A Writer's Space

by Eric Maisel

  Today something was flowing in her with the intensity of an ice-white river powered by glacial melt. She felt cold, not hot, and distracted, not focused. It was a feeling the very opposite of what she supposed “really creating” must feel like. Yet she understood why this was so. She was distracted because plot lines were zipping by like asteroids past a starship, whizzing by as she sorted possibilities and made decisions.

  How did the band get to the island? Why had they brought acoustic guitars with them if they only played electric? Who were they? Were they more like the Go-Gos, the B-52s, or the Bangles, three ancient all-girl bands about which Phoebe knew everything. What threats would she put in their way? Would the dangers be self-inflicted, arising out of personality conflicts—everyone envying the lead singer, say, who, it turned out, could not only hit the high notes but make fire—or would they arrive from the outside—volcanic eruptions, pirates, poisonous lizards?

  These thoughts were zooming by even as she wrote the opening scenes, having to do with the band’s dynamite last concert on their doomed cruise ship. She had her laptop booted up and she was typing furiously. “Fame meets Titanic,” Phoebe said to herself as she pounded away. Her thoughts leaped ahead as she made plot decisions, invented villains, created the ferns and bamboo groves of her island, foreshadowed the last several plot twists without which her thriller wouldn’t thrill. Phoebe was humming.

  She didn’t notice the bevy of muses present. The frog and the bee were playing cribbage in a corner, occasionally exclaiming things like “Fifteen for two, fifteen for four, and a pair for six!” Melanie Caterpillar was nibbling on a leaf she must have brought in from outside, there being no flora in Phoebe’s room. Harold Spider was reading a musty old book that Phoebe had purchased at a library book sale, a collection of travel anecdotes by famous writers. Other muses came and went, some leaving to do their laundry.

  Phoebe had been writing for almost an hour when a serious doubt crossed her mind. “This is mere ENTERTAINMENT!” she heard herself exclaim. “Where’s the depth? Where’s the BEEF?”

  The muses stopped what they were doing. This was the kind of thought that could stop a novel for a month or a lifetime. They held their breath. Suddenly Phoebe laughed. “But a young girl is entitled to write one entertainment. I can write Crime and Punishment when I’m fifteen or sixteen!”

  The muses sighed. Crisis over!

  Fifteen minutes later, after she’d mangled a sentence, Phoebe exclaimed, “What pitiful prose!” Her faced turned pruney. She reread her morning’s work and wanted to vomit. “Bad writing everywhere!” she cried. “No power! No resonance! I have been BORING!”

  This was worse than the previous crisis. The muses waited nervously. But Phoebe laughed her accusation away. “Get real, girl! Everybody knows that writing is rewriting!”

  Phoebe resumed her wild typing. The phone rang. The muses would have liked her not to answer, but they understood that for most people not answering the phone was quite impossible. Phoebe grabbed her portable phone.

  “Hello!”

  It was Wanda. “Will you come shopping with me at the mall? I have to buy—”

  “Sorry! I’m working on my novel today! See you on Monday!”

  She hung up unceremoniously.

  A minute later the phone rang again. This time it was her writer friend Abigail, a real grown-up writer.

  “We’re taking the boys on a picnic to Zaca Creek. Want to come? I made a pasta salad with green olives and pine nuts—”

  “Sorry! I’m working on my novel today!”

  There was a pause on the other end. “So am I! What was I thinking? Who has time to picnic?”

  Phoebe felt a pang of guilt for having ruined the picnic for Rory and Raymond, Abigail’s sons. But of course that wasn’t her fault. People like Abigail had to decide for themselves when they would write, when they would picnic, and whether their children mattered. Phoebe returned to her furious clacking.

  The phone rang again. Phoebe shook her head and almost didn’t answer it. But what if it happened to be a literary agent who, by magic, had become aware of Phoebe’s novel and its greatness? She couldn’t risk turning such a call over to voice mail. She hit the talk button.

  “Hello!” cried a familiar voice. “This is Margot. Remember me? I’m the girl who was fired from dance class. The girl you wouldn’t join in the fountain. I’m out of the hospital now and I’d like to come by. I have quite a story to tell you!”

  “I’m sorry, Margot. I’m working on my novel today and every other spare minute I’ve got.”

  “I could help you with your novel! Let me come over. We could collaborate!”

  “I’m sorry, Margot. Why don’t you write your own book?”

  “Thanks for nothing!”

  Margot hung up. Phoebe shook her head. She didn’t understand Margot’s mania, for which the poor girl had been hospitalized. Her own mild mania was clearly a cat of another stripe, just passion and excitement raring to go. Without giving Margot another thought, she returned to the cruise ship ballroom where her all-girl band was playing its last killer concert.

  Unbelievably, the phone rang a fourth time. This time Phoebe answered angrily.

  “Hello!”

  “Is Mr. or Mrs. Barlow there?”

  “They’re not! Can I take a message?”

  “Maybe you’re able to make decisions about refinancing your home mortgage? Because rates have never been lower—”

  “Mortgage rates were MUCH lower right after World War II,” Phoebe interrupted, as she had done a paper on the subject for history class. “And no, I am not able to make such decisions. And I really must go!”

  Phoebe tried returning to her novel. But suddenly nothing was there. She squinched her face up and tried to picture her ballroom scene. Suddenly Harold Spider sneezed.

  “Musty book I’m reading,” Harold Spider apologized. “Mold.”

  “Thank you very much!” Phoebe cried. “I’m trying to concentrate! What kind of muse are you, sneezing when a person is thinking!”

  “Sorry,” Harold Spider said. He sneezed three more times and apologized three more times.

  “Wonderful!” Phoebe cried. “My concentration is broken. My spirit is broken. Plus I’m hungry!”

  “A little sneezing—” Harold Spider began.

  Phoebe crumpled onto her beanbag chair. She sat there, arms and legs akimbo, for several seconds. Then she popped up. “Well!” she exclaimed. “I had a glorious start to this novel-writing day and a very ignominious finish. Should I call this a good day or a bad day?”

  The muses waited anxiously.

  “I’ll make myself a snack and then decide,” Phoebe said. She had a sudden thought. “Creating is one emotional roller coaster! Who knew?”

  No one—not muse, man, or beast—could have said whether Phoebe would return to her novel that day, that week, or ever. A black cloud scudded over Gold Strike but the sun beat it away. Another black cloud scudded by. So it would be until the end of time. Novels would commence; some would be finished; many would not. Phoebe made herself a snack plate of baby carrots and golden raisins and listened to loud music through her headphones.

  LESSON 34

  There will always be interruptions. How will you handle them?

  CHAPTER 35

  The Writer of Qualities

  The Gold Strike Writers Club, a branch of the California Writers Club, met once a month at Sylvan’s Restaurant for lunch and a guest speaker. Usually about thirty people attended, most of them of retirement age. That number swelled to forty or fifty on special occasions, for instance when awards were handed out to winners of the club’s competition for middle-school writers or when a famous guest speaker came to talk. Phoebe had learned about the club from a flyer posted outside the English office, inviting students to submit a short story or a poem to the competition. Phoebe was toying with the idea.

  Mildly curious about the club, she attended two meetings. At one the guest speaker discuss
ed foreign reporting; a second featured a mystery writer whose mysteries were organized around body parts (A Head for Murder, The Eyes Have It, Dead by a Hair, and so on). Each time she bought a raffle ticket and won, once winning a potted plant (the only prize left on the table) and the second time choosing a book of poetry self-published by a club member, who inscribed the book on the spot.

  A celebrity guest was coming to speak at the April meeting and Phoebe decided to attend. The main problem was the lunch choice. The first time Phoebe had ribs, which were very good but a tad too messy for simultaneous eating-and-socializing. The second time she had broiled salmon, which she discovered could be prepared as appetizingly as dry wall. What to eat? Finally she decided on the Caesar Chicken Salad, half-relishing the idea of a chopped-up Roman emperor. She mailed off her parents’ check and her lunch choice and waited expectantly for the Saturday in question.

  Veronica Blake, the celebrity guest, had written six or seven novels. Phoebe had read three of them. They were very beautiful, very lively, very deep. From the first sentence you knew that you were reading a novel that was going to take you somewhere. The author had control of her ideas and control of her details. Phoebe loved her ethics, or maybe it was her philosophy.

  The first one she read was about a dispute in Greenland over the ownership of some reindeer. The second was set in the Holy Land and focused on a love affair between a Palestinian woman and a Jewish man. The third was set in Boston and had to do with a white-collar crime that everyone refused to take seriously, juxtaposed against the life sentence meted out to an Angolan for smuggling drugs.

  Phoebe arrived early at Sylvan’s Restaurant on the Saturday when Veronica Blake was to speak. She arrived even before the club had set up its ticket-taker table, book table, or raffle table. Several people were in the room where the event was to be held, four or five of them together at a meeting of some sort, the remaining person at a separate table.

  The lone individual was Veronica Blake, who was glancing at a sheet of paper. Phoebe sidled over, using as an excuse the photographs on the wall behind Veronica’s chair, which photographs Phoebe began studiously examining.

  Veronica looked up and smiled. Phoebe smiled back.

  “Your speech?” Phoebe said, nodding at the piece of paper.

  “No,” Veronica replied pleasantly. “A reminder list of the me I would like to be.”

  “Really? You need to remind yourself?”

  “Absolutely! Everybody does.”

  “You look at it often?”

  “I ‘cast furtive glances’ at it, as a romance writer would say. The list is very long and daunting. It’s hard and even a little painful to look at it too directly. Like looking at the sun. You know not to look at the sun directly, but you also know that you need it, yes?”

  “Yes!”

  A question sprang to Phoebe’s mind. But she was shy about asking it. Veronica smiled, which permitted Phoebe to plunge ahead.

  “Do you plot your novels?” Phoebe asked. “Or do you just write them?”

  “I plot,” Veronica Blake replied. “I get more immediate pleasure if I just start, write the scenes that come to me, jot down fragments of dialogue, and let the novel come to life that way. But I no longer trust that method, even though it feels natural. What I now prefer to do is to take a lot of time trying to understand my novel before I write too much of it. I call that ‘figuring out what’s at stake.’ It’s sort of like plotting and sort of like arriving at a theme, but it’s different from either.

  “Sometimes it takes three or four months to arrive at this thing I’m talking about—knowing what’s at stake—because that whole time I have to push aside too-easy solutions, so as to make room for the right solution. In a way it’s more like demolition than creation, because I have to demolish my first, often wrong-headed ideas of what to do with the novel. I have to expose the real reason for writing it. This process I’m describing requires exactly the qualities on my list: the discipline, the energy, the thoughtfulness, and so on. Does that make sense? Have I explained myself clearly?”

  “I think you’ve explained yourself beautifully!” Phoebe replied. “I just don’t know enough about writing novels to really appreciate what you’re saying. I wish I did! I wish I’d written so many bad novels that I could really use your advice! My guess is that what you’re saying will come back to me in six or seven years, after I’ve made a mess of several novels. Then I’ll go, ‘Oho! That’s what Veronica Blake meant!’”

  Veronica Blake smiled. “You may be right! I certainly had to write those bad first novels!”

  People were arriving. It was clear that a large group was coming. A woman diffidently approached Veronica. Assigned to introduce her, she was very nervous and wondered if she could go over her introduction. Phoebe excused herself and found a seat for lunch.

  After lunch and a painfully long and halting introduction, which Veronica Blake sat through graciously, a smile of encouragement never far from her lips, the guest of honor rose to speak. She took her place at the podium and allowed the crowd to settle.

  “Many people dream of writing a novel and a sizable number of them start one,” she began. “Typically it doesn’t go very well and after not too long they find themselves saying, ‘I don’t have what it takes.’ Anxious and discouraged, they fail to ask the question that naturally arises from this thought—namely, ‘What WOULD it take?’”

  She paused and took a sip of water.

  “They don’t ask the question because they fear the answer. They fear they may learn that they really don’t have what it takes. This result, they imagine, would be worse than saying ‘I don’t have what it takes’ and throwing in the towel. They’re wrong! Not creating is worse than trying and possibly failing.”

  She glanced around the room.

  “What they would discover, if they asked themselves that natural question, is that what it takes to write a good novel is very simple to say and even simple to accomplish, in a certain sense. It doesn’t take talent, which is a word I would never think of using. What it takes is resolve, discipline, courage—in short, qualities of character.”

  She paused for emphasis.

  “That’s the long and the short of it. If I wanted to do something which I currently believe I couldn’t do, like become a bassoonist or learn physics, first I would have to quiet the voice in me that wants to say, ‘You have no talent for that!’ and remind myself of what I know to be true, that I might have a chance to do either of those things if I applied myself. Through the application of the best qualities in my character I could do just about anything, as can you.”

  Veronica Blake paused again. Phoebe thought that Veronica had caught her eye and smiled, but all she was sure of was the smile. After another sip of water Veronica continued.

  She spoke for forty-five minutes. It was an inspirational talk but also rather somber and dark. She kept demanding things of her audience, that they write every day, that they write first thing each morning, that they commit to a piece of writing and write it all the way through without abandoning it. At the end of her talk she received a very nice round of applause. But it wasn’t the hearty applause she would have gotten if she’d just told funny anecdotes and asked less of them.

  Phoebe understood. This was a quality speech from a person who loved good qualities. Phoebe wondered where she might get her hands on Veronica Blake’s list. Then she laughed. Of course she already knew what those qualities were—everybody knew what they were. You didn’t need to steal Veronica’s list. You just needed to heroically listen to your own conscience. Phoebe finished her Sprite and left the restaurant just as the raffle was beginning.

  LESSON 35

  Become more creative by improving your character.

  CHAPTER 36

  Phoebe’s Novel Blooms in the Silence

  Saturday morning was so quiet that you could hear stars being born. A silence deeper than a monastery garden’s enveloped Gold Strike and the canyons and valleys f
rom the state capital to Platinum Lake. It was just an ordinary May day, no different from a million other May days, but altogether hushed.

  Mrs. Snyder in Blue Bluff, frightened by the silence, mistook the reflection of the sun on some scudding clouds for an alien spacecraft and reported a UFO. Mr. McFeeny in Mine Shaft, transformed by the silence, dropped his lawsuit against his neighbor, with whom he had been fighting about the trimming of a weeping willow. Mr. Redspan went fishing. Two people in Palestine fell in love. In Paris, where it was very chilly but equally quiet, a baker decided to bake baguettes in the old way. The aroma wafting from his oven made women in the rue Mouffetard weep.

  Phoebe sensed that a silence this deep could precipitate anything. It could make you color your hair red, go mad, jump into the shower, or start a new novel. The silence was golden, dangerous, pregnant, provocative. When you turned on the television you had to turn it right off again, because the sounds the television characters made were like little explosions. Boom! Bam! The same with voices on the radio, the ring of the telephone, the six notes that the doorbell chimed. Bam! Boom! Even the tiniest sound, like Melanie Caterpillar crossing the carpet, shook you like a jet breaking the sound barrier.

  Suddenly it struck Phoebe: “Why do I need a round island?”

  She had been supposing that the island upon which her all-girl band was stranded was round, for no other reason than islands that you pictured were always round, just like lemons were yellow and tangerines orange. Now Phoebe realized that a round island wasn’t the only possibility and didn’t really serve her novel. She had been stuck because of the roundness of her island, which roundness prevented certain adventures. Suddenly she came unstuck.

  Her island was the wrong shape!

  She had to research islands. Why hadn’t that occurred to her before? She had given lots of thought to the shape of her plot but none to the shape of her island. What a strange lapse or blind spot. She got dressed all in a rush, said hello and goodbye to her parents, and stopped, as the library wasn’t open yet, for a hot chocolate and an almond croissant at her favorite café. Then, at ten, she hurried off to begin her research.