Let them go. Let them go.
Shells of buildings litter I-10. The Picacho Motel is nothing but a monolithic sign in front of dust. The Precision Machine Shop just east of State Route 87 stands empty, the glass in the window coated with green dust. Train tracks run both east and west along I-10’s westbound side. Cargo trains pull double-decker loads of boxcars painted yellow and gray past crossings where the red lights flash to warn no cars of its approach.
I wonder who stops and buys genuine Indian jewelry at the Dairy Queen off of exit 219. Who buys the “real” Mexican blankets and the Black Hills gold? Who stops along the edge of a speeding highway to breathe in the dust of trucks and travelers and eat a banana split and trade journey stories with the man behind the counter? Seekers. People searching for their stories. Thinking perhaps a bit of history in the form of petrified rock bookends or leather moccasins might answer some of the deeper questions of their hearts.
In the backseat, all four ghosts sleep in each other’s arms. The car is quiet, the whining of the engine vanished. I watch them in the rearview mirror, breathing together. I pull into a rest area and stop the car.
“Hey,” I whisper. “Move on now.”
They wake up, a collective quad of self-reflections, and slip through the door into the desert. The car smells of vanilla. I move forward, zero to seventy-five in record time. I breathe.
People say there’s nothing on this stretch of road. Nothing much, maybe. Just everything I’ve ever been, and the possibilities of everything I am to be. The mountains in front of me are rimmed in magenta and burnt umber. The sky is gray to the south, baby blue to the north. Dust winds a serpentine path upward. Ahead of me, the sun.
What ghosts line the highways of your life? Which ghosts can you pick up? Which ones can you discard? Which ones have you ignored and which ones have you canonized? Pay attention with absolute vulnerability and compassion. Listen with your heart, and then pick up your pen.
We are the sum of all we have been. Understanding and integrating the people we have been throughout a lifetime is an important part of the writer’s alchemy. The more whole we are, the deeper we can go in our writing. We’ve all been through stages and phases in our lives. We’ve likely gone through many shifts—in what we want for our lives, who we want to attract, and who we strive to be. Just like each draft of a story is perfect unto itself, so is each incarnation we’ve had along life’s path. All you have been is perfect. Gather your fractured selves together, breathe them in, and transform them. Use their fuel to create something new.
CHAPTER 31
Writing Is Not Like Making a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it, and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
—Don DeLillo
Every single time you sit down to write—a story, a poem, an essay, a novel—it will be a brand-new experience. No formula works. The mystery that solved your previous story doesn’t speak the same language as your current story. The key that unlocked the sonnet of yesterday won’t work today. Accept that. Don’t resist it. Writing never works the same way twice. You can view this as exciting or frustrating. Or, you can accept it for what it is. The writing process.
Writing is not like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. All the ingredients are not waiting for you in the cupboard. You—armed with skill and the memory of successful past peanut butter and jelly-making performances, and knowing that, barring the absence of a key ingredient, like say, peanut butter or bread, you’ll be able to deliver a delicious sandwich, a sandwich just as delicious as the one you made yesterday, or last week, or when you were twelve—feel success as a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich-maker extraordinaire. Writing is not in any way like this. The longer you believe that it is, the longer you will struggle needlessly.
Writing is not in any way like assembling a car engine. Or baking a cake. Or aligning your body for the perfect golf swing. The longer you believe that it is, the longer you will struggle needlessly.
I can’t tell you how much I want writing to be like these things. Even after all these years of writing and teaching, I still can get suckered into believing that someone has “an answer,” and if only I’d do this or that or the other thing, I’d finally get it. And every time I get suckered, I vow never to be suckered again. There’s always a promise of something that will solve The Writer’s Problem.
This book is not making that promise. That’s an inauthentic promise. No matter how much discipline we have, no matter how many tools we’ve gathered, we still need to figure out our practice anew each time we sit down to write. Understanding this will help you avoid frustration and deepen your roots as a writer.
Writing can never be like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because your ingredients aren’t sitting on a shelf waiting for you to take them down. If writing were truly like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, first you’d have to plant the seeds to grow the wheat to make the bread. Grow the peanuts to make the butter. Pick the fruit to make the jelly. Decide if you want white, wheat, sourdough, rye, or pumpernickel. Decide if you want chunky or smooth. Apple or grape or strawberry. Then realize you can’t always get what you want. Sometimes the harvest doesn’t come in and there’s not enough wheat for the bread. Sometimes worms get the apples and there’s no jelly. You can’t know these things though, until you’re all set and ready to make your sandwich—nay, until you’re in mid-sandwich-making-mode—and then you learn there are no strawberries. Or no peanuts. Or the bread went stale. Or there are only the ends and you hate the ends.
Sometimes you don’t know these things until you get quite far into the process. And then you’re frustrated and decide peanut butter sandwiches are stupid anyway. There are far too many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the world. Far too many people. Too many peanuts. Too many grapes to make the jelly with, and far, far too much bread. Storehouses of grain for loaves upon loaves of bread. Go be a farmer. A doctor. A preacher. A snake oil salesman. Anything, anything, but a writer. A maker of original peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Really, you say to yourself, what can you possibly have to offer that hasn’t already been done and done better than you could ever imagine?
Stop. Breathe. Pick up your pen. Raise your fingers above your keyboard. Just start already. The world is hungry for what only you can create.
CHAPTER 32
Sand Paintings
The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.
—William Styron
Tibetan Buddhist monks spend weeks and months creating intricate sand paintings only to brush them away at the end of their labor. The process of creation and destruction is a sacred meditation in nonattachment. Three days ago, I was working on two scenes from my novel. The writing was working. It wasn’t great, but it was good draft work. Two days ago, I was working on the scene that followed those scenes when my computer froze, forcing me to do a reset, which caused (though it wasn’t supposed to cause this) a loss of all my data. I had a portion of the book saved on a different computer, and though this computer freeze didn’t make me jump for joy, it was only about ten hours of work and I looked at it (mostly) as an opportunity to revise and make the scenes better. I always advise my students to take their early drafts and put them in a drawer and not look at them as they move into the revision process. I believe revision is best done on a fresh piece of paper. So I figured this was a chance for me to practice that in a little more of a boot camp fashion than I was accustomed to. I went home, wrote a quick outline of everything I’d written, taking special care to write down the surprise details that came up during the process of writing. Not that big a deal.
Today, I had four hours to work this afternoon. I was able to rewrite the scenes that had been lost as well as move forward two more scenes. And yes, you guessed it, the screen froze again. What an opportunity to practice my yoga, I thought, as I wanted to throw this machine across the room. What a teacher this computer is tur
ning out to be. What is this actually about? I’ve never lost data in my life, and now it’s happened twice in one week. By the time I rewrite the scenes tomorrow (on a different computer), they’ll be pretty darn fine scenes.
My first thought, after “oh shit,” was of the Tibetan monks and their beautiful sand paintings. I remembered reading an interview in which they were asked why they spent all that time making the mandalas only to destroy them. They replied, as monks are wont to do, that the making of the mandala was what mattered, not what happened to it after it was finished.
“But how can you work so hard to make it so beautiful knowing it will be gone in a few weeks?”
“The work is the practice. That is all there is. Everything else is an illusion. Today we make a painting. Tomorrow it is gone. This is the way of everything.”
So tomorrow, when I rewrite those scenes again, and back them up on two thumb drives and e-mail them to myself at work, I’ll approach them with that frame of mind. I can never rewrite them like I wrote them the first time. Some images are gone. The ones that matter will come back. New ones will appear. This is the way of everything. When the sand paintings blush with color, and when they vanish on the winds of breath.
CHAPTER 33
The Beginning Is Not the Beginning
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
—Gloria Naylor
Someday maybe you’ll write my story, hey, sugar?” Dad was lying on his left side on his bed, thumbing through a scrapbook I had made for him that contained all his golf tournament clippings, his school musical programs, his wedding announcement in the Wilmington paper, even a piece of desk stationery from his tenure at Blue Cross Blue Shield. If he held any nostalgia about any of the clippings, he didn’t let on then. He paused in front of the photo of him at age eight, in white baggy underwear, trying to walk again after the polio left (or so we thought). He was the face of polio for Wilmington, the boy in the photo spread intended to help raise money for the March of Dimes’ fight for the cure. His gaze reflected both bewilderment and a steady focus.
He closed the scrapbook. “A lot has happened since then.”
“I’ll write your story,” I said, not knowing what that promise would mean for me. I was seventeen then.
I didn’t see that scrapbook again until years after his death and my mother’s remarriage. When I held it in my hands the next time, I was once again seventeen, still trying to freeze the moments of his life. My desire to chronicle in impressive detail the events that made up his life caught me again like the firefly in the Mason jar. In trying so hard to keep everything from changing, the light died, and I was left with black-and-white newsprint photos and articles that captured just the skeleton of his life, and were as dead as he was. This wasn’t his story; it was just a catalog of the things he did. These listings didn’t tell me anything about him, except that he had polio in 1948, was an exceptional golfer, went to Wake Forest and Chapel Hill, married Elinor Ranta, a Lutheran from Brooklyn, in 1965, and sold insurance for Blue Cross Blue Shield. The scrapbook, like his life in some ways, ended after his heart attack in 1976. How must it have made him feel to receive a scrapbook of his life that ended while he was under thirty? To me, as a teenager making the book for him, it seemed like he’d already had a long and full life. Now, as I edge over forty, I taste the bitter saliva of its brevity.
When Dad died, I put a piece of thin typing paper into my IBM Selectric and began:
My father was the greatest man I’ve ever known.
I wrote pages in this vein, trying to get down everything I possibly could before I forgot. Trying to freeze-frame my nineteen years with him. The pages, filled with hero worship and unresolved grief, may represent an authentic capturing of the moment, but they don’t represent good writing. I was trying too hard, wanting too much to be the historian, attaching hard edges of distance to the scenes so that no one could know my father from those words. I wanted to preserve him only for me. In order for me to write in such a way that the reader could get to know him, I would have to let him go.
I wrote about fifty pages in 1987 and then put them in my desk drawer. I couldn’t do it. I felt terrible giving up on writing about my dad, but I didn’t know what to do about it, and, frankly, I was already tired of the blandness of grief. That’s something they don’t tell you; grief is stark as a prairie. Occasionally a fire rushes through, or a flood, but most days, it’s the same—beating sun, shrinking cold, and endless, endless sky.
His story was never going to work as long as I continued to circle around an ideal and an idea of what had happened. It was never going to work as long as I refused to let Dad move. I’ve now lived longer without him than with him. I don’t know that I can claim to have known him at all. My sister and I consistently have different ideas of what he would or wouldn’t have done in a given situation. This makes sense; we each knew a different man, and we’re both different people, so we resonated with different parts of his personality. I had to realize I couldn’t write his story, I could only write his story in relationship to mine. And I couldn’t do that until I had the key components to any story: action, motion, movement. I could stay in the cocoon of frozen animation forever if I wanted to, but there would be no book, no story, no life—for me or for him.
Every novel or story I have ever written begins this way. First, the intellect. The fear of loss if I don’t get down the “idea,” the main points, the theme—the desperation of a theme. I have to write my father’s story because if I don’t, no one will remember him, and if no one remembers him, then no one will remember me. Sticky. Laden with expectations and intentions. Burdened with an impossible mission statement. Beware of writing themes. They cling to your throat like fish netting. Don’t try to write about anything. Instead, write from direct experience of the story as it unfolds in front of you. Release any desire for a specific result. Let the story speak. Shake yourself loose, leaving only the writing pulsing, present, and alive.
After almost twenty years of writing seriously, I now move much more quickly through this place of mandates. I catch myself after a few weeks; oh yeah, Laraine, get out of your head. Oh right, who do you really think you are? Just shut up and listen already.
CHAPTER 34
Sacred Communication
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.
—William Faulkner
I have been thinking about how trapped our characters must feel within the pages of a book—bound, as it were, by the spine, crushed by the cover. Dead until a reader cracks the spine and breaks the chains, allowing the reader’s imagination to merge with the characters’ lives. Maybe there’s a connection. Maybe there isn’t. Inevitably, the book must close, the characters sprawled and pressed flat like dried flowers.
As writers, we give the gift of impermanence to our readers. We allow them to step into a world for a few hours or a few weeks, then step out, changed. We allow them to practice loving fully the people who dance in the sentences. We give them the practice of letting the characters go. Each novel a reader enters teaches detachment and absolute vulnerability if the reader is brave enough to face herself in the pages.
Each novel we write gives us these same gifts. We open our lungs, livers, and spleens and listen to who speaks to us. We notice the ache in our femur and stop to talk to whoever is stuck there. We loosen our jaws to speak what we have been afraid to speak, or unwilling to speak. We relax our wrists, position our fingers over the keyboard, breathe in, and then exhale out with the sound of stories. We listen more deeply when we begin to get in our way. We find ourselves writing things we didn’t know we felt, things we didn’t know were possible. These characters, once awakened, swirl in our dreams. They influence our outward behavior, our interests, and our hobbies. They pull us into unexpected shops or towns. We follow because it is what we writers do.
And then these relationships, longer perhaps than many of our “human” ones, dissolve. They have spoken what they have to say. We have listened to what we can hear. We have built the bridge of letters between them and the rest of the world. What happens to them is no longer a part of our lives. We detach from them, or perhaps more accurately, they detach from us and we wander a bit lost for a while, missing them, wondering why we are missing them, wondering why they didn’t want to stay longer. We haunt our own hallways searching for them.
But then, if we have practiced detachment, a tickle appears at the base of our spines. A sudden obsession with peaches, or the Industrial Revolution, or ant colonies. We follow intuition until a sound cracks through and our fingers sing once again.
Among the countless reasons that writing matters, this is the most important to me. Writing teaches impermanence. It shows us how to move with ease from one chapter of our lives to another. It provides practice for our ultimate transition. It embodies, on the recycled flesh of trees, what is most beautiful, most holy, and most possible within us. Open the book’s covers wide and let my characters move. Open the book’s covers wide and let your hearts and minds expand. Open the book’s covers wide and step back with awe and gratitude for the part of all of us that creates, that risks, and that ultimately, bids us a most fond and joyous farewell.
CHAPTER 35
Characters as Teachers
I don’t want to say I hear voices; well, actually, I do hear voices, but I don’t think it’s supernatural. I think it’s just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo and behold, they stand on their own.
—Anne Tyler
The moon waxes outside my bedroom window. Thumb Butte is silhouetted in grays. Tonight there are bats and coyotes and tiny biting bugs. I smell javelina, though I haven’t seen one rutting around the scrub brush in quite some time. I’m awake at my usual time—3:45 AM. I watch and listen. Sometimes I wake up and just use the bathroom. Sometimes I wake up and pull whichever cat is closer under the covers with me. I can usually get away with that for a few minutes before she gets sick of me and jumps away. But other times, I wake up because something has shown up—a solution to a scene in a novel, a new book idea, a sadness that seems real only at 3:45 AM.
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