And just like that, the beautiful clean kitchen of her self-esteem, where she was cooking up her story, got trashed.
Even our biggest fans do not understand never to ask HOW, but WHEN. When is your book coming out? Not how.
Peter Block’s wonderful book The Answer to How Is Yes helps explain that “how?” is not a creative question, and certainly not an empowering one. It is fear based. And as writers-in-the-making, we do not dabble with that devil.
It is better not to share your writing with the world while it is still a little book-fetus inside you.
If you’ve ever been pregnant and have seen your little pea with its beating heart on the ultrasound, you don’t ask, How am I going to turn this blob into a baby? No, you just know that something is growing and that by some magical alchemy of you, God, DNA, folate, and bit of luck, a baby will arrive. When it’s ready. You’re part of the process, but there are other forces at work too.
It’s like that with writing. For a while, it’s a little book-blob. It doesn’t know yet how it’s going to grow its heart and toes and eyelashes. But it will. If we shut up and let it get on with it. Mysteries don’t like to be interrogated.
Learning to shut up and keep secrets is essential to the art of gestation. We don’t celebrate conception publicly. We wait for birth.
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Guidelines for trusting yourself
Self-trust is an intimacy we accrue, like all intimacies: with attention and deliberate devotion. There are no rules, no instruction manual we can follow to achieve it. Here are some practices that have helped me, which I pass on to you . . .
Find a steady place inside you that is more solid than longing, that is fueled by some ambition and courage. Let your writing flow from this place.
Become as clear as you can about why you want to write. Don’t stop being curious about the pull writing has for you.
Encourage yourself the way you’d encourage a child you adore who has a dream to do something wonderful. Tell yourself, That’s a worthy goal; my story is worth telling.
Find a group of other writers who can support and encourage you. Hang around with other writers so you can be a writer nerd and talk writer stuff.
Subscribe to writer newsletters and receive writer mail.
Pretend you’re already published. Write the blurb for your book and make a mock-up of the cover.
Write a glowing review of your book-to-be.
Find a mentor who will help you grow as a writer, one whom you trust to be honest with you.
Find one book that’s been published by the publisher you dream of having publish your book. Make sure this book is shit. Real crap. It has to be a book that makes you know with utter certainty that you can write a better one. Keep this book by your desk. Every time you look up from your screen, there it will be—published shit. You will not write shit. If this book could get published, yours will too.
PART III
Triggers
The beginning is always today.
— Mary Shelley
So how and where do we begin?
By now you know you can begin anywhere. This, however, is not much practical help, is it? It’s too vague, and we can easily get lost in “anywhere.” Too much choice, weirdly, doesn’t free us, it censors us. Notice how a deadline or a tight topic concentrates our thoughts and energies? I’d much prefer to be told, “Write about the history of the tampon” than “Write about anything.”
So here are some suggestions that can serve as triggers, trails inward to lead you to your story.
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Little
There was a time when we saw the world uncontaminated, when our naïveté and ignorance allowed us to see everything for the first time. As kids we believed what we were told by the adults we trusted. The movie Life Is Beautiful tells the story of Guido, a Jewish-Italian bookstore owner who, together with his young son Giosué, is incarcerated in a German concentration camp during World War II. He turns their existence into a magical game, and in this way, he keeps his child from the horror of their reality. Children trust with blind devotion. Until they don’t.
Childhood memories are potent partly because little people are, in the words of Carol Shields in her novel Unless, in “a locked closet of unknowing.” Children have partial understandings, gaps in their knowledge, and these spaces easily become filled with monsters and Wild Things.
We all arrived clean, uncontaminated. But we may have been exposed early to the toxicity and infectious diseases of life. Many of us had painful childhoods—we lost a sibling or a parent, or faced abuse, illness, bullying, loneliness. As children, that world was all we knew. It was our “normal.” So we found ways to survive.
How did you survive your childhood?
Much of our grief as adults has to do with the way in which we have failed the children we were, ignored their dreams, disregarded their needs, forced them to grow up and live out other people’s choices and demands. Just about any story from our childhood is interesting if we remember it: the first time we saw snow, how we played tickle-toes with our sister, where we went for comfort, what made us afraid, what made us joyful.
When tackling your life story, write about:
memories of sounds, smells, tastes from early childhood;
objects from the past—what you loved or played with;
your mother and father and other important adults in your life, and the ways in which they were there for you and the ways in which they were not;
your siblings—the good, the bad, the painful;
the house you grew up in;
your pets, favorite toys, hobbies, and how you spent your time as a child when no one was looking;
who was around for you and who was absent;
your friends, not only people, but also animals, plants, special secret places, imaginary friends;
what frightened you;
what magic you believed in;
your family’s secret and how you found out about it or just intuitively knew it;
what you thought about adulthood and what you dreamed of becoming when you grew up;
your most beloved teacher;
what your mother always told you;
your grandparents;
the rules in your home;
your favorite book;
your champions—maybe an older brother, a grandmother, an uncle, or a special teacher;
your bullies—perhaps an older sister, a teacher, a neighbor, or a parent;
your mother’s or grandmother’s kitchen;
your traumas and terrors; or
the labels used in your family (the black sheep, the difficult middle child, the strange one, the ugly duckling, the princess, the crybaby, the sissy, bossy-boots, the oversensitive one, the lazy one, the irresponsible one).
Trawl through old photographs, if you have them. Begin to write into the prompt “I remember . . .” or “When I was a child . . . ,” and see what emerges. One memory will snag another and another, and soon you will find you are remembering moments you thought you’d forgotten. Don’t judge them, just record them. Let them come back to you.
Once we open the door and summon these memories in, they acknowledge our invitation. They offer themselves back to us like abandoned orphans. They come home.
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Naïve no more
But there came a time when we woke into an altered consciousness. We started to see the world not through the eyes or beliefs of the adults around us, but through our own eyes. Our innocence was either slowly eroded or we were blasted with brutal knowledge—loved ones die, parents get divorced, fathers are absent, mothers are depressed, no one lives happily ever after, the world is unfair. We got a whiff of the gas chamber. We saw a burning monk. There was blood in our living room. Terrorists struck again. And just like that, the magic of our childhood was gone.
If childhood was the equivalent of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, our teenage years were Songs of Experience. Danger, fear, and shame
arrived along with periods, breasts, wet dreams, and pimples. We began to question and push back against the rules, the injunctions not to go near the edge, talk to strangers, play with fire, pierce it, answer back, masturbate, experiment with illegal substances.
Sex arrived. At least the longing for it. And the fantasies coupled with trepidation.
We rejected, rebelled, sought our own adventures, forged our own paths. We turned our backs on our emotional, social, and philosophical inheritance. We went in search of our own paths.
So you could write about:
the moment you associate with your “loss of innocence” or when your magic was stolen;
the betrayals of childhood—who and what let you down;
loneliness;
your first kiss;
your first sexual experience;
your first decent sexual experience;
not fitting in;
the first time you defied your parents or rebelled;
playing with fire;
walking away as an act of claiming your selfhood (what were you walking away from, such as parents or expectations, and what self were you claiming?);
the first time you “experimented” (sexually, with drugs, alcohol, porn, cigarettes, weapons, guns, or anything else you were told to stay away from);
getting piercings and tattoos;
mixing with the “wrong crowd”;
risks you took;
risks you wish you’d taken;
what it meant to you to “come of age”;
moments of defiance;
someone who was a great influence on your life, such as a teacher, coach, friend, bully, or mentor (what did they tell you, what did they see in you?);
how you have rebelled.
If you’re reading these prompts and thinking, I never did that or that or that, guess what? You missed out. Now write about all the ways in which you got shortchanged on your adolescence and how this plays out in your life today.
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They may not mean to, but they do
In Philip Larkin’s hilarious but sobering poem “This Be the Verse,” he reminds us that our parents screw us up, even though they may not mean to. This may come as a relief to those of us who were feeling a little shortchanged in the happy-family department. My sense is that people who come from happy families go on to become preschool teachers and laughter therapists. To be a writer, you probably need a bit of unhappy family history, you know, to work with. As Tolstoy’s opening line to Anna Karenina reminds us, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In the kiln of family, each of us is shaped and dented by how much or how little we were loved in the beginning. We know now that our earliest experiences in our families of origin mold our self-understanding. In our first relationships (with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, and extended family), we learned about loss, forgiveness, anger, trust, safety, loneliness, belonging, tolerance, and generosity. Parenting, we’re learning, is best undertaken when it’s not a part-time hobby and we have our own shit together. But our folks didn’t know that.
In those early incubators, we formed our basic understanding of relationships, marriage, and parenthood. We took those blueprints with us into the world and went on to have our own lovers, partners, friendships, and children—or not.
This is fertile ground for exploring our stories.
You can write about:
three questions you wish you could have asked your father;
three things you wish you could say or could have said to your mother;
the first time you fell in love;
the first time someone fell in love with you;
yourself through the eyes of your first love;
someone you feel strongly about (positively or negatively);
the one person who “gets” you;
the one who got away;
unrequited love;
how you feel about marriage or commitment;
experiences of infidelity—others’ or your own;
broken families;
losing someone you loved;
pregnancy, childbirth, becoming a mother or father;
all the people you have loved in your life;
a relationship that ended badly (told first from your point of view and then from the other person’s point of view); or
the three most important relationships in your life and what they have taught you about yourself.
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Skin and bones
One of the most reliable places to enter your writing is through your body. Why? Because it’s there. And as long as you’re breathing, it’s working.
In Dubliners, James Joyce wrote, “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” We do not want to be like Mr. Duffy.
It doesn’t matter how you get into your body as long as you get out of your head. That’s where the noise is. You want the silence of sinew, the music of muscle, the beat of blood.
When we don’t sink below our chins, our writing can become abstract and incorporeal: “The oceans float . . . clouds of life . . . strips of light . . . harmony . . . heaven swivels . . .”
It’s heady, a bit “‘what does this even mean?” And the minute a reader has to stop and ask What does this mean? we’ve lost them. So one way to make sure we stay focused is to tether ourselves to skin and bone. We want to make sure that when we write about oceans, we’re talking about colors (the white lace hem of the water) and sounds (the shushing of waves on sand). That we’re tasting, smelling, feeling. From these embodied descriptions, we can take the reader on a journey into the emotion that the “bitter brine” or “silver stretch of water like satin” evokes.
As writers, we want to live right in the heart of our bodies. We want to be able to share and communicate the full sensual experience of what it is like to feel hungry, afraid, lost, in pain, in love—the whole glorious catastrophe of what it means to be human.
Our writing voice is the guts of our writing. To find it, we have to go deep down into our belly. So get inside your skin. Write about physical experiences and sensations.
We have five windows into our bodies—the senses. Choose any of them. Though we all see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, each of us does it differently, in ways that are unique to us. Some of us see colors; others see shapes. Some of us notice the spaces around things more than the things themselves. Some of us hear too much, some of us hear undertones, and some can only hear the silences.
When we see things, we tend to hardly look at them. We gloss over. We glance. We don’t allow ourselves to pause in the sensual experience. Remember in the movie The Lion King when Rafiki leads Simba to water and Simba says, “That’s not my father. That’s just my reflection”?
Rafiki says, “Look harder.”
Find ways of seeing you have not seen before. Look for what you cannot see. Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”
One way to make sure we are looking harder is to come to things curiously, never assuming we know what is there. It’s this kind of sensory curiosity that helps us avoid lapsing into mundane thinking and cliché. When we look at clouds, faces, oceans, we want to see the way we see, not recycle Wordsworth or Eliot or something we saw on Facebook.
Write about:
what you see when you look in the mirror and how you acquired the lines on your face or a particular feature;
what emotions arise when you look at your face;
the stories your skin tells—scars, freckles, wrinkles;
music that moves you—how it feels in your body;
the silences—let quietness talk to you;
the tastes of different foods in terms of color and memory—dark chocolate, licorice, a clove, cumin seeds, an olive, fresh mint;
a time when your body surprised you;
a time when your body let you down;
the worst pain you’ve ever felt;
the most intense physical pleasure you’ve ever experienced;
what your vagina or penis would say, in two words, if it could talk;
your toes, eyelashes, cheeks, chin, thighs, breasts, hands, lips, knees, ears, bellybutton, thumbs, neck, hips, forehead, shoulders, bottom, feet, eyes, arms, back, tongue, nose;
a body part you feel ambivalent about—write a dialogue between you and this body part in which it makes a case for why you should like it more;
whether your body is a friend or an enemy;
whether your body is treacherous or trustworthy;
a secret your body keeps;
the worst sex you ever had;
the most delicious thing you ever tasted; or
when you first noticed your gender and how you feel about it.
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Where it aches
The great cellist Gaspar Cassadó used to say to his students, “I’m so sorry for you, your lives have been so easy. You can’t play great music unless your heart’s been broken.” I believe this is true of writing too. I’m not one to romanticize hardship or grief, but we all know that we have to have a truthful conversation with these ouchy places. They do not sink quietly away. They have an energy and life force and if we tap into them, they become a source of our own creativity. Happiness is often more difficult to write about. It can be boring, unless it is fragile or hard-won. As the wonderful Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön said, “If it’s painful, you become willing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your heart and soften you. You learn to embrace it.” For each of us, there is a place where our suffering started. That’s where the pain of our past sits, waiting for us to find it.
I don’t believe we always have to write about our pain, but we do have to write from it. Because emotion is the key to connection with a reader—it’s one of the elements of what I call “transition,” where we cross the bridge from the personal to the universal. Our reader may not have been bullied, lost a limb, buried a child, or gone through our personal hell, but every single person knows love, loss, grief, pain, regret, guilt, and sorrow.
Your Story Page 8