The Writing Life

by Ellen Gilchrist

  After I thought of that, I got up from the bed where I was lying, poured fresh-squeezed orange juice into a glass and went back to work. “It’s hard to get back into harness,” the poet Frank Stanford once told me, meaning getting back into the routine and work habits that are the bedrock of a writer’s life.

  But I am good at doing hard things. The old daddy I miss so much got up at dawn every day and did his work and I will do mine also.

  How can this knowledge help my students? Perhaps I will Xerox this and give it to them this fall. Then I will threaten to give them really bad grades if they don’t meet my deadlines for stories. Deadlines, bylines, and a pay check. Those are things a writer needs and why I think an apprenticeship in journalism is a good place for a writer to make a beginning. Is a writing school a good place for a writer? I am making up my mind as I teach in one. I learned to write short stories in this school but I didn’t stay very long. Maybe it is different for each student. The very talented ones should take what we have to teach and move on out into the big world as soon as possible. I believe that because it’s what I did twenty-five years ago and it worked for me.

  Eudora Welty

  MY MOTHER IS ALIVE and her mind is clear but her body is failing. She will be ninety-five years old in a few weeks. For three years she has been bedridden and now she is almost unable to move. It is very painful for me to visit her. I love to look into her eyes and talk to her, which is as it always has been. But to watch the terrible invasions she must undergo to be cared for breaks my heart.

  I tell you this because it reminds me of the year I was lucky enough to be in the only classes Eudora Welty ever taught. That year her beloved mother had been put into a nursing home near Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora’s friends in the English department at Millsaps College had talked her into teaching a creative writing workshop to help cheer her up as she nursed her mother. Also, probably, to help defray the costs of the nursing home. This was a low point in Eudora’s career. She had not published a book in many years and was struggling with the long novel Losing Battles, which was about the lingering last years of a matriarch in the country. Of course, it was a metaphor for what Eudora and her family were going through. Eudora, with her brilliant imagination, had turned her small, almost dying family into a large, laughing clan with lots of powerful young men. In her own family one brother had already died and the other one was ill. Eudora did have two wonderful, strong nieces and I think I see them in the beautiful young women in the novel.

  I think often of that year I spent with Eudora. Her kindness and maturity were the main things I loved about her. She was like my mother and almost the same age. It seemed hard to imagine that the kind, gentle woman who climbed the steps of the Millsaps library two afternoons a week to talk to us was a famous writer. When she talked about literature, about stories she loved, then I believed it, but not when I saw her coming up the steps with her hunched back and wearing her little stocking cap and looking so sad. She drove to the nursing home every afternoon and spent the evening with her mother.

  Tomorrow I am getting in the car to go and spend two days with my mother. The drive I have to make is much longer than the one Miss Welty made but the expression on my face is the same one she wore as she climbed the steps to our classroom. I hope we cheered her up as much as my students cheer me up. They take me out of myself. They present me with problems to solve and I try to solve them.

  Yesterday I had a note in my mailbox asking me to recommend a young woman to the graduate school of education. She was the worst student in my class last year and contributed nothing to the workshop. Half the time she had not read the stories we were going to talk about. Yet I liked her for being honest. “I haven’t read this” was all she would ever say when I called on her. Also, she was always there, on time, and always listening to everything I said. And she turned in her work on time.

  I agonized over what to say in the letter I wrote to the education school. Finally I wrote that she was dependable and honest and very shy about talking in class. I think that was basically true. I told the person to whom I was writing that she didn’t talk in class but I thought it was because she was overwhelmed by the powerful students who were extremely opinionated and critical. After I wrote the letter I decided I believed it. Teaching is turning out to be a lot deeper than I thought at first. Layers upon layers. No wonder no one ever gets any writing done after they begin to teach. At first I didn’t understand that but the longer I teach the more I understand why it happens.

  Another Hard Thing for a Writer to Learn to Handle

  YOU CAN’T BE A PUSSY in this game, which is why I assign Ernest Hemingway’s On Writing to every class I teach. It is a collection of small pieces of writing advice that are scattered around his books and letters. It has been an invaluable help to me in the years I have been writing. It reminds me to be strong and to know that what I am doing has never been easy for anyone. If you want an easy profession find one that has a more dependable source of income and praise.

  The great thing about writing is that you are self-employed. The bad thing about writing is that you have to wait on other people to find out if you are going to be published. Then, you have to wait to find out if anyone is going to buy the book, or like it, or read it, or keep it in print.

  A writer cannot afford to spend much time thinking about all of that. A writer is a person who writes, who continues to create, who believes he can create and that the world is so full of material that if we all wrote all the time we would never begin to use it up.

  Here is the process that leads to publication. You think of something to write and you start writing it. You don’t know exactly what you’re doing. You don’t have a blueprint or a map. You are taking a line for a walk, as an artist once said about drawing.

  Sometimes this process catches fire. Sometimes it doesn’t. The longer you work as a writer the more likely you are to know which is which and you learn to abandon the projects that aren’t leading anywhere.

  When something does catch fire, when the muse appears and the work is going well and you can’t wait to get back to the typewriter each morning, to FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT, then you begin to think about showing what you are doing to your editor or agent. In my case my editor and agent are close friends and trust each other so sending work to my agent includes them both. If he thinks it is good enough he will send it right over to my editor.

  Then the wait begins. If the work is good I will know it and not worry too much about whether they are going to like it. I should worry about whether what I sent them is something they can sell to my publisher or something the publisher can sell to the public but I can’t afford to think about that. I have to follow my heart, write what I know or believe or dream or am interested in and hope it turns out well.

  What am I supposed to do while they are reading the work I have sent them? Keep on writing as if it didn’t matter. I usually send about sixty pages of a manuscript to them. If it is a novel I will include an outline of what I think the rest of the book will be. If it is short stories I only send the stories. In the case of this book it will be about twenty small essays.

  Then I wait. I am waiting now. But I am not worried about this book. It is something I have wanted to write for years. I want to help young writers. I want to help aspiring writers. I want to help the writer I was when I was forty years old and gave up drinking and decided to settle down and use my talents.

  I have thought on and off for years about writing this book but I could not get started. I couldn’t find an entry into the material. Then I began to teach, thinking I would never write again and happy to quit. The first semester that I taught I wrote a book of stories that I love. The second semester I wrote nothing but I began to make notes for these essays, thinking they might be of use someday.

  This is the process in the weather of the mind. This is how you wait for lightning. “A poet is someone who stands out in rainstorms all his life and once or twice gets struck by li
ghtning,” Randall Jarrell once wrote. I was solaced by that when I began writing. I am solaced by it now.

  But what if the manuscript you send your editor isn’t good enough? What if it is a terrible mess like the first draft of The Annunciation that I mailed to New York City in November of 1981? I had never written a novel or wanted to write one but Little, Brown had given me an advance for one on the basis of a book of short stories I had written the year before that had a big success after it was published by a university press.

  I didn’t question why they wanted a novel. They had offered me fifty thousand dollars to write one which was a huge sum in 1981 so I set to work to do it.

  I had no idea how bad the manuscript was that I sent them in November, but I remember it was very long. Three or four hundred pages of rambling description and dialogue, with many asides and quotations and too many characters. Later I burned hundreds of pages of manuscript that led up to the book I finally published. I am not sorry that I burned it. I can’t imagine a time when I would want to read it again.

  Poor Roger Donald, my editor, and poor Don Congdon, my agent. They had taken my success and turned it in a direction it didn’t want to go and they probably knew it as they tried to deal with the manuscript I had sent them. I remember Don telling me on the phone one day that I must remember this was not a movie, there was no actress performing The Annunciation, and I had to make my central character real ON THE PAGE.

  But that was later. First the manuscript was sent to Roger Donald, then silence fell. Thanksgiving went by, then Christmas, with not a word from New York City about my book. If I had known then what I know now I would have tried to start writing something else but I was new to publishing so I just sweated it out. “They have you on tenterhooks,” my psychoanalyst told me. “Call them up and tell them to report to you. Then take your boyfriend and go somewhere for a vacation. Change the venue.”

  Luckily I was in love so I took my boyfriend and we went up to Eureka Springs and spent a week at a small resort on a mountain lake. We built fires and made love and ate wonderful meals in German and Italian and French restaurants but I was suffering terribly. I called Roger many times. Sometimes he returned the calls. Sometimes he didn’t.

  Deep inside myself I must have known how bad the manuscript was and now I would recognize that feeling, but then I needed someone to blame so I blamed him for my distress.

  Think of it from his point of view. He had discovered a new writer and given me a lot of money to write another book and the book I sent him was a mess. This happens all the time, I have learned in the years since, but then I thought I was the first person in the world to suffer such distress.

  There was a happy ending. By the end of January Roger had managed somehow to edit the thing and mailed it back to me and Don Congdon got on the phone and healed and coached me and they both told me I could do it and I went back into the manuscript and rewrote it and made it better and then they edited it again and then I rewrote it again and by the end of the summer I had finished the book.

  In May of 1983 it was published. It got bad reviews and sold sixty or seventy thousand copies. Since then it has sold about six hundred thousand copies in different editions, been optioned for the movies twice and made me a lot of money and earned me a lot of fans. It’s not a great novel but it’s a good read and people like it and keep telling other people to read it.

  In the wake of all that distress I went happily back to writing short stories and wrote Victory Over Japan, for which I won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1984.

  Lucky me. I have always been lucky in my work. Lucky in the wonderful men and women who have taught and helped me on my way. Don Congdon and Roger Donald and Bill Harrison, who taught me how to write the short story, and Eudora, and the muse, and my family who put up with the stories I tell.

  How I Invented Traceleen

  FIRST, I LEARNED to love a woman who was very different from me. On the day I moved to New Orleans my mother-in-law sent a lovely black woman named Rosalee over to my house to help me move and, if we liked each other, to become my housekeeper. Her aunt worked for my mother-in-law and she was working there part-time as a laundress. She was adept at ironing button-down Brooks Brothers shirts until they looked like objects of art. She was very beautiful, quiet and gentle and ladylike. She reminded me always of a dancer. She moved with grace and she brought beauty and grace into my life.

  She was the mother of three small children and was in the process of getting an unhappy divorce from their father. She came to my house four days a week around ten in the morning and stayed until the afternoon. She was so good at everything she did that she was often finished early and went on home. If her children were ill or needed her, it was fine with me if she stayed at home. I was appalled at what a small sum of money she was accustomed to making and quickly began paying her as much as I could. My husband was generous about this. Finally, after her divorce, and after I visited her in the project and was appalled at the conditions there, my mother and I lent her the money to make a down payment on a small house. I loved Rosalee and she loved me. Whatever anyone wants to say about the fact that she was the maid and I was the employer is their problem. We were not into that sort of thing. We liked each other. We came to love each other and we helped each other and we had a good time working together to make life better for both our families.

  My husband and I had learned to scuba dive and we would go off on trips for several weeks at a time to islands in the Caribbean to try out different reefs. While I was gone on these trips Rosalee got into the habit of writing down what was happening on As the World Turns, a soap opera we both watched every day. I don’t remember whose idea it was for her to write down the events of As the World Turns. I think she just started doing it to be nice. At that time there was no Soap Opera Digest or plot summaries in the newspapers.

  Some years later, when I had just begun writing short stories, I was in the bathtub in my house in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I heard a voice saying, “Another time, Miss Crystal did a real bad thing at a wedding.” It was the voice Rosalee used to write down the plot of As The World Turns. I jumped out of the tub, threw on a red towel, ran to my typewriter and began to write the first Traceleen short story. I was laughing the whole time I was writing the story and I still think it is funny. I was seeing my own crazy, obsessive behavior through the eyes of the most nonjudgmental person I had ever had as a friend.

  Unfortunately, I allowed my editor to talk me into changing the first line of the story when I put it into Victory Over Japan, but I restored it for my Collected Stories.

  God bless Rosalee Harris for her goodness and kindness to me in real life and for her generosity in allowing me to model a character after the divinity of her being. I love Rosalee and always will and I love Traceleen and Miss Crystal, even though they are pale shadows of their progenitors. There are a lot of real stories I could never tell.

  How to Move Characters from One Place to Another

  IF YOU WANT TO LEARN how to make characters move around and do things, open up Huckleberry Finn to any page and start reading. No one does it better than the old master, Mark Twain. One night I was driving to Nebraska in a rainstorm and turned on the radio to keep me company as I drove through the wheat fields of Kansas. I tuned into a station that was playing a recording of Huckleberry Finn. I started listening at the point where most readers stop paying attention in the book, the part where Huck and Tom have Jim hidden out in a shed although they know he has already been freed by Tom’s aunt.

  It was fascinating. I forgot that I was all alone on a highway in a storm and had no place to stay for the night. I forgot I didn’t have a map and wasn’t even sure I was on the right road. I was cheering for Huck to get up the courage to tell Tom they had to tell Jim the truth and let him go home.

  First you have to create characters that are more real than real people. Then you have to let them talk like real people, even if you have to face down the language police to do it.
Then you have to think up things for them to do that are the sort of stories that would make you buy the morning paper to find out what happened in the end. A great writer like Mark Twain will give you so much information that anyone with brains could figure out what will happen eventually but still keep you spellbound as you wait to find out how and when it will happen.

  You write your way into a character or characters. You cannot think up characters or outline them. You have to write them in action with other characters. William Shakespeare knew Hamlet for a long time before he brought him full-blown into his own play. The first we hear of Hamlet is through the conversation of two of his friends, Marcellus and Horatio. “Let us impart what we have seen tonight/Unto young Hamlet, for upon my life,/This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him,” the good Horatio says. The playwright knows his central character so well that even this first mention is charged with meaning and with power.

  In the next scene we are in the crowded court and after hearing requests from other characters the king turns to a black-suited Hamlet standing apart and speaks to him. “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son—”

  Hamlet answers in an aside to the audience. “A little more than kin, and less than kind.” Already, in his first speech he has distanced himself from the court and made the audience his friend. Later, when he speaks his great monologues we will not be surprised.

  Shakespeare had written the play once before. He knew his character well.

  I tell my students that one story does not exhaust a character’s possibilities for a writer. I discovered this by doing it. It seemed natural to me. When I was a child I had loved series of books having the same main character and I still do love them. Sometime last year I discovered John le Carré and devoured all his books. I especially loved the ones about the master spy, George Smiley