by Robin Black
One of these things is not like the others.
Whatever else happened in that moment, for sure one piece in the room stood out. There’s no way the Pope didn’t ask what the deal was, no way his curiosity wasn’t piqued. And even an attentive papal what the fuck? is better than a dismissive papal same old, same old—which goes for literary judges and magazine editors too.
But suggesting “difference” as a goal without some explanation is a dangerous thing to do. When I talk about difference or about being distinctive, I am emphatically not talking about jettisoning all familiar, time-honored subject matter. Distinctiveness, for me, isn’t about the subject at all. It might be the language. It might be the structure. It might be that intangible: voice. But to get me to read past page one, a story needs to feel like something I have never read before.
Every time I’ve judged a contest, I read once, and then make an informal Finalist pile. Then I take a few days off. And very often a funny thing happens: I find myself remembering one story more than the others, almost as if it were in color, while the others fade to black and white. It just kind of pops. That doesn’t mean I remember the plot or even how I felt at the end, but just that it’s the one haunting me. And that is almost always the one I choose.
I don’t know how to advise anyone on how to make their work memorable, but I will say that for me, anyway, it has absolutely nothing to do with surface perfections, well-turned sentences, expertly handled point of view. That’s a kind of funny thing for me to say, because I work hard at those very elements. But I think that for those of us who aim for a kind of smooth, well-crafted product, there’s a danger of losing sight of what’s really going to knock a reader off her feet. I’m not saying that craft and memorability are in opposition, just that it can be easy to begin to put all your faith in a kind of proficiency of execution, as if that were the whole task, perhaps because as a writer, proficiency, as opposed to something more like spark, like magic, feels like something over which one can have some control.
It’s possible though that being memorable has to do with something more like risk. As I said, here we are, seven centuries after the fact, telling the story of Giotto’s unquestionably risky move. Would anyone ever cast a thought to that courier’s visit had Giotto’s response been to whip out a canvas of The Annunciation? No. Playing it safe, doing the expected, following the rules, these are not likely to penetrate anyone’s consciousness with the kind of power that makes a thing unforgettable.
There are, of course, caveats. Giotto didn’t just paint any old circle in order to be different from his peers. He painted the circle. A perfect circle. He backed up the risk with skill.
But another caveat, a caveat to that caveat: Perfection was Giotto’s game. It isn’t a writer’s. There’s no such thing as perfection in this pursuit. So the lesson isn’t take risks if you can execute with perfection. The lesson is take risks—but be aware that risks alone do not great art make.
Though who knows, maybe sometimes they do. Maybe sometimes the risk is the art. Even while I want to give clear advice, I could easily go on and on with caveats and caveats to my caveats and so forth ad infinitum. Because that’s how writing advice has to be: equivocal, balanced always by its opposite, absolutely not absolute.
But, with no caveats, I stand behind this modest assertion: There is value, if of an unquantifiable sort, to holding that moment of Giotto’s bravado in your head from time to time as you write. The boldness of it, and the oddness too. The confidence. The lunacy. The riskiness, of course. The rudeness. The presumption.
And the success.
Line Edits III
Their first minutes at the inn are all about disappointment. Charlotte’s disappointment.
Their first minutes at the inn are all about disappointment. Charlotte’s disappointment; and Ethan’s management of Charlotte’s disappointment.
Their first minutes at the inn are all about disappointment. Charlotte’s disappointment; and Ethan’s management of Charlotte’s disappointment, which she is doing her best to conceal.
Their first minutes at the inn are all about disappointment. Disappointment and the management of disappointment. Charlotte’s disappointment; and Ethan’s management of Charlotte’s disappointment. She is doing her best to conceal it, he knows. She just isn’t doing a very good job.
Their first minutes at the inn are all about disappointment. Disappointment and the management of disappointment. Charlotte’s disappointment; and Ethan’s management of Charlotte’s disappointment. And Charlotte’s management of her own disappointment too, to be fair. She is doing her best to conceal it, he knows. She just isn’t doing a very good job.
Father Chronicles:
The Persistence of Demons
When I was a twenty year old undergrad, back in 1982, I had a dream, an actual sleeping dream, in which Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell escorted Virginia herself into my dorm room and announced that she was mine now, in my care. She was very delicate, they told me. Tending her wasn’t an easy job, they said—while she only glanced downward from beneath the great rim of her hat. Being all of twenty years old, and thinking myself a writer, I took this to mean, not that I had best watch out lest I have a mental breakdown (which was true and might have been helpful advice at the time), but that I was to inherit the mantle of genius.
Within months of having that dream, I dropped out of school for a bit, moved back in with my parents, had the aforementioned mental breakdown, eventually became engaged to (later marrying) a man I barely knew, and stopped being serious about writing for the next twenty years.
Genius!
In my life it has been an ugly word. My father, gone fourteen years now, was a bona fide genius. He was the sort of genius for whom even the people who roll their eyes at the word genius make an exception. And the fact that he was also one of the unhappiest, most personally dysfunctional people I have ever known did little to protect me from the message he delivered, both explicitly and also in more poisonous, potent forms, that to be anything other than a genius—anything less than a genius—was to be, well, at best, a little sad. Pitiable. Pathetic.
My knowledge of my father’s private miseries did little to protect me from this view, but his death in combination with more therapy than I’ll ever admit to diminished its power, which is part of why, at the age of thirty-nine, just about two decades after having the dream that amplified my misguided conviction that genius should be my goal, I was finally able to write.
And write I did, mostly short stories, but some essays too. None of which caused anyone to use the G-word, nor caused me to feel that they should, or even to long that they would. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was doing something as well as I could, which was all that seemed to matter. I had frustrating days of course, but overall the writing made me happy. Happier than I had ever been. Maybe it was the deceptively unambitious-seeming nature of short forms that let me relax. Maybe it was the gusting exhilaration of finally stepping out from within the dark of my father’s shadow and from under the weight of the tragic standards by which he measured his own lonely, unhappy success. Whatever the cause, I was productive and I was enjoying it.
A happy ending, yes?
Well, yes; and also, no.
Because then there was a novel. Unfinished. And often uncooperative. And just look at what a big thing it is—a novel. Look at how huge an impression it might make. How excellent a vehicle it could be for being declared a you-know-what…or, more realistically, how it will surely make it evident that one is not. And look at what sustained faith it requires. How difficult a task! What room for one’s neuroses that massive task leaves, within those frustrating days and all those inevitable missteps…Look at what space is created for the demons to creep back in.
If it isn’t to be a work of genius, it isn’t worth writing, you know…
I found myself struggling again with that thought—as I realized that I was not in fact writing Mrs. Dalloway. Or Ulysses. Not reinv
enting the form. Not revolutionizing literature. I understood very well that my personal best was not Virginia Woolf’s best—and never would be. At nineteen, at twenty, I dreamed it was. At nearly fifty, I knew better. And if I was to believe my poor father, that made this whole writing pursuit pretty pointless.
If it isn’t to be a work of genius, it isn’t worth writing, you know…
Ugly. As I said. But that was the message I was given, loud and clear. Quiet and clear. At every imaginable volume—and always clear.
Sometimes, when I have tried to explain the damage this viewpoint has done to me, the difficulties it newly caused while writing that new book, I have struggled to define the distinction between my father’s blind drive for admiration on the one hand, and a healthy ambition for excellence on the other. The best way I have found to parse the two is to say that in my father’s emotional landscape, doing one’s best was only a meaningful goal if one’s best was better than everyone else’s best. The simple knowledge of having achieved a personal best would be a sorry consolation, at most.
If you think about it enough, that is one of the saddest possible ways to look at life. Certainly, one of the loneliest. And had you known my father, you could have traced that sorrow, that solitude in his every gesture, every glance.
It is difficult for me sometimes, this writing thing—as it is for us all, I know, in our different ways. I am haunted daily by that other idea, not my own, of what my goal should be. When it takes up my brain and crowds away my knowledge of what dangerous nonsense it is, it bullies my lyrical side into babbling doubt. I become a study in blockage, in self-sabotage. Never mind the questionable wisdom of taking life advice from one person whose misery I witnessed daily for almost forty years, and longing to follow in the footsteps of another who did, after all, walk into a river and drown herself. Demons are not creatures of logic. Demons are not geniuses. They don’t need to be. They are just persistent as hell.
But if you think about that, there’s the seed for optimism right there.
Because it turns out that persistence is a powerful thing. One of the most powerful allies any one of us has. Directed demonically, it can shut you down for decades at a time. But it can also be the engine that keeps you typing, that causes the clattering keys to drown out the voices that would have you stop. Persist, persist. Be more stubborn even than your own demons. Persist. Persist. Not for any reason other than that you promised yourself you would. Just for long enough to get it all out on the page.
For my father, bona fide genius and eternally unhappy man, it took that kind of fortitude to face the business of living through every day. I would study the pain of it settling into his bones, beaming out from his light brown eyes. I would watch him scrap and cobble his broken self through many an hour, often ungraceful, sometimes unkind, occasionally memorably generous, startlingly empathic. But always in profound psychic pain.
Our stories are strange things, all of ours. And the logic through which our narratives unfold is often both obvious and paradoxical. Even as I battle the toxic standards of success that my father breathed into my dreams, I find myself grateful for his example of how fiercely one can try to fight a demon down.
Persist. Persist.
Empty Now
I am empty now. I have been empty for months. I have no stories inside me, none that are anxious or even willing to emerge. My imagination has taken on aspects of a phantom limb. Occasionally, I feel a twinge, but when I try to attend to it, I discover nothing there. Where dozens of short stories have jostled for space over the years, where hundreds of characters have lived, where my novel once resided, there is now a hollow space.
I think about this hollow a lot. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but, oddly, I don’t hate this feeling of imaginative emptiness. I would describe my emotional stance toward it as something closer to a combination of respect and resignation. It wins. That’s non-negotiable. I don’t get to order my imagination to refill. I have to wait.
Some might call this writer’s block, but I have always disliked the term—and not only because I don’t know where, if anywhere, the apostrophe goes. I use the phrase sometimes, as a kind of shorthand, but the imagery is wrong for me, the metaphor fails. There isn’t an impediment between me and the work I might produce. There is this hollow. This absence. This twinge that signifies nothing. The stories aren’t being impeded. They don’t exist.
The distinction matters to me. Emotionally. If I imagine myself blocked, it feels like a disorder of some kind. It worries me. But if I imagine that there is a chamber, always there, a space my imagination fills sometimes, and sometimes does not fill, it feels to me more like a process. Maybe even a natural process.
In fact, it feels strangely simple: I have used up my material, the stuff from which I craft stories. I don’t have anything now. Maybe I will have more soon. Or not soon. Or not.
I don’t like the thought of that last possibility, but of course it is a possibility. It is always a possibility. For every writer. On any given day. We always live with the specter of this hollow as eternal companion.
I attribute some of my current emptiness to having finished a novel recently. For so long, it filled all of me; of course it has left an emptiness behind. But I don’t think that ending a consuming project is the only route to the state in which I find myself. Sometimes, my narrative-making ability is otherwise engaged, having nothing to do with writing fiction. My daughter who has special needs leads a life that doesn’t follow any of the templates that exist for her older siblings—even allowing for variation. I am constantly spinning narratives in my mind about her and her future, crafting possible paths, writing alternate scenarios. Starting them and revising as circumstances change. I am making up her life with her as we go along—to a far greater degree than I might were her strengths and challenges otherwise. She is the great creative project of my life.
And—an easier realm for me—I am building an addition onto our new home. To design a space is to immerse yourself in narrative: Here is how we will live in it; this is the course of a day; this is the sort of area we will use for seeing friends; for doing work; for eating meals. These are the characters we must take into account.
I have also been traveling a lot, for work. I’m not naturally good at keeping track of logistics, so I have to tell myself the story of my own itinerary over and over, every trip, before I can conceptualize where I will be and how I will get there. Narrative, again.
I’m not saying that life has to stop in order for me to write. It never has stopped, and I’ve written plenty. I suppose I’m suggesting that it’s inevitable that for many of us there will be periods when the generative, creative energies are otherwise engaged. That making up stories can’t happen every day. That it’s okay.
Though the fact is, we do make up stories all day long. All of us. To go to the grocery store is to spin a thousand tales. A thousand silent tales. About what you need to buy, why you need it, how you will use it. About what you will do while you’re there. How long it will be before you go back. The route you will take; the one that you won’t. How you will pay…
Life doesn’t only happen. Life happens in narrative, upon narrative, upon narrative.
It can be exhausting, I think. This storytelling requirement of being alive can exhaust a person’s capacity to make up other kinds of stories.
For now it has surely exhausted mine.
Often, at readings, at talks, someone will ask me something along the lines of: “What do you do when you can’t write?” More and more my answer is, I do something else. I know there are people for whom the better approach is to develop strict habits, write every day, even if nothing “useful” comes out; but for me, that is when the metaphor I am living shifts from feeling bearable—this hollow that eventually, probably will refill—to being untenable: the attempt to make it happen, the pushing, as if the problem were not an absence of material but an absence of force.
Force does nothing for me.
When I
write, I am a woman possessed, aflame, obsessed. When I write, it feels as though I have taken the drug nature designed especially for my addiction, mine alone. When I write, I am only half in my “real” life. I am in an altered state of consciousness, believing that what I make up matters as much as anything else; and at moments, matters more. When I write, I am crazily in love.
I cannot force being crazily in love. I can only hope for the insanity to revisit me one day.
And try to enjoy these calm moments before the hollow next fills.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Victoria Barrett and to Engine Books for welcoming this collection into the company of all those magnificent books they publish, and also for invaluable support and keen editorial guidance.
A very special thanks to the members of the late great blog Beyond the Margins, where many of these essays first appeared. I loved being part of that team of writers writing about writing. I learned so much from them all, especially from my dear friends Kathleen Crowley, Randy Susan Meyers, Nichole Bernier, and Juliette Fay. They taught me, through example and with lots of laughs, what kind of writer I want to be—not what I want to write, but who I want to be while I write.
My agent Henry Dunow is a source of endless wisdom, humor, and friendship. And I cannot imagine how I could have started writing and stuck with it without my once teacher, still mentor, and always friend Steven Schwartz.
Thank you to all my students, from whom I learn continually, and to the many writer friends and admired authors who are my teachers. And thank you to all the readers who have engaged with my work. It is an incalculable privilege to be part of your reading life.