Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

  I have index cards and pens all over the house—by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know, so that, God forbid, I won’t look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same. I don’t even know you, but I bet you have enough on your mind without having to worry about whether or not you look bulky. So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are actual notepads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers—as if it has just come back to me—and I take out my index card and scribble it down.

  I have an index card beside me right now on which I scribbled, "Pammy, Demi Moore." Those words capture an entire movie for me, of one particular day last year, six months before Pammy died.

  We were outside in her garden. The sky was blue and cloudless, everything was in bloom, and she wore a little lavender cotton cap. She was doing very well that day, except that she was dying. (My father’s oncologist once assured him, "You’re a very, very healthy fifty-five-year-old man, except, of course, for the brain cancer.") We were lying on chaise longues, in T-shirts and shorts, eating miniature Halloween chocolate bars. Sam was pulling Pammy’s two-year-old daughter Rebecca around the garden in a little red wagon.

  "I’m a little depressed," Pammy said. One day not long before, she had said that all she had to do to get really, really depressed was to think of Rebecca, and all she had to do to get really, really joyful was to think of Rebecca. "I’m actually quite depressed," she said.

  "I don’t see why."

  "What’s the silver lining here? I can’t seem to remember today."

  "The silver lining is that you’re not going to have to see any more naked pregnant pictures of Demi Moore."

  She looked at me for a moment with real wonder. "God," she said, "that’s a lot—I hadn’t even thought of that." And she was very funny again for the rest of the day, happy to be with the children and me.

  It was such a rare scene that you would think I would remember it forever. I used to think that if something was important enough, I’d remember it until I got home, where I could simply write it down in my notebook like some normal functioning member of society.

  But then I wouldn’t.

  I’d get home, remembering that I had thought of or heard the perfect image or lines to get my characters from the party in the old house on the hill to their first day on the new job, or to their childhood playhouse, or wherever it was that they seemed to think they were supposed to be next. And I’d stand there trying to see it, the way you try to remember a dream, where you squint and it’s right there on the tip of your psychic tongue but you can’t get it back. The image is gone. That is one of the worst feelings I can think of, to have had a wonderful moment or insight or vision or phrase, to know you had it, and then to lose it. So now I use index cards.

  One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer. You start seeing everything as material. Sometimes you’ll sit down or go walking and your thoughts will be on one aspect of your work, or one idea you have for a small scene, or a general portrait of one of the characters you are working with, or you’ll just be completely blocked and hopeless and wondering why you shouldn’t just go into the kitchen and have a nice glass of warm gin straight out of the cat dish. And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step out of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They’re often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway.

  Now, I have a number of writer friends who do not take notes out there in the world, who say it’s like not taking notes in class but listening instead. I think that if you have the kind of mind that retains important and creative thoughts—that is, if your mind still works—you’re very lucky and you should not be surprised if the rest of us do not want to be around you. I actually have one writer friend—whom I think I will probably be getting rid of soon—who said to me recently that if you don’t remember it when you get home, it probably wasn’t that important. And I felt eight years old again, with something important to say that had suddenly hopped down one of the rabbit holes in my mind, while an adult nearby was saying priggishly, "Well! It must not have been very important then."

  So you have to decide how you feel about this. You may have a perfectly good memory and be able to remember three hours later what you came up with while walking on the mountain or waiting at the dentist’s. And then again, you may not. If it feels natural, if it helps you to remember, take notes. It’s not cheating. It doesn’t say anything about your character. If your mind is perhaps the merest bit disorganized, it probably just means that you’ve lost a little ground. It may be all those drugs you took when you were younger, all that nonhabitforming marijuana that you smoked on a daily basis for twenty years. It may be that you’ve had children. When a child comes out of your body, it arrives with about a fifth of your brain clutched in its little hand, like those babies born clutching IUDs. So for any number of reasons, it’s only fair to let yourself take notes.

  My index-card life is not efficient or well organized. Hostile, aggressive students insist on asking what I do with all my index cards. And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away now in my memory. If I’m working on a book or an article, and I’ve taken some notes on index cards, I keep them with that material, paper-clip them to a page of rough draft where that idea or image might bring things to life. Or I stack them on my desk along with the pages for the particular chapter or article I’m working on, so I can look at them. When I get stuck or lost or the jungle drums start beating in my head, proclaiming that the jig is about to be up and I don’t know what I’m doing and the well has run dry, I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense of confidence, help me put down one damn word after another, which is, let’s face it, what writing finally boils down to.

  There are index cards on my desk that record things I thought of or saw or remembered or overheard in the last week or so. There are index cards from a couple of years ago. There is even one index card from six or seven years ago, when I was walking along the salt marsh between Sausalito and Mill Valley. Bicyclists were passing me on both sides, and I wasn’t paying much attention until suddenly a woman rode past wearing some sort of lemon perfume. And in a split second I was in one of those Proustian olfactory flashbacks, twenty-five or so years before, in the kitchen of one of my aunts, with her many children, my cousins, on a hot summer’s day. I was the eldest, at eight or so, and my aunt and uncle had just gotten divorced. She was sad and worried, and I think to soothe herself and help her wounded ego, she had done a little retail therapy: she’d gone to the store and spent several dollars on a lemonade-making contraption.

  Of course, it goes without saying that to make lemonade, all you need is a pitcher, a lemon-juice squeezer, ice cubes, water, lemons, and sugar. That’s all. Oh, and a long spoon. But my aunt was a little depressed, and this lemo
nade-making thing must have seemed like something that would be fun and would maybe hydrate her life a little, filling her desiccated spirit with nice, cool, sweet lemonade. The contraption consisted of a glass pitcher, with a lemon squeezer that fit on top and that had a holding tank for the lemon juice. What you did was to fill the pitcher with water and ice cubes and sugar, then put the squeezer—with its holding tank—on top, squeeze a bunch of lemons, then pour the lemon juice from the holding tank into the pitcher. Finally, you got your long spoon and stirred. The lemon googe and seeds stayed on top in the juice squeezer. The whole thing was very efficient, but if you thought about it too long, totally stupid, too.

  So there we were in the kitchen, the five cousins and me, crowded around her at the sink as she proudly made us lemonade. She put the cold water in the pitcher, added ice cubes, lots of sugar, put the juicer lid on top, squeezed a dozen lemons, and then began to take glasses down from the cupboards. Wait! we older ones wanted to cry out, you haven’t poured in the lemon juice. Stop! Mistakes are being made! But she got out jelly glasses, plastic glasses, a couple of brilliant aluminum glasses, and poured seven servings. There we were, six anxious black-belt codependents, unable to breathe, with a longing for everything to be Okay and for her not to feel sad anymore. She raised her glass to us as a toast, and we all took sips of our sugary ice water, and my aunt’s hands were so lemony from cutting and squeezing all those lemons that she must have tasted lemon. We all stared at her helplessly as we drank our sugar water, then smiled and raised our glasses like we were doing a soft-drink commercial, and held them out for more.

  I perfectly remembered, there on the salt marsh, the crummy linoleum on my aunt’s kitchen floor, graying beige speckled with black, and how it wore away to all black near the sink, and how at its most worn place, rotten wood showed through. And how all those cousins, some so young they must have thought ice-cold sugar water was about as good as the getting got, stood at the sink with us older kids, in a ring around my aunt. And how close I felt to them all, how much a part of the wheel.

  It touches me so deeply, the poignancy of the crummy linoleum, of my aunt’s pain and her pride in her lemonade-making machine, of all the ways in which we try to comfort ourselves, of her wanting to make us better lemonade, of us wanting to make her better, the enthusiasm with which we drank and held out our glasses, as if we were hoisting steins at Oktoberfest. And I hadn’t remembered any of this in twenty-five years.

  Now, maybe I’m not going to use it anywhere. All the index card says is "The lemonade-making thing." But it’s like a snippet from a movie, a vignette of a family in pain, managing to survive, one of those rare moments when people’s hearts are opened by disappointment and love, and for just a few minutes, against all odds, everything is more or less Okay.

  Sometimes I’ll be driving along, and all of a sudden words form in my mind that solve some technical problem for me. I may have been trying all morning long to show that time has been passing for my characters, without resorting to old-movie techniques where leaves of a calendar blow out the window or the hands of a clock spin. These techniques do not translate well to the written word. It’s a wonderful feeling when you’re reading something by someone else, and the writer has aged exactly the right detail so that you know the story is picking up again sometime later. Sometimes the seasons change, or children start school, or beards grow long, or pets go gray. But sometimes in your own writing you can’t find the way to make time pass invisibly, and you will not be aided in this by sitting at your desk staring bitterly at your words, trying to will it to happen. Instead, all of a sudden when you’re wrestling with the dog or paying the electric bill, you might look up and know that something is coming to you that might really matter, only you can’t quite reel it in. It’s like watching someone on a ventilator rise again and again to the surface, like a trapped fish, and you stay with the person, and sometimes he or she blinks awake. And so, if you hold some space open, an image may come to you. Then, for goodness sakes, jot it down.

  I have an index card here on which is written, "Six years later, the memory of the raw fish cubes continued to haunt her," which I thought might make a great transitional line. But I have so far not found a place for it. You are welcome to use it if you can.

  I eventually throw away a lot of my index cards, either because I use what’s on them in a paragraph somewhere or because it turns out that the thought wasn’t all that interesting. Many index cards on which I write in the middle of the night tend to be incoherent, like some incredibly bright math major thinking about oranges or truth while on LSD. Some contain great quotes that I share with my students, although I unfortunately often forget to write down whose quote it is. Like this one, for instance: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us." Now, I’m almost positive Ralph Waldo Emerson said this, but with my luck some critic will point out that it was really Georgette Mosbacher. (Who was it that said, "A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded"? I have it written on an index card somewhere....) Other cards just sort of live with me, in little piles and drifts. My son will probably have to deal with them someday, after my death. They are my equivalent of all the cats that those nutty Bouvier aunts own. But my cards do not smell or shed or go wee-wee on the floors, and I think Sam should be aware that he is getting off easy. Most of them will not make much sense to him. There are many with just one or two words on them that would have reminded me of entire scenes and empires, but he will have to stand there scratching his head.

  But he will also find some dated in the early nineties, and they will contain complete stories about how he blew me away, how he made me shake my head with wonder and a kind of relief. Like this one, dated 9-17-93:

  Sam and I walked Bill and Adair up to their car after dinner. Crisp cold starry night. Bill, holding Sam, inhaled deeply. "Doesn’t it smell wonderful, Sam?" he said. Sam inhaled deeply, too, like he was smelling a delicious meal, looked off into space, and said, "It smells like moon."

  Now that memory won’t be lost. I’m not sure if I will use it in my writing—actually, I guess I just did—but I know it won’t be lost.

  Nor will the details of an early morning the two of us spent recently in an emergency room, where Sam was having his first asthma attack. We were both afraid and sad and did not quite know what was going on, but Sam was hooked up to a nebulizer, with a mask over his mouth and nose, and I was sitting beside him on his bed, wishing I had thought to grab a toy as we left the house. So I looked inside my purse and managed to come up with a tiny box of crayons from a restaurant and two used index cards. One contained a shopping list, the other a brief description of the sky.

  I drew a terrible giant on the blank side of each card. Sam, sucking away at his mask, watched me with fear. Next I poked holes in each of the giants’ right hands, and stuck tongue depressors through the holes. Then I staged a vigorous, clicking sword fight. Sam’s eyes grew wide, and he smiled. After a long while he could breathe again freely, and we were told we could go home. But before we did, I dismantled the giants, stuck the card with the shopping list in my back pocket and, on the back of the other, scribbled down this story.

  Calling Around

  There are an enormous number of people out there with invaluable information to share with you, and all you have to do is pick up the phone. They love it when you do, just as you love it when people ask if they can pick your brain about something you happen to know a great deal about—or, as in my case, have a number of impassioned opinions on. Say you happen to know a lot about knots, or penguins, or cheeses, and the right person asks you to tell him or her everything you know. What a wonderful and rare experience. Usually what happens in real life is that people ask you questions you can’t remember the answer to, like what you came into the kitchen to get, or what happened on the Fourth of July in 1776, and you sit there thinking, "God, I knew that; it’s right there on the tip of my to
ngue, let’s see—Okay, wait, the Constitution? No, wait, shit, I used to know ... " When you do actually know a bit about something, it is such a pleasure to be asked a lot of questions about it.

  This is one great reason to call around. Another is that if you make the phone call while sitting at your computer, you can consider it part of that day’s work. It’s not shirking. Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone— and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp. If you are in a small workspace, your brain will begin breathing and contracting like the sets in Dr. Caligari. You may begin showing signs of schizophrenia—like you’ll stare at the word schizophrenia so long that it will start to look wrong and you won’t be able to find it in the dictionary and you’ll start to think you made it up, and then you’ll notice a tiny mouth sore, one of those tiny canker sores that your tongue can’t keep away from, that feels like a wound the size of a marble, but when you go to study it in the mirror, you see that it is a white spot roughly as big as a pinhead. Still, the next thing you know—because you are spending too much time alone—you are convinced that you have mouth cancer, just like good old Sigmund, and you know instantly that doctors will have to cut away half of your jaw, trying to save your miserable obsessive-compulsive head from being cannibalized by the cancer, and you’ll have to go around wearing a hood over your entire face, and no one will ever want to kiss you again, not that they ever really did.

  I don’t think there is anything wrong with this way of thinking, only that it is ultimately not all that productive. So you might as well try to get something done. And it’s better if contact with another human being is involved. One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline—so it’s useful to give yourself a minimum quota of three hundred words a day. But also every single day a kid needs a break. So think of calling around as giving yourself a break.