Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

  The other is to think of the writers who have given a book to me, and then to write a book back to them. This gift they have given us, which we pass on to those around us, was fashioned out of their lives. You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits. So write a book back to V. S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Wendell Berry or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can. It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

  Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight.

  The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put in the girl’s IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister; until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, "How soon until I start to die?"

  Sometimes you have to be that innocent to be a writer. Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it’s right. To be great, art has to point somewhere. So if you are no longer familiar with that place of naive conscience, it’s hard to see any point in your being a writer. Almost all of my close friends are walking personality disorders, but I know innocence is in them because I can see it in their faces and in their decisions. I can almost promise that this quality is still in you, that you are capable of quiet heroism.

  This sophisticated innocence is a gift. It is yours to give away. We are wired as humans to be open to the world instead of enclosed in a fortified, defensive mentality. What your giving can do is to help your readers be braver, be better than they are, be open to the world again. One does not need to be optimistic in order to do this. My priest friend, Rankin, for instance, describes himself as a cheerful pessimist, and this attitude is enough to rescue him from the bleakness that would otherwise have him psychically curled up in the fetal position.

  Now, come to think of it, this autism is a great position for one of your characters to end up in near the climax, because the killing of this deadness is a great theme. In real life, most people don’t actually curl up in the fetal position in order to tune out their feelings. Most people get strung out on relationships with other people or on work or drugs or alcohol or food. But a similar trance is induced.

  You may find that your character is not well enough for this deadness to be killed or, at least, not ready yet. Heaven knows, punishment and trance are a great deal more comfortable and familiar than aliveness. It’s like that old joke about denial. A woman goes to the zoo and is completely taken by the beauty and power of the gorilla. She cannot take her eyes off him. He is sleeping against the bars of the cage, and even though a sign says not to, she reaches her hand in to stroke him. Instantly, he awakes and goes berserk, tearing the bars of the cage open to get at her, mauling her to within an inch of her life. Finally, the zoo personnel manage to hit him with the tranquilizer darts. The woman is taken to an ICU, barely alive, but slowly, slowly she pulls through. After four days she is finally allowed visitors. Her best friend arrives. The woman can barely open her eyes. "God, you look like you’re in a lot of pain," the friend says, and the woman sighs. "Pain," she says. "You don’t know pain. He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write..."

  This is one of my favorite jokes because the character is so familiar to me. She is probably familiar to a lot of people you know. Maybe she is not ready for the deadness to be killed, or maybe, against all odds, she is. Maybe you can give her something from deep within to find or do or fight for that will break the trance for her. You’ll have to find this first within you, though. And then you’ll have it to give away. This woman may get to wake up. And then she will have something to give, a song to sing. Maybe it won’t be a song exactly, but maybe just a little tune, a calliope tune, the tune of survival.

  Publication

  All right, let’s talk about publication. Let’s talk about the myth of publication.

  Say you’ve finished your book, or a draft of the book, or a whole lot of stories, and you send them off to your agent, if you have one, or to a friend’s agent, or to an agent you’ve found listed in the Yellow Pages or in the Literary Market Place. Say you actually already have an editor somewhere, or an editor who once wrote you an admiring rejection letter, so you send your book or stories to him or her and to a couple of friends. As I’ve mentioned, I’m one of those people who feels beside herself the day after I’ve stuck the manuscript in the mail. It can’t have even arrived and already I’m feeling bitter and resentful about what cold, lazy, sadistic slime I’m surrounded by. There are other writers, and you may be one of them, who just push back their sleeves and get to work on the next piece. I could never be close to a person like this, but I know they exist. Anyway, if you are like me, you wait and wait and check your mail ten times each day, and feel devastated and rejected every hour that there is no response. Finally, if you are lucky, a week later you get a note from your agent’s assistant that the manuscript has in fact arrived, and maybe one of the friends has called to say that he or she has read part of it and that it is just terrific and not to worry, but you go ahead and have a small breakdown anyhow, waiting for your agent and editor to call and tell you that it’s brilliant. Every time the phone rings, you sing, "Let it please be him, oh, dear God, it must be him." But it’s not him, and then you die and go on a massive eating binge and think about what phonies most of your friends are. And then you calm down. You go for a walk. You’re a little better. Then you try to read something, but you end up reading your own manuscript and reeling with shame at how bad it is. But just when you start to go into actual spasm, your friend calls back and says he’s just read another chapter and really, on the souls of his grandchildren, he swears it’s the best thing you’ve ever written; he loves it and he loves you.

  So you are Okay again, for a good ten minutes or so.

  After another week, you call your agent because you can’t stand pretending to be cool anymore, but your agent hasn’t read your manuscript yet because he is swamped with infinitely more important matters. He tells you with the faintest hint of irritation that the very second he finishes it or hears from your editor, you will be called. And that everything is probably just fine. Okay? the agent asks. All better? You want to go rip his face off. Instead, you pray.

  And then you see in a flash of blinding insight that your agent and editor are in cahoots, and what you heard as irritation was really just the strain of withholding hysterics. After being on the phone all morning reading each other passages from your book, they agree that it is the most embarrassingly bad book ever written, and they are honking and screaming with laughter. At one point your editor is laughing so hard that she has to take some digitalis, and your agent ruptures a blood vessel in his throat. They are reading the scene to each other where your hero’s father dies.

  (And if you actually have a contract with these people, you assume that your editor has to get off the phone at this point so that he can go talk to the legal department to see if they have to pay you the last part of the advance they owe you, or if maybe they can even sue you to collect the money they have already paid yo
u.)

  But all you can do is wait and wait and wait, until finally your agent or editor calls and says the book is terrific and it will be published in the spring or the fall or whenever. It will be published. And then there are some happy months, rewriting, editing, working with the copy editor, loved and reassured every step of the way, and then there is the utter miracle of galleys, where your book comes to you set in type and it looks like a real person was involved in writing it.

  Many nonwriters assume that publication is a thunderously joyous event in the writer’s life, and it is certainly the biggest and brightest carrot dangling before the eyes of my students. They believe that if they themselves were to get something published, their lives would change instantly, dramatically, and for the better. Their self-esteem would flourish; all self-doubt would be erased like a typo. Entire paragraphs and manuscripts of disappointment and rejection and lack of faith would be wiped out by one push of a psychic delete button and replaced by a quiet, tender sense of worth and belonging. Then they could wrap the world in flame.

  But this is not exactly what happens. Or at any rate, this is not what it has been like for me.

  For me, it has been more like a cross between the last few weeks of pregnancy, when you look and feel like Orson Welles and you are hormonally challenged up the yang, your ankles are swollen and you feel revulsion at the smell of vegetables cooking; and the first day of seventh-grade PE class, when they make you line up by size before they hand out your gym uniform. And you’re either four feet tall, like E.T, or made to feel like Diane Arbus’s Jewish giant.

  Oh, the process starts off well enough. One day several months before your pub date, you get a set of bound galleys, which is to say, a paperbound book with your manuscript set in type. I always feel a desperate sense of relief at this point, because it seems like the publisher is too far in now to cancel publication. These bound galleys have also gone out to hundreds of papers and reviewers, and this makes you believe that the publisher has already shelled out so much money in production and postage costs that they will have to go ahead and actually publish the damn thing.

  The first time you read through your galleys is heaven. The second time through, all you see are the typos no one caught. It looks like the typesetter typed it with frostbitten feet, drunk. And the typos are important ones. They make you look ignorant; they make you look like an ignorant racist. By the third or fourth time through, you can see that there is not one fresh or insightful or even salvageable line in the whole thing. By the fifth reading, you are no longer sure that publishing this would be in your best interests.

  Not long after, you get your early reviews, in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and sometimes they sound like your mother wrote them. Other times they suggest that you are a show-offy vacuous loser, and they hope you die so that they won’t have to read your work anymore. I have gotten prepub reviews that said I was a treadmark on the underpants of life. Perhaps this is not exactly what they said, but by reading between the lines, I could see that this is what they were implying. You survive that. Possibly you’re still drinking, so you have a pitcher of martinis just to take the edge off, or you’ve quit drinking, so you eat your body weight in pastries and Mexican food. Somehow you get the time to pass, and then your pub date arrives.

  There is something mythic about the date of publication, and you actually come to believe that on this one particular morning you will wake up to a phone ringing off the hook and your publisher will be so excited that they will have hired the Blue Angels precision flying team to buzz your squalid little hovel, which you will be moving out of as soon as sales of the book really take off. Or at least they will remember to send flowers.

  I remember one year my friend Carpenter and I had books out on the same day. We talked about it all summer. We each pretended to have modest expectations. I had modest expectations for his book; he had modest expectations for mine. The week before, we talked almost every morning about how excited we were and what a long time we had waited, and how it was just like being a little kid waiting for Christmas Eve. Finally the big day arrived and I woke up happy, embarrassed in advance by all the praise and attention that would be forthcoming. I made coffee and practiced digging my toe in the dirt, and called Pammy and a few friends to let them congratulate me. Then I waited for the phone to ring. The phone did not know its part. It sat there silent as death with a head cold. By noon the noise of it not ringing began to wear badly on my nerves. Luckily, though, by noon it was time for the first beer of the day. I sat by the phone like a loyal dog, waiting for it to ring. Finally, finally it rang at four. I picked up the phone and heard Carpenter laughing hysterically, like some serial killer, and then I became hysterical, and eventually we both had to be sedated.

  He sent me flowers, and before I knew he had done so, I sent him flowers, too. The ones he sent me were so beautiful, roses and irises mostly.

  That is often pretty much what it is like, except for the part about the roses and irises. I tell you, if what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy. If you are lucky, you will get a few reviews, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Don’t even get me started on the places where one is neglected. There will be a few book-signing parties and maybe some readings, at one of which your publisher will spring for a twenty-pound wheel of runny Brie, and the only person who will show has lived on the street since he was twelve and even he will leave, because he hates Brie. You and the people who work at the bookstore will make lots of hilarious jokes about this. You will read to the five of them, and they will respond with great enthusiasm. Maybe there will be a couple of interviews and then probably somewhere along the line, just when you thought things were settling down, your first really devastating review, the review that says your book is dog doo. It is especially festive when this review is in the local press so that all your relatives can read it, too. You can just picture several hundred thousand people perusing the review over their morning coffee, reading it out loud to one another and chuckling about how clever the reviewer is. So you rant and you cry, and then your writer friends call and commiserate. And they really do feel sick for you, and angry, and they know you feel like a wounded animal, a raging bull, and they say the right things, that they love you and they love your book, and that it has happened to them, a year ago or whenever. Because if you are a writer, it is going to happen to you. This is the truth. It has happened to me, and if you get published, it is almost certainly going to happen to you.

  But the fact of publication is the acknowledgment from the community that you did your writing right. You acquire a rank that you never lose. Now you’re a published writer, and you are in that rare position of getting to make a living, such as it is, doing what you love best. That knowledge does bring you a quiet joy.

  But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face the blank page.

  The beginnings of a second or third book are full of spirit and confidence because you have been published, and false starts and terror because now you have to prove yourself again. People may find out that you were a flash in the pan, that it was all beginner’s luck. What I know now is that you have to wear out all that dread by writing long and hard and not stopping too often to admire yourself and your publishedness in the mirror. Sometime later you’ll find yourself at work on, maybe really into, another book, and once again you figure out that the real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

  "When is she going to talk about joy?" the people in the back row whine. Haven’t I? I certainly meant to mention that good hours at the desk are as wonderful as any I can imagine. But joy for me is Sam and my church and my buddies and family, and more often it is felt outdoors than at my desk. There is a part of me that resists saying that I love being a published writer, that it has been a dream come true, first of all because it is so much more complicated than that. And second, I don’t w
ant unpublished writers to throw up their hands and say, "See? Okay? I rest my case: publishing is the great reward."

  But the truth is that there can be a great deal of satisfaction in being a writer, in being a person who gets some work done most days, and who has been published and acknowledged. I carry this around in my pocket, touch it a number of times a day to make sure it is still there. Even though so much of my writing time is stressful and disheartening, I carry a secret sense of accomplishment around with me, like a radium pack implanted near my heart that now leaches a quiet sense of relief through my system. But you pay through the nose for this.

  No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like "You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I’ll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I’m usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I’m a writer. Then there’s always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, ’Have you written anything I might have heard of?’

  "And that’s the price I pay for being a writer."

  My own version of this is that the other day, Sam and I were at the mall. I had a big event coming up onstage at the Herbst Theater, because I had just had a book published that was getting a lot of attention. I had decided to buy a new dress for the evening. So the two of us were just innocently walking around the store when the owner came up to me. She said, "Are you looking for anything in particular?"

  I said, "Well, I have a special occasion coming up, and I need a new dress."

  She said, "Is it for a dinner party?"

  I said, "No, actually, I’m doing something onstage."