Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (10 page)

Dani Shapiro

he wants me to write the best book I possibly can. We’re in this together. And he possesses none of the characteristics that are to be avoided when thinking of considering early readers for your work: envy. Indifference. Comparison. Laziness. Dishon-esty. Lousy bedside manner. Secret agenda. Rudeness. Hostil-ity. Poor boundaries. False enthusiasm. Lack of discernment.

Inattentiveness. Distractibility. Did I mention envy?

We’re so vulnerable when we share new work. I once had a student who was unfazed speaking in front of huge audiences for her job as a CEO. But the first time she read a piece of her memoir aloud in my small private workshop, her voice shook, her hands trembled, and her eyes welled up. So much is on the line. We’ve revealed ourselves on these fledgling pages. The unconsidered response can be devastating. I have had wonderful readers over the years, and destructive ones. Once I made the mistake of showing a piece of a novel to a colleague too early, and her comments—while meant to be helpful and supportive—were so off the mark that they derailed me. I’ve also made the mistake of giving pages of a new piece to a writer who was unaccustomed to being in that position, and treated them in a cavalier manner (she glanced at them and called me from her cell phone while at a hair salon), which both hurt and offended me.

I remember the first time I left my infant in the arms of a friend to run across the street to buy diapers. She was about to 98

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be a mother herself, had nieces and nephews—she knew her way around babies—but still, entrusting my weeks-old infant to her for ten minutes felt nearly impossible. It can feel the same with a manuscript. It’s your baby, after all. So choose your early readers wisely. Think about your reasons for sharing. Examine your own motives. Why now? Are you ready?

Or are you just trying to impress someone? Do you want to be told that you’re a genius? (I once slogged through eight hundred pages of a friend’s first draft, then discovered that he had been anticipating only praise. When I told him that there were far too many female characters on their knees performing mind-blowing oral sex, our conversation was over, and the friendship unfathomably lost.)

Ask yourself: Why this person? Will she treat my manuscript with respect? Read it with close attention? If you find one or two genuinely helpful readers—ones who are able to speak with you about your work in a way that helps you—

consider yourself lucky. Return the favor whenever you can.

When we apply what we know to the manuscript pages of a friend, when we do our best to understand what the writer hopes to accomplish, we are completing the circle. We do this for each other because there is precious little we
can
do for each other. We’re alone in our rooms, in our heads. But we can reach out a hand. Who better than us? After all, we’ve been there, too.

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Three pages a day, five days a week. When working on a book, this has been my pattern for my entire writing life. I spend most mornings writing my three pages, and I revisit them in the afternoon. I scribble in the margins, thoughts about edits, word choices. Sometimes I reread them before I go to sleep.

I cross out paragraphs, I rearrange sentences. I ask questions that I hope to answer in the light of the next day. These pages are where I begin the following morning, because those notes give me a way in. If I begin by implementing the changes, before I know it I’m back inside the manuscript, already at work. I’ve evaded the pitfalls and distractions that often lie in wait for me.

Some writers count words. Others fill a certain number of pages, longhand, have a set number of hours they spend at their desk. It doesn’t matter what the deal is that you strike with yourself, as long as you keep up your end of it, that you establish a working routine for yourself, a rhythm. I prefer to think of it as rhythm rather than discipline. Discipline calls to my mind a taskmaster, perhaps wielding a whip. Discipline has a whiff of punishment to it, or at least the need to cross 100

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something off a list, the way my son Jacob does with his homework. (Big sigh.
Got it done
.) Rhythm, however, is a gentle aligning, a comforting pattern in our day that we know sets us up ideally for our work.

Three pages a day, five days a week. Do the math. I do, all the time. Fifteen pages a week. Sixty pages a month! A novel-length manuscript in half a year! Let me stop you right there.

I have never written a novel-length manuscript in half a year.

In fact, two years would be fast for me, and usually it’s closer to three years, or more. So what has happened to my well-established rhythm?

I’ll tell you what happens: it fails, it falls apart, it gets interrupted. William Styron once referred to this quandary as the “the fleas of life.” He went on to say that “writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word—
life
.” The dog has a vet appointment; the school play is being performed at noon; it’s flu season, a snow day; who knew there were so many long weekends? The roof springs a leak; the neighbor’s house is under construction; a friend calls in a crisis. Life doesn’t pause to make room for our precious writing time. Life stops for nothing, and we make accommodations. There is no stasis, no normal, no such thing as a regular day; only this attempt to create a methodology. Having a rhythm is no magic pill. Without a doubt, we will be pulled away. At times we will be frustrated 101

Dani Shapiro

and unproductive. But if we have our one way of working—a number of pages, or hours, or words—we will eventually return to it. This return won’t be easy. The page is indifferent to us—no, worse. The page turns from us like a wounded lover.

We will have to win it over, coax it out of hiding. Promise to do better next time. Apologize for our disregard. And then, we settle into the pattern that we know. Three pages. Two hours.

A thousand words. We have wandered and now we are back.

There is comfort in the familiar. We can do this. Breathe in, breathe out. Once again, just as we’ve been doing all along.

Most of us compose directly on screens at some point in the writing process. Desktops, laptops, Ipads, and variations thereof. Walk into any Starbucks, or down the aisle of any train or plane and there we are, our faces made ghostly by the bluish-white light cast from our devices. But the screen can make our work look neat and tidy—finished—before it is. We can swoop in, search and replace, cut and paste, highlight, delete, and all the while the screen absorbs the changes and still looks the same. If you’ve never tried it, see what happens if you write a draft of something longhand. Before long, you’ll 102

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be forced to
x
out whole sentences. You’ll draw circles and asterisks and arrows. You’ll change your mind about what you’ve crossed out, and write “stet” in the margin. It will look messy, because it
is
messy. It should be that: a beautiful, complicated mess. Who knows? Maybe only one sentence will remain.

Maybe the whole order will be upended. You’ll be able to see a road map of your progress as you build the architecture of your story. The poet Mark Strand has made art of his drafts on canvas, in which doodles and scribbles and columns fill up the space with what the poet Jorie Graham calls “a mildly feverish black cursive.”

This fever is lost on the screen. The evidence of the mind making the thing—made visible in the cross outs, the thick rewriting of words over other words, the fanciful sketches—a cloud, a camel, a man in a hat—that seem to ride the waves of language, the places where the pen grows dark and forceful, nearly stabbing in its intensity. This is work being made in real time. Work that reveals its scars.

But—unless we are poets—there are practical considerations to writing longhand. Your hand gets a cramp. You become afraid of losing the notebook. Though I begin most of my creative work in a notebook, when I reach thirty or forty pages, I type a draft into my computer. What if there was a fire? A flood? The irony that my work stored on a
cloud
feels safer than the solid weight of a spiral-bound notebook, 103

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does not escape me. But at least for a while, the circles and squiggles, the
x
’d out sentences, the asterisks and inserts covering every inch of every page have served their purpose. They remind me that my work is changeable. That there is
play
in this thing I’m doing. I’m a child, finger-painting. This color?

Why not? There is joy—rather than industry—in putting pen to paper. A sense of possibility, discovery.

For the past dozen years, I have used a particular brand of spiral-bound notebook—dark blue, the insignia of a prep school I did not attend emblazoned on its cover. I’ve become a little obsessive about these notebooks. They can only be found in one bookstore, in my in-laws’ hometown. Whenever I visit, I stop by the prep school bookstore and stock up. I carry home armloads of them. I live in fear of running out, or—horrible thought—that they might be discontinued. Why these notebooks? They’re nothing special to look at. I have no connection to the school, other than its location in the town where my husband grew up. The reason I’m attached to them is simple: the first time I randomly happened to write in one of those notebooks, the work went well.

We are, many of us, superstitious creatures. We think there may be reasons our day flows in the right direction. A favorite necklace, a penny found on the sidewalk, a crystal we tuck into our pocket, a private mantra—we may rely on talismans to help us along. But I’ve never heard a writer feel that way 104

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about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

Pick a notebook, any notebook. If you compose well in it, you will become attached. Choose a pen that feels right. It could be a beautiful, expensive fountain pen, or any old BIC.

Whatever feels good in your hand. Okay—this is your notebook, and this is your pen. Balance the notebook on your lap or set it on a table. And wherever you are in your work, start there. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the sound the pen makes as it moves across the page. Now, doodle something. Write a few sentences. Scratch them out. Write a few more.

I had just published
Slow Motion
when Jacob was born. In the first sentence of that memoir, I refer to my parents’ car crash as the event that divided my life into before and after. What 105

Dani Shapiro

I didn’t know—I was in my early thirties and single when I began the book, in my midthirties and engaged to be married when I finished—is that a life containing only a single

“before and after” moment is indeed a fortunate one. “My life closed twice before its close,” said Emily Dickinson. After my father’s death, I carried those words around in the back pages of my Filofax for years. I intuited the truth in them, though I couldn’t have yet imagined how a life could close twice—or even more—before its close. I thought it was kind of like a one-per-customer thing.

But then, when Jacob was six months old, he developed seizures that led to a diagnosis of a rare and nearly always cata-strophic disorder known as Infantile Spasms. Seven out of a million babies are diagnosed each year with this disorder, and only 15 percent of them survive. Most are left blind, physically impaired, or brain damaged. As I sat in the doctor’s office hearing these dire statistics about the infant I was holding in my arms—
pain engraves a deeper memory—
everything I cared about in the world was distilled into a single moment. Looking down at my only child on that late autumn afternoon, I knew that if he wasn’t okay-–if he wasn’t part of that small per-centage of babies who make it—that my life would be over. I believed the loss of a child would be the only pain from which it would be impossible to recover. And in that doctor’s office I was staring straight into the dark heart of that likely outcome.

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Over the next weeks—a frenzy of trying to calibrate the experimental medication that came via FedEx from Canada, of doses around the clock, of waking a sleeping baby at three o’clock in the morning to drink down the medicine that was or wasn’t going to save him, and then the months of vigilance that followed: was that a seizure or just a hiccup?—my usual way of moving through life was no longer possible. I could not hover at an outsidery distance. I was not filing away details for later. Being a writer offered me no protection. In Lorrie Moore’s story “People Like That Are the Only People Here,”

a surgeon tells a writer-mother that her baby has a Wilms’

Tumor. (“Is that apostrophe
s
or
s
apostrophe,” she asks.) The writer argues with her husband, who wants her to sell a story about it. She calls what is happening to them “a nightmare of narrative slop.”

I had always shaped narratives out of my life’s most painful and difficult circumstances. I had held to a belief—as necessary to me as a heartbeat—that this was a redemptive act; to create a coherent narrative out of sorrow or grief was genuine and worthwhile. But as I fought for the survival of my own child the failures of narrative seemed to taunt me. John Ban-ville wrote about
Blue Nights,
Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her only daughter: “Against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art. Especially not art.”

Each day, I climbed the stairs of our Brooklyn brownstone 107

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to my third-floor office and stared blankly at the wall. I was a writer who couldn’t write. A writer who didn’t see the point of writing. Words on paper couldn’t save my child, and they could no longer save me. It felt as if I had chosen to spend my life in the most frivolous way possible, making up stories.