days, even weeks, sometimes years, and then lose faith.

  I also have several dozen similarly abandoned essays, three novels that made it past the fifty page mark, and the big one, the 300-page novel that I worked on for four years and revised at least three times. May it rest in peace.

  I’m not sharing these gruesome statistics because I think I’m a special case, but because I think it’s not all that far from the norm. We are all struggling here. We are all making false starts, falling in and out of love with our own words, facing hard truths about something we have labored on for what seems like an eternity. And we are all haunted by the belief that it’s a whole lot easier for everyone else.

  A couple of years ago, at a post-reading dinner, a well-known writer and I got to talking about how impossible it is to predict which of one’s students will keep writing over time. I suggested that maybe success—defined as continuing to write—is determined by three things: talent, hard work, and good luck, and that without some of all three, it’s very hard to keep going. My dinner companion added another.

  “You have to be good at being a writer,” he said. “You have to be able to survive it all.”

  The conversation moved on, and I can’t remember if I ever asked him exactly what he meant, but I know what being good at being a writer means to me. Most obviously, it means being able to keep going in spite of the inevitable rejection from others. But perhaps more critically it means being able to survive rejection from oneself, to weather the huge number of failed attempts and dashed hopes, the daily sense that one is not actually good enough to do what one wants so desperately to do. It means being able to wake up many mornings having disappointed oneself the day before and once again resuscitate the capacity to hope that this day’s result will be different. And it means learning to recognize that every word one writes is just as important as every other word, that the words that make it out into the world cannot exist without those that came before, now lingering on a hard drive, abandoned.

  Process, process, process, process.

  One of the wisest things ever said to me about writing was said to me about sewing. Years ago, when I wanted to make my own clothing, an older woman told me, “If you’re going learn how to sew, you’re going to have to learn to love ripping out stitches. Otherwise, you’ll quit.”

  I stopped sewing a quarter century ago, but I have never stopped reminding myself of that.

  On Learning to Spell Women’s Names While Men Buy My Novel

  for Their Wives

  I was at a party, a celebration of my novel, thrown by old friends, and filled with couples around my age, middle-aged men and women. My host asked me to read a bit from the book, which I did, and I answered some questions about my process and about the publishing world; and then I stepped out of the spotlight so that something closer to a normal party might begin. A normal party that included one guest selling and signing books, that is.

  Such interactions are inherently a little awkward. I felt both fortunate and a bit sheepish, as I always do when making chit-chat wh
ile selling my wares. But this time I also felt a different, distinct discomfort settling in as more than one man approached me, book in hand, and told me he wanted to buy it—as a present for his wife. You can make it out to…Carol…Jane…Kathy…

  I began to feel grumpy. I don’t believe it showed, but I was starting to feel unmistakably irked at the unspoken assumption that I had written a book for women. Only women. That a man who bought a copy for himself might as well also buy a pair of heels and some jewelry to accessorize the purchase.

  To be clear, I wasn’t ticked off at these individual men. They were—to a man, so to speak—warm and encouraging, said kind things about the work I’d read aloud, and expressed interest in the whole process of how a book comes into the world. My friends are lovely people, and they had gathered lovely friends of their own. But…One particularly engaging man told me he belonged to a book group. A men’s book group. “You should suggest this to them,” I said, poking a bit, consciously making mischief.

  At least he was forthcoming. “It’s really tough to get them to read books written by women,” he said. “It’s viewed as…” He shook his head and shrugged.

  Sigh.

  I’m not describing an unfamiliar phenomenon here. The fact that it’s difficult to get men to read fiction by women has been well-documented and mightily discussed. But something about this experience, the line of actual, living, breathing men armed with spellings of women’s names, made the imbalance feel true and—excuse me—just so fucking weird, in a way that no statistics, no documented trends ever have.

  Really, guys? Really?

  Yes. Really.

  It never occurs to me when I write that I am writing for one sex almost exclusively. To me, I am just a person, writing fiction for other people to read. I am concerned with the simple, central question of why people do what they do. Is that a particularly feminine preoccupation? I hope not. I hope it’s something we’re all thinking about, a lot.

  “Men love this book,” I finally said to one fellow guest, thinking of the men who have, most of them friends and family, their ages ranging from 23 to 81. “You might be surprised.”

  “Well, I did like what you read, a lot…”

  Dot. Dot. Dot. Awkward silence.

  All righty, then. I guess I’m not going to change the world at a book party.

  “And how is Carol spelled? Is there an e?”

  I’m not angry at any individual. I’m not a bit sure I’m angry at all, though the word is, of course, inevitably, tiresomely melded to all observations that might be termed “feminist”—and so I feel some obligation to contend with the presumption. In truth, a bit weary, on this day anyway, I feel more frustrated than angry.

  And the frustration is familiar, like some kind of natural element, innate to existence by now. It disperses into the air we all breathe and refills my lungs; strolls with me down sidewalks; prickles, uncomfortable, as I watch stereotypes play out on my TV. This is not only the fault of those men who bought my book. This a Big Social Problem, and so society, culture, history must all shoulder the blame—though, of course, as always, it falls on individuals to fix what entire civilizations have broken. It isn’t ever acceptable to let the weariness win out.

  Or, it turns out, to forget to be angry. Or to disown the emotion because others have used its name as a weapon against women…Shame on me for that. Anger it is.

  And so the analysis begins anew: Why don’t men read books by women?

  Friends and I have puzzled over this endlessly. Is it the fear of being seen holding a pink cover, a logical if unfortunate response to an unabashedly traditional gender-coded message that literary marketing has sent? Is it the outgrowth of a process that begins with people telling newborn girls how sweet and pretty they are, encouraging them as they grow, to be nice and worry about relationships, while telling boys how big and strong they are, encouraging them to be tough and smart? Does that well-documented distinction make reading what women write—always presumptively about domestic relationships—seem a feminine activity? (While not making reading male authored fiction about domestic relationships problematic—as if those books have some kind of blue-for-boys, won’t-lessen–your-manhood stamp of approval on them.) Is this just another corner of the world in which those who are taught to view women as equated with emotions, and emotions as equated with weakness (and therefore, by the transitive property…) reward the lifelong brainwashing inflicted on them by acting accordingly?

  Do girl books have girl cooties? Is it really that much a legacy of the schoolyard? Of the nursery?

  Probably. That’s all doubtless part of it. But, having gone through what felt like a strangely ritualistic enactment of a statistic I haven’t wanted to believe, I am filled more with questions about the larger implications of men not reading fiction by women than about the causes.

  If you think that because I’m female what I have to say in my novel won’t interest you, what about the things I say when I am talking to you about the research project in which we’re both engaged? About the funding needed for the public school system? How about when I am arguing a case in court? Filing an insurance claim?

  Is it credible that fiction occupies a unique place? Credible that men who dismiss what female storytellers have to say as irrelevant to them aren’t also inclined to dismiss—perhaps unconsciously—what females of every variety have to say? To think it somehow less relevant than what men say? Is it credible that this literary aversion is a special case of some kind? A glitch?

  Just as the fact that men commonly skip over female authors has never felt as real to me as it now does, the implications of that fact have never seemed as serious. And though I am limiting my exploration here to “men” and “women” as if our genders divide anything like so clearly, I have no doubt that these issues are all the more complex and disheartening for those whose gender does not fit mainstream definition.

  But back to the mainstream for a moment, back to traditional gender presumptions, which are almost certainly at the root of all this. The book that I wrote has been described in reviews as tense, taut, and brutal. I’m not suggesting that had it been called tender, sweet, and heart-warming, men would be right not to read it, but when you write a book so commonly described with adjectives that are viewed in this (dysfunctional, sexist) society as “male,” and men still aren’t interested in reading it because the author is female, it’s …it’s depressing. That’s the word. Depressing. And enraging.

  I am bummed out about this. Not because I don’t value my female readers nor because of the impact on my career or sales numbers, but because of the questions to which this imbalance inevitably leads, because of my hunch that this book-avoiding nonsense is only a relatively innocuous hint at something much more important, something both endemic and profoundly ugly, something that has precious little to do with literary taste.

  In Which My Mother Suggests

  That I Murder Her,

  As a Marketing Ploy

  On the phone with my beloved mother, I was—once again—bemoaning the difficulties of getting attention for my quiet, literary novel. “It’s a good book,” I said. “I honestly believe that. And I feel like if I could just get more people to know about it…I have completely lost faith in all social media crap, and I just keep wondering if there’s some kind of scandal I could get involved in that might help.”

  “Not a terrible idea,” my mother said. (I love my mother.)

  We talked then for a while about the possibilities. I ruled out a sex scandal, based on loving my husband and thinking that having already asked him to put up with a lot for my writing career, that might just be a bridge too far. “I could maybe find some way to make it look like I plagiarized the whole thing. Plagiarized books get a lot of attention. People get famous for that shit.”

  “But don’t the publishers sometimes destroy all copies?”

  “I suppose. Though that might still help with the next book. I could commit a crime. Except I don’t fancy tim
e in prison.”

  “You could kill someone,” my eighty-one-year-old mother said.

  “I suppose.”

  “You could kill me,” she said. “I’m old.”

  I have to tell you, I was really touched. “How would I get away with it?” I asked. “Or should I even get away with it? I mean, is it enough just having my mother killed, or do I kind of need, for full publicity and all, to be accused of doing it?”

  “Ideally,” she said, “from a publicity perspective, I would think the best would be for you to be the prime suspect, but ultimately not convicted. Better for my grandchildren, too.”

  “Maybe I could claim insanity. Over wanting more attention for my book. A crime of passion. Because it is in fact making me insane.”

  “I don’t think that works,” she said.

  “I could pin it on one of my brothers,” I said, never too old to try to trick Mom into saying I’m her favorite.

  “I can’t go along with that,” she said in her that’s not funny voice.

  “It was worth a shot.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” she said.

  But soon enough, before we could work on the mechanics, she had to get off the phone. And I don’t suppose we ever will come up with a plan for my killing her with which we’re both entirely comfortable, probably not, but I really appreciate her willingness to go “all in” on this PR thing.