Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

  The truth is that there are simply going to be times when you can’t go forward in your work until you find out something about the place you grew up, when it was still a railroad town, or what the early stages of shingles are like, or what your character would actually experience the first week of beauty school. So figure out who would have this information and give that person a call. It’s best if you can think of someone who’s witty and articulate, so you can steal all of his or her material. Also, of course, it’s just more interesting to be on the phone with someone who’s sort of keen. But these qualities are not absolutely necessary, because you may just be looking for one piece of information, or even just one word, and you do not need a whole lot of background or humor to go with it. And it may also turn out that in searching for this one bit of information, something else will turn up that you absolutely could not have known would be out there waiting for you.

  For instance, when I was writing my second novel, I got to the part where the man comes over for his first date with the woman and brings with him a bottle of champagne. He removes the foil. We get to see his hands, which are beautiful, long and broad with white moons on his big square fingernails, so lovely that they almost make up for the fact that he is wearing a yellow polyester shirt. Also, it is in his favor that he has brought along a nice bottle of champagne; the woman loves to drink. So the man has peeled the foil away, and then begins to untwist and remove that wire thing that covers all champagne corks.

  Now, I’ve always thought of that wire thing—that little hehnet—as the wire thing, and that is how everyone I’ve ever known refers to it: "Honey, will you take the wire thing off the champagne? I just had my nails done." "Oh, look, Skippy’s playing with that little wire thing; I hope she doesn’t cut her little lips on it ..."

  But it must have a name, right? I mean, boxes of them don’t just arrive at wineries—five-hundred-count Wire Things. They have to have a label. So I called the Christian Brothers Winery, whose vineyard is near the Russian River. I got a busy signal. I really did. So I sat there staring off into space. I watched the movie in my mind of the many times I’d passed those vineyards and remembered how, especially in the early fall, a vineyard is about as voluptuous a place as you can find on earth: the sense of lushness and abundance; the fullness of the clumps of grapes that hang, mammarian, and give off an ancient autumnal smell, semiprotected from the sun by their leaves. The grapes are so incredibly beautiful that you can’t help but be thrilled. If you aren’t—if you only see someone’s profit or that in another month there will be rotten fruit all over the ground—someone has gotten inside your brain and really fucked you up. And you need to get well so you can see again, see that the grapes almost seem to glow, with a light dusting of some sort of powdery residue, like an incredibly light snowfall, almost as if they’re covered with their own confectioners’ sugar.

  I wrote all this down, and then dialed the winery again. The line was still busy. Right when I hung up, a friend called and wanted to describe his latest emotional catastrophes, but I said, "No, no, talk to me about grapes." I read him what I’d written, and he said, "Yes, they really are that lovely. They do almost glow; Mother Nature wants animals to be mesmerized, hypnotized by the beauty of the fruit, so they’ll eat it, shit the pits somewhere else, and make her some more." So I wrote this down on the index card, too, and I felt so happy about that card, even though I was unable to use it— until just now.

  I finally got through to the winery’s receptionist and told her what I needed. She said she always just thought of it as the wire thing, too, so she transferred me to a two-thousand-year-old monk. Or at least this is how he sounded, faint, reedy, out of breath, like Noah after a brisk walk.

  And he was so glad I’d called. He actually said so, and he sounded like he was. I have secretly believed ever since that he had somehow stayed alive just long enough to be there for my phone call, and that after he answered my question, he hung up, smiled, and keeled over.

  "Ah," he said, when I told him what I was after. "That would be the wire hood."

  What a full day! I had a description of vineyards that could turn out to be a perfect setting for a scene somewhere down the line. I got to think about how good Mother Nature is at getting her business done, and I got to write that my character untwisted and removed the wire hood before popping the cork.

  I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me in the ten years since that book came out and said that they loved knowing the word for what they’d always referred to as the wire thing. Okay, the truth is I can tell you how many people: three. But three people who seemed genuinely pleased to have found out something they’d wondered about. Okay. Let’s be honest. Two real people and my mother. Not that my mother is not a real person, but whenever I show her a copy of my latest book, she gets sort of quiet and teary, and you can tell that what she’s feeling is "Oh, honey, did you make that yourself?" like it’s my handprint in clay—which I suppose in many ways it is.

  Writing Groups

  So much of writing is about sitting down and doing it every day, and so much of it is about getting into the custom of taking in everything that comes along, seeing it all as grist for the mill. This can be a very comforting habit, like biting your nails. Instead of being scared all the time, you detach, watch what goes on, and consider it creatively. Instead of feeling panicked by those lowlifes on the subway, you notice all the details of their clothes and bearing and speech. Maybe you never quite get to the point where you think, "Ah—so that’s what a gun looks like from this end." But you take in all you can, as a child would, without the atmospheric smog of most grown-up vision.

  And all the while you are writing away, editing, revising, trying new leads, new endings, until finally, at some point, you want some feedback. You want other people to read it. You want to know what they think. We are social animals, and we are trying to communicate with others of our species, and up to now you have been alone in a hole getting your work done. You have no idea whether it sings to anyone but you. You wouldn’t spend a month on an oil painting and then mummify it. You would hang it where people could see it. So the thought of a writing class or a writing conference may cross your mind.

  Blooming writers really do not know what to expect when they sign up for a workshop or a creative-writing class. Some want to learn to write, or to write better. Others have been writing a great deal for a long time and want some feedback. These are realistic goals. A certain kind of person finds writing classes and workshops to be like camp, and just wants to hang out with all these other people, maybe with a writer he or she respects, to get and give response and encouragement, and to hear how other people tell their stories. Some people want other people with whom to share the disappointments and rejection letters and doldrums. A lot of people like to work on other people’s writing because it helps them figure out what they themselves love in the written word, as well as what doesn’t work for them. And others want feedback from people who aren’t quite friends or editors but who will be realistic and honest and helpful.

  But a lot of people come to my workshops or classes secretly hoping that I will have read their submission and absolutely flipped. I will take them aside after class and tell them that all the story needs is for them to put a little spin on the ending, maybe shorten the scene with Cammy and the ducks, and that then we’ll send it off to my agent or The New Yorker, or maybe we’ll just send it straight to Sonny Mehta. We’ll fax it to Sonny; he would want it that way.

  But I tell them that this is probably not going to happen. Every so often at a writing conference, people get taken aside by wonderful writers who love their story and who help them in some pivotal way. Every so often during one of my workshops, I’ll take someone aside and say, "You’re very good; work on this another six months and then give me a call, and we’ll take it from there." But this is rare. Mostly what I do is listen, and encourage, and tell people what writing is like for me on a daily basis and what helps me and wha
t doesn’t. I tell people all the things I like about their piece—how wonderful the atmosphere is, for instance, and the language—and also point out where they got all tangled up in their own process. We— the other students and I—can be like a doctor to whom you take your work for a general checkup. We can give you a place to show up and a little benevolent pressure, which we hope will help you finish stories and sections. We can give you some respect, because we know what it takes.

  But be warned that you may feel as though you have put your head in the lion’s mouth. Creative-writing classes and ongoing workshops tend to be gentler than conferences, but in all of these situations you may find yourself sitting around a table with a number of other writers who feel morally and aesthetically compelled to rip your story to shreds. At best, they will say that the story would work better if you rewrote it in the past tense, unless it is already in the past tense, in which case they will suggest the present, or that you should try writing in the first person or, if it is in the first person, in the third. At worst, they will suggest that you have no visible talent whatsoever and should not bother writing anything ever again, even your name.

  I’ve taught at writing conferences where students have come to me crying because the famous writer who critiqued their work that day had savaged it. I’ve taught at conferences where the students have been devastated by the harshness of other participants’ comments, where it felt to them like the Lord of the Flies Writing Conference. Last summer, for instance, I was in the classroom at a huge and prestigious conference when things got completely out of hand. I sat with that day’s twenty students and listened to one of them read a few pages of his work. He had not been writing for very long. It was experimental, with a lot of bad dialect, and not very good. The other students had been given his story beforehand to mark up, and when he was done, they gave him their comments. They mentioned things they liked, things they thought he had done well, moments here and there that worked. They said that the dialect had gotten in the way but that there was a great deal of heart and emotion in the story that had moved them. I thought that what they said was true, if perhaps somewhat effusive. So I said a few encouraging things, too, and pointed out a few passages that didn’t ring true, recommended ways to pick up the pace, and rather gently suggested that it needed some work. The author asked a few specific questions and was given some good suggestions. Then a young woman who had been silent raised her hand.

  "Am I crazy?" she implored. "Am I losing my mind? Am I the only person here who doesn’t think it worked at all? Did anyone actually think there was one believable character, one meaningful image ..." and she went on and on, while the rest of us stared at her entranced, as if frozen in cobra hypnosis. Much of what she said was true.

  She looked at me when she was finished, fevered and imploring. I looked back at her. I tried to figure out what to do. There was a silence.

  "Should he give up altogether?" I asked.

  "I think people are patronizing him. He’s not going to get better if people don’t tell the truth," she wailed.

  "But what you think is the truth is just your opinion."

  The author of the story scanned the ceiling, as if he had heard the drone of approaching mosquitoes. The rest of the class stared at me with a sort of wired expectation. Part of me understood how the young woman felt. It had taken a lot of courage for her to speak up. And part of me wanted to tear a leg off the table and wave it at her threateningly. I knew she was a much better writer than he, because almost everyone was. I tried to breathe, and to remember what unpublished writers need and why they come to these writing conferences. They need attention. They need someone to respond to their work as honestly as possible but without being abusive or diminishing. So in my comments I focused on the fact that the author had tried something so difficult, had taken such a risk. I told him that the best possible thing was to shoot high and make mistakes, and that when he was old, or dying, he was almost certainly not going to say, "God! I’m so glad I took so few risks! I’m so glad I kept shooting so low!" I told him to plow ahead, write it one more time, and then get to work on something else.

  I told the young woman, in front of the class, that it had taken guts to say what she had said. Later she sought me out and asked if I thought she was a monster. I told her I thought she’d been very honest, and that this was totally commendable, but that you don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.

  Long after the conference was over, I found a poem by Bill Holm, which I wanted to send to the young man. But I no longer had his address. It is called "August in Waterton, Alberta":

  Above me, wind does its best to blow leaves off the aspen tree a month too soon. No use wind. All you succeed in doing is making music, the noise of failure growing beautiful.

  Be aware that some conferences and writing programs can be cutthroat and competitive, and you may not need or be ready for the fiercest possible critique of your work. But if you do need feedback, encouragement, benevolent pressure, and the company of other writers, you may want to consider starting a writing group.

  I’ve had students who met in a class of mine and who then started getting together in groups of three or four every third Thursday, or the last Sunday of the month, or whenever, and who’ve been doing this for years now. The fact that they’re going to meet means that they have to get a certain amount of work finished. Also, an occupational hazard of writing is that you’ll have bad days. You feel not only totally alone but also that everyone else is at a party. But if you talk to other people who write, you remember that this feeling is part of the process, that it’s inevitable.

  Writers tend to be so paranoid about talking about their work because no one, including us, really understands how it works. But it can help a great deal if you have someone you can call when you need a pep talk, someone you have learned to trust, someone who is honest and generous and who won’t jinx you. When you’re feeling low, you don’t want anyone even to joke that you may be in some kind of astrological strike zone where you’ll be for the next seven years. On a bad day you also don’t need a lot of advice. You just need a little empathy and affirmation. You need to feel once again that other people have confidence in you. The members of your writing group can often offer just that.

  So how do you start one? One way is to join a creative-writing class and to ask the people whose work you most love and with whom you may have some rapport if they want to begin meeting once a month, to hear and support each other’s work, gossip a little, and talk about writing in general. They may say no. Then you can call Jack Kevorkian and see if he can squeeze you in. Or you can keep trying until you find two or three people who do want to see what a group would be like.

  Some of my students have put ads on bulletin boards and in small newspapers, announcing the formation of a writing group for beginning writers, or for writers with novels they are trying to get published. Many, if not most, of these people have ended up with functioning groups that bring them a great deal of pleasure and support. My New Age friends claim that they’ve started groups by just "putting it out to the universe." Now, I love this sort of talk; I always picture the universe hearing the call, and flipping breathlessly through its little Rolodex, because these friends have all ended up in flourishing writing groups. So who’s to say?

  There are four people, three women and one man, who met in one of my classes and who have now been meeting as a group for four years. I see them together in bookstores or cafés, where they sit at tables with wine or coffee and go over each other’s work, offer criticism and encouragement, ask questions, and figure out where to go next. They do not actually edit each other’s drafts, which is something we’ll talk about in the next chapter, but they listen to each other’s work and help each other to keep at it.

  Sometimes they’ll drop in on one of my classes, like the seniors dropping by freshmen basketball practice. They end up giving the new students rousing pep talks about how great it is to be pa
rt of a writing group, how much they’ve come to care for one another, how it helps them get their work done. They’ve gone from being four tense, slightly conceited, lonely people who wanted to write to one of those weird little families we fashion out of whoever’s around us. They’re very tender with one another. They all look a lot less slick and cool than they did when they were in my class, because helping each other has made their hearts get bigger. A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through. You can see this pulse in them now.

  All four of them are excellent writers, but only one of them has been published at all, and that was just one article. But you know what? They love each other. They still look forward to their meetings after all these years. They are better writers and better people because of their work with each other. Almost always at least one of them is well and able to help, while someone else is always on the verge of giving up and dropping out of the group. But so far they have been able to talk one another into sticking it out. For instance, one of the members, the one who’d had the article published, called me last week and told me she was on the verge of giving up because she hadn’t sold anything else in the months since her piece came out. She said in an Eeyore-like voice that she thought she could drink again safely now that she’d been sober for seven years, and she’d decided that I could, too, since I’d also been sober for seven years. Her plan was to come pick me and Sam up, and then we’d drive around until we found a biker bar with child care.

  I made sounds of empathy and reminded her that she’d been this stuck before. Short assignments, I whispered. Shitty first drafts. She mewled. I asked if there was anyone in her writing group who might be helpful. But she said no, she couldn’t call them, she knew they were all doing well, that they’d all had a great week, and that anyway they probably got together every few days without telling her and exchanged their favorite derisive stories about her and rolled their eyes.