The Writing Life

by Ellen Gilchrist

  A month after I fired the maid the owners called and said she needed money so I sent her several hundred dollars in the mail. I was embarrassed that I had forgotten to do it when I fired her but I was so bombarded by the strangeness of living in New York City and having to bring food and firewood into the house via a doorman and an aging elevator that I wasn’t working at the top of my form.

  This was my state of mind when my editor called and asked me to come to Little, Brown and talk to the “gang” and go to lunch with him at Le Périgord, which is my favorite restaurant in New York City.

  When I got to the Little, Brown offices everyone cheered my book award and treated me like royalty and then Roger took me into his office and told me that People magazine and Newsweek wanted to interview me as soon as possible.

  “Of course not,” I answered. “I don’t like either of those magazines. I might do Newsweek if the reporter is someone I respect but I definitely won’t be in People. It’s trash. No self-respecting author would agree to that.”

  “Oh, you have to do it,” he begged. “It’s publicity. You can’t turn down that kind of thing. They aren’t going to write anything bad about you. People just want to know who you are.”

  “They can read my books,” I answered. “I write the books for them. They can have the books. They can’t have me. I’m not for everybody.”

  Roger begged in the taxicab to Le Périgord and he looked sad and agreed to tell them no for me and then he looked even sadder and I remembered he had gone to Andover on a scholarship because his father was poor, so I relented and said I would try to talk to the reporter from People magazine but I wasn’t sure how much I would tell her about myself.

  The next morning she called and asked in a whiny, sad little voice when we could meet. “This afternoon,” I suggested. “Come over and see this crazy Victorian apartment I have rented. It’s so full of furniture you will think it is a store.”

  At two that afternoon she showed up at the door. She was a mousy little woman with stringy hair and no makeup and she was clutching a large notebook with pens clipped to the edges of the cover. “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests ….” How had I forgotten that?

  We began to talk. She asked if she could use a tape recorder and I agreed and helped her set it up on a table. Such things were more unwieldy and difficult to operate than they are now.

  She wanted to know about my childhood. I told her about my powerful, funny, loving father and my wonderful, beautiful mother and my wild, good-looking brothers. I told her about the Mississippi Delta and our plantation, which had been built by the descendants of Yankee soldiers after the Civil War. I told her about my cousins and my friends in Jackson and New Orleans. I told her about New Stage Theatre and Jane Petty and Ivan Rider and Patti Black.

  She listened. Then she began to cry. “My mother was a painter,” she said. “She was too busy with her work to be interested in me. I never got to go to the country and be on a farm. I never had a happy life.” And so on for a long time.

  I went over to her and put my arm around her shoulders. I tried to cheer her up but she could not be cheered. She had gone into a decline. After a few minutes of her crying I made tea for her and gave her some of my homemade chocolate chip cookies. Then, in a burst of inspiration, I had an idea. “The Royal Shakespeare Company is playing tonight at Lincoln Center,” I said. “They are doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am going to take you to see it. That will cheer you up.” I got on the phone and called Little, Brown and told my editor what was going on. “You got me into this,” I told him. “So get us some tickets. I was going tomorrow night anyway. Call me back.”

  In fifteen minutes he called back and said the tickets would be waiting at the box office at seven that night.

  I fed cookies to the poor girl from People magazine, then she went home and changed and returned later and I took her to dinner and then to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. I could hardly enjoy the play for her being sad in the seat beside me but at least she had stopped crying.

  The next week People magazine sent a splendid photographer named Thomas Victor to spend ten days following me around and taking wonderful photographs of me all over New York City. He returned on Christmas morning and photographed my entire family who had come to visit me. He gave me dozens of fabulous prints of these gorgeous photographs and my family cherishes them. Until his death ten years later, he was one of my favorite people in New York and photographed me many more times, always at someone else’s expense.

  In late January of 1985 the article came out in People magazine. It was all right, but smart-alecky. It tried to make light of my achievements as a writer and was smug and mean-spirited about the South. “See,” I told my editor when I had the magazine in my hand. “I told you it was a mistake to talk to this lady.”

  “Publicity is publicity,” he answered. “I think it’s very flattering actually.”

  “Look at the photograph they used,” I replied, pointing to a silly, staged photograph of me standing on a bench in Central Park. “Why didn’t she use some of the ones that make me look beautiful?”

  “That’s not how they do it in magazines,” he answered. “You should read some of them sometime so you’d know.”

  “Not in this life,” I answered. “I read poetry. I read books.”

  WINTER 2000

  The Sinking Ship

  THE WAY YOU START WRITING is by writing. Over and over again I have proven this to myself but I always forget it the next time. I always believe that I will never write again. The first time I finished a book a painter was visiting me. Her name is Ginny Stanford and her wonderful paintings have been the covers for nine of my books.

  “I’ll never write again,” I told her, the week after my editor told me my book was finished and I should quit writing it.

  For days after that conversation I had tried to start something new but couldn’t think of a thing to write. “That’s it,” I told the painter. “It’s over. It was great while it lasted, but now it’s done.”

  That afternoon she made me a wonderful drawing of a ship sinking in the waves of the sea. “I’ll never write again,” it said on the bottom of the picture. “September, 1981.”

  Since then I have published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Still, I believe it every time. I accept the fact that the part of my life that was writing is over, and I go, at first gingerly, and then wholeheartedly, back into real life. I call my friends, I visit my family, I write letters, invite people to lunch and dinner, buy a new bathing suit, consider risking skin cancer by getting a tan, throw myself into exercise programs, dye my hair platinum blond.

  This goes on for weeks or months or even, in its last manifestation, for several years. I write a few magazine articles, perhaps a poem that I throw away, I begin to read again, real books, fiction by people other than myself, or I reread books I have loved.

  Then, one day, the germ of an idea begins to enter my head. I begin to see a book before me. I see it mostly in the mornings and maybe I go to the typewriter and make some notes or take a legal pad outside and sit in a sunny chair and make some notes. This is nothing serious, I tell myself, I’m just fooling around. I’m not a writer anymore. Who am I fooling? Maybe I never was a writer. Maybe I was pretending to be one.

  Finally, I get the idea in my head that if I write a book I will be paid for it and I could use the money for my grandchildren’s education or to help out with a new baby someone in my family is having or to replace my old car or fix the roof. All of this is a lie I tell myself to disguise the fact that I’m dying to start writing again and I don’t know if what I’m going to write will be ANY GOOD OR NOT.

  That is exactly what my students tell themselves that blocks them from writing. They tell themselves I DON’T KNOW IF IT WILL BE ANY GOOD OR NOT because it’s tru
e. They don’t know and the only way they can find out is to do it.

  My job as a teacher is tell them that I’ll help them make it better if they will grind out a first draft. You don’t have to make a home run, I tell them. Just get on first base and I’ll knock you in. That is what Frank Stanford told me when he helped me put together my first book of poetry.

  But I digress. I want to finish telling you about how the spell of writing comes over me. I tell myself I will get paid, then I call my agent and ask him to get me a contract for a book. He always says he will as if there is no question that anything I write will be welcomed.

  Then I start writing in earnest. At first, for the first few days, “it is hard to get back into harness,” another thing Frank Stanford told me. I am accustomed to going out to run first thing in the morning. It is difficult to sit at a typewriter instead but I spur myself on with the prospect of being paid and I make myself do it. By the third or fourth day I don’t want to go out and exercise. I have started a process and I want to see where it leads. Or else, my unconscious mind has decided to start telling me what I’ve been thinking and I can’t wait to hear what it has to say.

  Now my nunlike life kicks in. I stop wearing makeup. I take the phone off the hook. I wear my oldest, most comfortable clothes, I’m careful what I read and who I talk to, I only make appointments in the afternoons and not many of them. I am a writer again and every moment of my life and every breath I take is to prepare me for the time when I wake from sleep and go to my typewriter and serve the muse. There is a muse. She has been with me since my first book. Perhaps she is Athena or the ghost of Edna Millay or maybe the bard himself, walking around London listening to his fellow men and remembering the fields and flowers and seasons of his childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon, or imagining the forest of Arden, which was his mother’s maiden name. Is this mysterious or what? You bet it is.

  Why do I come back to the typewriter so headily each morning? Because it feels good. The brain is easily addicted to feeling good and nothing on earth, with the exception of great sex, feels as good as having written well and truly in the morning. Actually, it is better than sex because you control the whole activity and the afterglow can last for years if the work is published and other people profit from it. The lasting pleasure is not in their praise but in your knowledge that you have contributed something of value to the culture from which you derive your being.

  FALL 2002

  Breaking the Rules

  RULES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN. The best thing a writing teacher ever told me was that every time he said something about how to write it ricocheted and came back and hit him in the head. Show, don’t tell, always ricochets because every great writer has told us plenty. The work for the young writer is to find the balance. This is the work of the ear. A good writer is a person with a good ear who can hear what the sentence or paragraph is supposed to sound like to the reader. It must ring true to the writer’s voice.

  Voice, ear, the ability to write is like a singing voice.

  Because I believe all of the above I believe young writers should be careful about what they read. I have read great poetry all my life. I am drawn to it. Every morning when I am down at the coast, where I spend half my days, I pick up a book by Robert Frost and read a poem. It is the first thing I do every day and it never fails to cheer me up and teach me and make me wonder at the greatness of Frost and the wonder of nature and the beauty of the seasons. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as Dylan Thomas wrote.

  On the coast where I read Frost there are no real seasons. Flowers are always in bloom, leaves are always on the trees, there is almost never any frozen water, the birds don’t leave. I think I am reading Frost to remember my other home, up in the Ozark Mountains, which is usually covered with ice when I’m on the coast.

  When I am in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which I call my “real” home, I read William Shakespeare every Sunday afternoon with a group of friends. We sit around my dining room table and read the plays out loud. We have become very good at it. At least two of us can pronounce all the names correctly and we almost never stumble over the language as we did when we began this joyous ritual sixteen years ago. Every Sunday afternoon I fill my heart with the greatest writing in the English language. It is also filled with metaphors from nature and the seasons. If I did not live up here where water freezes and leaves fall from the trees I could not understand lines like “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” or, “Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,/As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea/Contagious fogs, which, falling in the land,/Hath every pelting river made so proud/That they have overborne their continents …” or, “And thorough this distemperature we see/The seasons alter; hoary-headed frosts/Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,/And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown/An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds/Is, as in mockery, set …”

  Rules are made to be broken. I tell my students to read great literature. If you want to be television producers, watch television. If you want to be writers, read.

  And yet, with the exception of poetry and newspapers, I almost never read while I am writing. If I am deep into a writing project I don’t want anyone else’s voice to penetrate my unconscious mind. When I am writing I don’t like anyone else’s writing voice.

  Write what you know. Show, don’t tell. Writing is rewriting. Don’t use modifiers unless they are very special and are earning their way. Question every adjective and question adverbs twice or three or four times. All of those things are probably true most of the time for every writer. A writer who is writing at white heat with the muse at his shoulder doesn’t need any rules. All he needs to do is be a good typist.

  FALL 2003

  In the Weather of the Heart

  AN ARCHITECT TOLD ME ONCE, “Write it from the heart and it will be great.” I was deep into a book about the friendship between a troubled young mother and a budding architect who was her friend. The book was about my real friendship with the real architect. He had asked me to write it. He was dying. It was his dying wish that I tell some of the stories that we shared.

  On the rare occasions when I speak in public, and the even rarer ones when I agree to answer questions about my work, students ask me if my family and friends mind when I use my life as fodder for my work. “Several times they have asked me to write about them,” I answer. “My sister-in-law in Alabama once said to me, ‘Why do you never write anything about me? I certainly think I’ve had an interesting life.’ “ She had two kidney transplants when such things were fairly uncommon. One kidney came from her father and the second one from her mother. The week before the second transplant she and her mother moved into the most expensive hotel in Birmingham, Alabama, and went shopping at the finest stores. Since they are the same size—both are dainty, extremely beautiful women with tiny waists and feet—they figured whoever survived could wear the clothes. When people talk about steel magnolias I always smile to myself over the silly models they use in Hollywood. They should have seen Hilton Hagler and her mother buying shoes the day before they lay down on tables to be transplant subjects.

  Another thing Hilton did was marry my brother twice. Both weddings were gorgeous. I was a bridesmaid in one and the maid of honor in the second one. Hilton was right. I did owe her a story and I wrote a good one for her. It is called “The Blue-Eyed Buddhist.” I left it out of my Collected Stories because I thought the ending was too sad but when we redo the book someday I will ask Little, Brown to add it to the stories.

  The book about the architect and me when we were young is called Net of Jewels. He loved the title and painted a beautiful abstract for me to use for the cover but I couldn’t get the art department to use it. The architect had died by the time the book was published and never knew his painting wasn’t on the cover. The book is out of print right now. Perhaps when it is reprinted I can get the publisher to use it. Little, Brown has always been my publisher and I have been through many art directo
rs with them. At the moment they have a great one. He would see the beauty of this painting so I will keep my fingers crossed that the book goes back into print while he’s in charge.

  All of what I have written so far in this essay is to illustrate for young writers as well as I can how very strange and mysterious and yet simple writing really is. At the core of writing is this heart-driven desire to praise, remember, and love. “A process in the weather of the heart,” as Dylan Thomas wrote. Most of my teaching is about the outward process of writing, about training for the job, making yourself go back to the typewriter and rewrite, and all of that is helpful to a young writer. But the truth is more beautiful than that. “Write it from the heart and it will be great.” A student who wrote a story about trying to protect her younger brother from the bullies on the back of the school bus was writing from her heart. We wept with her, when, against her warnings, the boy kept going back there to take his punishment until he earned his place among the men. She was a young woman with two children and another on the way who had spent most of the last few years cleaning houses for a living. Somehow she had stayed close to her heart, to the real stuff, to what makes us care and weep. I want to lead my students to that place. I want to read what they write when they have found it.

  SUMMER 2002