Logic dictates that writing should be a natural act, a function of a well-operating human body, along the lines of speaking and walking and breathing. We should be able to tap into the constant narrative flow our minds provide, the roaring river of words filling up our heads, and direct it out into a neat stream of organized thought so that other people can read it. Look at what we already have going for us: some level of education, which has given us control of written and spoken language; the ability to use a computer or a pencil; and an imagination that naturally turns the events of our lives into stories that are both true and false. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides. In short, the story is in us, and all we have to do is sit there and write it down.
But it’s right about there, right about when we sit down to write that story, that things fall apart. I’ve had people come up to me at book signings, in grocery stores, at every cocktail party I’ve ever attended, and tell me they have a brilliant idea for a book. I get letters that try to pass themselves off as here’s-an-offer-you-can’t-refuse business proposals: My story will be a true blockbuster, a best-selling American original. Unfortunately, my busy schedule does not afford me the time to write it myself. This is where you come in. . . . The person then offers me some sort of deal, usually a fifty-fifty split, though sometimes it’s less. All I have to do is agree, and he or she will tell me the (Compelling! Unforgettable!) story, and I will type it up in his or her own voice, a task that is presumed to be barely above the level of transcription. Like those random Internet letters that begin Dear Sir or Madam and tell of the countless millions that will be left to me, This is my lucky day.
I feel for these people, even as they’re assuming I’m not bright enough to realize where they’ve gotten stuck. I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize on the record to Amy Bloom, because once when we were madly signing books at the end of a New York Times book and author lunch (with Alan Alda, Chris Matthews, and Stephen L. Carter in between us, a very busy event), an older woman appeared at the front of my line to tell me that the story of her family’s arrival from the old country was a tale of inestimable fascination, beauty, and intrigue, and that it must be made into a book, a book that I must write for her. I politely but firmly demurred, saying that I was sure it was a fantastic story but I scarcely had the time to write about my own family’s journey from the old country, much less all the things I made up. She kept on talking, outlining in broad strokes her parents and their sacrifices and adventures. No, I said, trying to hold on to good manners, that is not what I do. But she didn’t budge. She leaned forward and wrapped her fingers beneath the table’s edge in case someone thought to try to pull her away. Short of yes, nothing I said was going to dislodge her from her spot. The crowd was backing up behind her, people who wanted to get my signature quickly so they could be free to adore Alan Alda (who was fully worthy of adoration). When I was completely out of tricks, I told the woman from the old country to ask Amy Bloom. Amy Bloom might be interested, I said, and I pointed my pen three authors away. The woman, seized by the prospect of a new captive audience, scurried into Amy’s line. It was a deplorable act on my part, and I am sorry.
If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick, a point that was best illustrated to me on one of the more boring afternoons of my life. (Boring anecdote, thoughtfully condensed, now follows.) I once attended a VanDevender reunion in Preston, Mississippi, a dot on the map about forty-five minutes from Shuqualak (inevitably pronounced “Sugarlock”). I went because I am married to a VanDevender. It was not a family reunion, but rather a reunion of people in Mississippi named VanDevender, many of whom had never met before. The event was held in a low, square Masonic Lodge built of cinder blocks on a concrete slab that was so flush with the ground there was not even a hint of a step to go inside. All we could see was a field and, beyond that, a forest of loblolly pines. Because we had come so far with our friends, distant VanDevender cousins, we were planning to stay for a while. It was in the third or fourth hour of this event that one of the few VanDevenders I had not already engaged said that my husband had told her I was a novelist. Regrettably, I admitted this was the case. That was when she told me that everyone had at least one great novel in them.
I have learned the hard way not to tell strangers what I do for a living. Frequently, no matter how often I ask him not to, my husband does it for me. Ordinarily, in a circumstance like this one, in the Masonic Lodge in Preston, Mississippi, I would have just agreed with this woman and sidled off (One great novel, yes, of course, absolutely everyone), but I was tired and bored and there was nowhere to sidle to except the field. We happened to be standing next to the name-tag table, where all the tags had been filled out with VanDevender in advance so that you could just print your first name on the top and get your lemonade. On that table was a towering assortment of wildflowers stuck into a clear glass vase. “Does everyone have one great floral arrangement in them?” I asked her.
“No,” she said.
I remember that her gray hair was thick and cropped short and that she looked at me directly, not glancing over at the flowers.
“One algebraic proof?”
She shook her head.
“One Hail Mary pass? One five-minute mile?”
“One great novel,” she said.
“But why a novel?” I asked, having lost for the moment the good sense to let it go. “Why a great one?”
“Because we each have the story of our life to tell,” she said. It was her trump card, her indisputable piece of evidence. She took my silence as a confirmation of victory and so I was able to excuse myself. I found my husband and begged him to get me out of there.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman, not later that same day, not five years later. Was it possible that, in everybody’s lymph system, a nascent novel is knocking around? A few errant cells that, if given the proper encouragement, cigarettes and gin, the requisite number of bad affairs, could turn into something serious? Living a life is not the same as writing a book, and it got me thinking about the relationship between what we know and what we can put on paper. For me it’s like this: I make up a novel in my head (there will be more about this later). This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don’t take notes or make outlines; I’m figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.
And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.
When I tell this story in front of
an audience it tends to get a laugh. People think I’m being charmingly self-deprecating, when really it is the closest thing to the truth about my writing process that I know. The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost. So maybe Mrs. X. VanDevender in the Preston, Mississippi, Masonic Lodge was right; maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this argument let’s say it’s so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words. This is why we type a line or two and then hit the delete button or crumple up the page. Certainly that was not what I meant to say! That does not represent what I see. Maybe I should try again another time. Maybe the muse has stepped out back for a smoke. Maybe I have writer’s block. Maybe I’m an idiot and was never meant to write at all.
I had my first real spin with this particular inadequacy when I was a freshman in college. As a child and as a teenager I had wanted to be a poet. I wrote sonnets and sestinas and villanelles, read Eliot and Bishop and Yeats. I entered high school poetry competitions and won them. I would say that a deep, early love of poetry should be mandatory for all writers. A close examination of language did me nothing but good. When I arrived at Sarah Lawrence College as a freshman I submitted my poems and was admitted into Jane Cooper’s poetry class. I was seventeen.
Jane Cooper was a kind and gentle soul whose poor health was exceedingly bad the year I studied with her. She faded in her own class, which was primarily run by a group of seniors and several graduate students, the best of whom was a woman named Robyn. Robyn drove a Volvo and wore a raccoon coat. She was not only an astute writer, she was the kind of critic who, in a matter of a few thoughtful sentences, could show that the poem up for discussion was a pile of sentimental, disconnected words. I admired Robyn and was terrified of her, and soon I had so assimilated her critical voice that I was able to bring the full weight of her intelligence to bear on my work without her actually needing to be in the room. I could hear her explaining how what I was writing would fail, and so I scratched it out and started over. But I knew she wouldn’t deem my second effort to be any better. Before long I was able to think the sentence, anticipate her critique of it, and decide against it, all without ever uncapping my pen. I called this “editing myself off the page.” My great gush of youthful confidence was constricted to a smaller and smaller passage until finally my writing was down to a trickle, and then a drip. I’m not even sure how I passed the class.
At the end of that year, I moved my poetry books to the bottom shelf and signed up to study fiction with Allan Gurganus. I thank Robyn for that. I would have arrived at fiction eventually, but without her unwitting encouragement it could have taken me considerably longer.
Most of what I know about writing I learned from Allan, and it is a testament to my great good luck (heart-stopping, in retrospect, such dumb luck) that it was his classroom I turned up in when I first started to write stories. Bad habits are easy to acquire and excruciating to break. I came to him a blank slate, drained of all the confidence I had brought with me to that first poetry class. I knew I still wanted to be a writer, but now I wasn’t sure what that even meant. I needed someone to tell me how to go forward. The course that Allan set me on was one that has guided my life ever since. It was the course of hard work. But he also managed, and may God bless him forever for this, to make the work appear to be a thing of beauty.
Allan had what must have been the best office on campus, with a fireplace and French doors leading out onto a garden, which in the spring was full of heavy French tulips and dogwood trees. There were hardback volumes of Chekhov and a framed black-and-white photo of John Cheever. There were drawings Allan had done, postcards from exotic friends in exotic places, a large crazy quilt on the wall made out of satins and velvets. When he walked into a room, we stirred, we leaned towards him. Everybody did. Allan, young, with a handful of well-published stories, was as dazzling to us as Chekhov or Cheever themselves would have been.
There was an enormous generosity in him. The class, a weekly fiction workshop that lasted two semesters, had fourteen people in it. I remember each of them. I remember their stories in a way I cannot remember stories from any other class I have taken or taught since. The deal was as follows: we were to write a story a week, every week, until it was over. For a while there were assignments, the most skeletal nudges towards plot: write a story about an animal; write a fairy tale; write a story from the point of view of . . . and so forth. Then even those little starters fell away and we were out there alone, typing. I am respectful of people whose college careers consisted of classes I was (am) unfit to audit—inorganic chemistry, advanced statistics, upper-level Greek—but I would say the best of them would have struggled under this particular load. Ninety percent of what I know about fiction writing I learned that year. Write it out. Tell the truth. Stack up the pages. Learn to write by writing. Slowing down was for later, years later. We were to keep going at all costs. To miss a week was to have two stories due, which was a little like taking in a mouthful of water when you were doing your best not to drown.
It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out. Think of the diamonds, or, for that matter, the ever-practical coal that must be chipped out of the mine. Had I wound up with a different sort of teacher, one who suggested we keep an ear cocked for the muse instead of hoisting a pick, I don’t think I would have gotten very far.
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration? Chances are, any child who stays with an instrument for more than two weeks has some adult making her practice, and any child who sticks with it longer than that does so because she understands that practice makes her play better and that there is a deep, soul-satisfying pleasure in improvement. If a person of any age picked up the cello for the first time and said, “I’ll be playing in Carnegie Hall next month!” you would pity their delusion, yet beginning fiction writers all across the country polish up their best efforts and send them off to The New Yorker. Perhaps you’re thinking here that playing an instrument is not an art itself but an interpretation of the composer’s art, but I stand by my metaphor. The art of writing comes way down the line, as does the art of interpreting Bach. Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, put it away, write another story. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sediment. The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the freshwater underneath. Does this sound like a lot of work without any guarantee of success? Well, yes, but it also calls into question our definition of success. Playing the cello, we’re more likely to realize that the pleasure is the practice, the ability to create this beautiful sound; not to do it as well as Yo-Yo Ma, but still, to touch the hem of the gown that is art itself. Allan Gurganus taught me how to love the practice, and how to write in a quantity that would allow me to figure out for myself what I was actually good at. I got better at closing the gap between my hand and my head by clocking in the hours, stacking up the pages. Somewhere in all my years of practice, I don’t know where exactly, I arrived at the art. I never learned how to take the beautiful thing in my imagin
ation and put it on paper without feeling I killed it along the way. I did, however, learn how to weather the death, and I learned how to forgive myself for it.
Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds), I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.