All Will Be Well

All Will Be Well

Tomorrow is my last round of chemo. And today I’ve taken the pre-chemo meds to reduce the possibility of an allergic reaction to the drugs. I’ve packed my “chemo bag” – movie, water, chocolate, chewing gum, book, knitting, comfy blanket, eye mask (so I can’t see what’s going on at the beginning of the process). Tomorrow we’ll pack our food. So, I’m ready. Or as ready as I can be. And I’m convinced that tomorrow, and in the days to come, all will be well and that I will make slow, steady progress to wellness.

“How can you stand it?” a friend of mine asked. “How can you stand not knowing whether the prognosis you’ve been given [a good one] will pan out?”

“I have no choice but to stand it,” I responded. “And I choose to think that all will be well.”

I’ve had people tell me every possible thing that could go wrong after chemo. I’ve chosen not to listen, to try, instead, to “be in the moment” with whatever I’m experiencing. I’ve chosen to try to listen to my own body; to “see” where I am, rather than to anticipate all the difficult things that might happen. Rather, I anticipate that all will be well. This doesn’t come naturally; it takes work because I come from a background of very pessimistic people.

I’ve had a lot of help from reading the lives of people who’ve been where I am before me. And I’ve read a lot about how to approach difficult situations like this. What I have done is work very hard at incorporating what I’ve learned into my life right now, and into my writing life, too, because much of what I’ve learned to get me through this period in my life, we can easily apply to our work as we write about our lives. (More about this later.)

Just before my last round of chemo, I read an article in the AARP magazine about a man with a chronic condition. What impressed me, and what I took away from the article – the basis of what I write here – is that he said he chose to believe that all would turn out well for him. This way, he didn’t contaminate whatever pleasure each day contained with the fear of what would happen to him in the future. In pop psych jargon, he didn’t “futurize.” He said that, yes, he realized this was irrational, given his diagnosis. He said, too, that you have to constantly readjust to every shift and change that occurs in your body, that the adjustment to your condition is ongoing, that it isn’t over all over at once, and that it demands an constant awareness of the condition of your body, a constant checking in. This is, of course, both true and wise. (I’ve read books – and I’m sure you have too – that suggest that you should work toward a moment of adjusting to something, of getting past something, of accepting something. My good writing friend Edvige Giunta reminded me a while ago that this is a Western concept that denies the ongoingness of human experience, of living with, rather than overcoming, something that has profoundly affected us.)
One of the advantages of this life I’ve been living is that I’ve been reading books I’ve wanted to read for ages. One is the remarkable, The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself From Chronic Unhappiness by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007). I’m a fan of Kabat-Zinn and have tried to read everything he’s written.

In The Mindful Way, the authors report on an experiment called “The Mouse in the Maze.” In the experiment, two groups of students were shown a cartoon mouse trapped in a maze. Two different versions of the maze existed: one showed a piece of Swiss cheese at the exit of the maze’s mousehole; the other, an owl hovering to seize the mouse in its talons.

The task was easy; the maze took only a few minutes to complete. All the students completed the task. Later, the students were given a test to determine their current state of creativity. “Those who had helped their mouse avoid the owl turned in scores that were fifty percent lower than the scores of students who had helped their mouse find the cheese. The state of mind elicited by attending to the owl had resulted in a lingering sense of caution, avoidance, and vigilance for things going wrong. This mind-state in turn weakened creativity, closed down options, and reduced the students’ flexibility in responding to the next task” (124).

So, knowing that all would not be well for the cartoon mouse was enough to significantly diminish the creative responses of one group of students! And knowing that all would be well for the cartoon mouse was enough to significantly boost the creative responses of the other group!

I’ve pondered what this means for me as a person undergoing chemotherapy, and also, of course, what this means for me as a writer.

According to the authors of The Mindful Way, if we approach any task with “qualities of interest, curiosity, warmth, and good will,” we’ll be “countering any effects of aversion and avoidance that might be present.” This takes conscious cultivation.

Now imagine two scenarios in our writing lives. In the first, we sit down at our desks, and we tell ourselves, before we’ve written a word, that everything we write will turn out boring or horrible, that we’re really not talented, that we’re writing because we’re taking a course not because we have any intrinsic interest in what we’re doing. In the second, we sit down at our desks and we stop a moment to cultivate a state of interest and curiosity towards what might emerge under our pens in the next several minutes; we stop a moment to congratulate ourselves for taking the time to sit down to the task, and we think, with eagerness, of the sense of fulfillment we’ll feel when our writing is done.

In our writing lives, if we deliberately cultivate the notion that “all will be well” with our work – and with ourselves as writers – it very well might enhance our capacity to be creative.

Here I Am

It’s a beautiful morning here, where I live in the northeast.  A nice enough morning for a walk – it’s in the mid 40s.  A present during this time of the winter when it’s often far too cold for me to walk.  And today, five days after my last chemotherapy, an especially welcome day, for I never could have ventured out for a walk if it had been windy, wet, and wild and snowy, as it had been a few days ago.

 

So I dressed in layers, wore a soft wool hat to cover my now bald head, and decided to walk, yes, but to stay close to home, which meant a wee walk up the block and back, and then, if able, all around the little park nearby, then home.  Twenty minutes at the most, but I could bail out at ten, if necessary, and given how I’d felt on Monday, the third day after chemo (confined to bed most of the day, unable to eat, except toast and Sicilian orange jam – I’d insisted on that luxury for myself on that miserable day when I needed at least one pleasure), I felt sure I’d walk less today rather than more.  For I hadn’t exerted myself to any great degree yet, though I’d walked a tiny bit yesterday.  Whether I liked it or not, I had to accept that I was back to Square One – very weak and lacking in stamina, so that anything I could manage was (I knew) damned near heroic, though I didn’t want to think of it in that way. 

 

But you’re told to walk for your recovery, to try it even if you think you can’t.  Or rather, you’re told – and this is a good system – to assess where you are to determine whether you should exercise.  If you feel your strength is at a 5, then exercise.  If a 4, then exercise.  If a 3, start, be prudent, then stop if you become fatigued.  If a 2, then rest rather than exertion is in order.  If a 1, then don’t even consider making an effort.  And…always make sure you have some energy at bedtime; don’t go to bed exhausted.

 

I like this system.  It’s one I’ll take with me into my post-chemo life.  It’s a little system I’d wish I’d known about before.  How many times have I sat down to write something on a project when I was a “1,” when rest, rather than work was in order? How many times had I wasted the energy of a “5” to do something that didn’t move my work forward, like write long unnecessary emails or read stupid stuff on the Internet (a review of the garments the First Lady has worn since President Obama took office – appropriate reading for a “2” moment, if at all, I now realize)?  How many times did I even reflect upon the amount of energy I had, and how I could most appropriately use it?

 

Well, this morning I was a “3,” and I was prudent, and, much to my surprise, the act of walking energized me, and so I continued, continued past the ten-minute mark and took myself up past the little park.  At one point, gazing at the trees in the park, many of which were ravaged during the fluke October snow, I thought to myself “I am here.”  Where that sentence came from, I don’t know, but came it did.  Perhaps it was the gratitude that I’d been out walking for, by then, nearly fifteen minutes, that made me so aware of my being-ness, of the fact that I was where I was.  Just that, no more.  There are those moments when you’ve been diagnosed with a dangerous condition that the recognition of “I am here,” though so simple, staggers you with its its implications, and that’s what happened to me, today.

 

So, on to writing.

 

How many times in my writing life have I wanted to be other than where I was at the moment?  Not “I am here, and isn’t it a miracle that I’ve walked even this far.”  Not “I am here, and aren’t I lucky to be here right now, caught in the mire of this very difficult chapter which presents so many learning opportunities to me.”  Not, “I am here, at the beginning of the process, which I vow to relish.”  But “Damn it, I wish I were finished with this section.”  Or, “I can’t wait to finish this piece so I can start that other.”  Or, “I only wrote 250 words today; I wanted to write more; what’s wrong with me?”

 

The day after chemo – at least the regimen I’m on – you feel okay.  The medications to limit negative reactions are still in your system.  You feel rather “up,” in fact.  Two days after chemo – a bit more “normal,” but still “up.”  The third day after chemo, for me (and not everyone) is my “killer day,” the day when I can barely get out of bed, the day when everything hurts, the day when my nose leaks and my eyes tear and much, much more.  I’d been warned about this, but early in the process, I somehow thought that what happened to other people wouldn’t happen to me.  On my third day, I’d somehow avoid what others had to suffer through.  (Infantile power fantasies; delusional thought system; arrogance; stupidity – call it what you will.)  Then round one of chemo, and whack – the third day, the “killer day.”  Then round two of chemo, and whack – the third day, the “killer day.”  By the third round, though, slow learner though I may be, I figured I’d get whacked (though I still hoped I wouldn’t), that it was inevitable, that I shouldn’t fight it, that I should prepare for it (expensive Sicilian jam in the house; good bread in the cupboard; nice, clean sheets for the bed; meditation tapes on the end table to get me through the night when I awakened).  So I was ready.  And for the first time, I didn’t fight it.  I can’t say I liked it – I didn’t.  But, just like on my walk today, I thought something like “I am here.”

 

I didn’t waste my energy protesting where I was in the cycle.  I didn’t wish it were different.  I didn’t blame myself for being where I was (and let me tell you there are plenty of dangerous books out there about cancer that say, in effect, you cause it, you can prevent it, you can shrink your tumors by using your will).  I did something that’s hard for me.  I accepted where I was in the process.

 

Accepting where we are in the process of writing.  That’s a wonderful skill to cultivate.  And I say it’s a skill because, quite simply, it is.  It isn’t easy.  It takes work, just as accepting where I am in the process of chemo takes work (reading the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn; meditation; simple yoga, journal writing).  But it’s work that’s worth doing.  And, like everything else that we do that’s good for ourselves, it’s a lifelong process.

 

And – and this I didn’t expect – after my walk, here I am (I am here), writing.

Writing Readiness

So, here I am, getting myself ready for my second chemotherapy infusion. The process itself started today, with oral medications that reduce the possibility of an allergic reaction to the chemo drugs. I’ve gotten out a little carry bag and packed supplies for tomorrow, and while I was doing it, I thought about writing (which I’ll get to later).

Into my little carry bag, I’ve packed a DVD (“Mamma Mia” – they have a big screen TV in the infusion room). Some knitting (the last sleeve of a multicolored sweater I’m knitting). Wipes (I’ve become a fanatic about hand washing). Hand cream (I’m trying to keep my hands soft through all the hand washing. Gum (I always have a dry mouth now and it truly helps.). Chocolates (treats for enduring chemo, eaten regularly during the few hours I’ll be there). Earplugs and sleep mask (I don’t want to see or hear what they call the “stick” when the nurse inserts a needle into the port in my chest for the infusion). Water (of course – hydration, essential). The book I’m reading (Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese – a magnificent book set in a hospital in Ethiopia; it’s written by a doctor and describes, not only the kind of procedures done there in detail, but also the history of Ethiopia during and after the Emperor Haile Selassie’s reign, including back-story about the Italian invasion; it’s the kind of book I’m preferring at this time – huge, epic, set in another country, filled with graphic descriptions of landscape, historical events, complex unforgettable characters). A very big picnic lunch (Roast Beef and Potato Salad on an Onion Roll and Carrot Sticks; I was the only patient eating during chemo last time; the nurse was thrilled – “We want you to have enough energy to walk out of here,” and I did). A scarf I’ve knit for my oncologist (I hope he likes it).

You might say that I’m prepared for tomorrow.

But of course I’m not prepared. Who could be? Lots of my friends have been telling me, “You’re doing such good work preparing yourself for this experience”; “You’re dealing with this so well”; “You’re such a good patient”. I want to disabuse them all of these false images because it perpetrates a sense that there are people who do this kind of thing well (me) and people who don’t (someone else). I don’t like those divisions, those dichotomies. I can say, and will, that I’m doing the best I can. But I can’t say that I’m prepared.

Because I’ve gone through this once, it’s not as scary as the last time, that’s for sure. But still, there’s no telling what will happen. So “prepared” isn’t the right word. Because as prepared as you think you are for whatever you’re encountering – partnership, childrearing, elder age, illness; grieving – you’re never prepared and you don’t know what will be what until you begin the process. I think I learned this during the past several years from reading all the war novels I’ve read. Once the first shot is fired, nothing ever goes according to plan, and if you’re in combat, you’re always in an ad hoc kind of world, prepared in some ways, and unprepared in others.

In thinking about what the right word might be for what I am at this point, the only word that I can come up with is the word “Ready”. I’ll have all my stuff (my talismans) with me. So let’s just say that I’m ready for tomorrow. Not prepared for tomorrow, by any means, but ready to respond, as best I can, to whatever happens. Notice that I’ve said respond “as best I can,” not “respond well,” for who can predict the future. I certainly can’t. (And I can tell you that it’s a terrible burden to someone to respond “well” to a difficult situation – “I know you’re do fine during chemo; you’re just that kind of person”. So that in addition to living through something tough, you’re expected to live through it well. “Johnny is taking his father’s death so well.” Why should he?)

While I was packing my special chemo carry bag, as I said before, I began thinking about writing while I was thinking about what I was trying to do in packing that little bag.

The truth is that when we sit down at our desks (or wherever we happen to be writing – in the subway, at a café, on a bench outside), we can kid ourselves into thinking we’re prepared to do the work of writing just as I could kid myself that I’m prepared for tomorrow. We have our story (we think). We have our set of skills (we’ve worked hard at them). We have our little or our big plan (an outline, or, in my case, my many outlines). We have our “deadline” in our head or written down (the book will be done by the end of the summer, by the end of September). And, of course if your writing life is anything like mine, even though we might think we’re prepared, we also carry with us all those threads of terror and doubt. Me, write something that makes sense? Me, finish a book?

I think that I will, in the future, try to think about how, when I sit down at my writing desk, I want to be, not prepared, but ready. That’s all. Ready. Ready to write. Ready to see what happens when I write. Ready to respond to what unfolds under my pen. Ready to duck and swerve the mental demons that make me want to stop writing. Ready to keep my concentration and not check my e-mail, the day’s news, and the latest dumb thing some cat did on You Tube. Ready to stay at my desk for the full half hour, hour, two hours, whatever. Ready, even, to let myself witness myself enjoying the process. Ready to change my plans, ready to change my narrative, ready to elaborate on something I hadn’t intended to. Ready to protect myself as a writer and walk away from the desk should I feel myself “reliving” an event rather than “writing about” it. Ready to walk away from a publication situation that starts to feel abusive.

Ready seems doable to me.

I started thinking about readiness in writing, actually, on Christmas Eve, when I read Nancy F. Koehn’s New York Times article, “Leadership Lessons from the Shackleton Expedition.” (I might write more about this soon.) On his attempt to reach the South Pole, Shackleton’s 1914-1916 expedition faced disaster upon disaster. Shackleton thought he was “prepared,” but he wasn’t. Yet, he did not lose one crewmember throughout the ordeal. And the reason was that Shackleton responded “constantly to changing circumstances”; he manifested the skill of “consistent reinvention.” Though his goal had been to reach the South Pole, he changed his goal to making sure all of his crewmembers survived. This entailed his ability to jettison his initial goals, to honestly assess his situation, to be “present” (rather than oblivious) to what he faced.

So, how’s this for a description of Writing Readiness? The ability to respond “constantly to changing circumstances”; manifesting the skill of “consistent reinvention”. I’m thinking that this is what I’ll work toward – in my chemo experience and in my writing – in this New Year.

Order and Meaning

Order and Meaning

When I’m dealing with a medical issue, I often let all the “shoulds” with which I usually bombard myself fall away – I should be reading this, or reading that – and I pick up books seemingly at random, rather than by plan, which permits me to get to works I’ve ignored or avoided or forgotten I’ve wanted to read. A writer friend wrote me that she was going to Venice soon. Could I suggest restaurants? Reading material? And I remembered that I’d always wanted to read Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark since I’d visited Venice, and that I never had. I found the book and began to read it lying on a sofa, instead of sitting attentively at a desk with pen in hand. This relaxed way of reading brings, into my life, certain bliss even in times of great stress and strain that I don’t seem to allow into my everyday life. And the obvious question is Why wait for illness? Why, indeed?

So I’ve been reading Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark, that idiosyncratic memoir of his yearly forays to Venice. The book is an arrangement of short meditations on his experience – not a “touristy” approach to Venice, by any means, but an experiential soulful work about the effect of Venice in the winter on a sometime traveler. It’s a seemingly random series of observations and thoughtful ramblings about, say, why he would never go to Venice in the summer; about why winter is so compelling; about how the fog in winter is often so thick that the only way to find your way back to your hotel after a brief errand is to hope that the path your body cut through the fog was still there; about what the inside of a certain palazzos really looks like – the rotting draperies, the corridors filled with middling paintings of ancestor, the smell of must. There is this insight: that in Venice a person “is more a silhouette than his unique features” because of the way the city is constructed, because another person is nearly always witnessed in a narrow passageway silhouetted against a building; the very meaning of personhood changes in such a setting.

In one section, Brodsky writes about his writing, about how, “by the cumulative effect of what I’ve been doing over the years, I am a writer; by trade however, I am an academic, a teacher.” He explains that he has a five-week winter break, and that he arranges his trips to Venice during that time. His interest in Venice was piqued years before when he read Provincial Entertainments, a short novel written by the French writer Henri di Regnier, translated into the Russian by Mikhail Kuzmin. Provincial Entertainments was set in Venice in winter. Venice in winter – “the sense of damp, cold, narrow streets through which one hurries” – sounded like the Petersburg of Brodsky’s youth, and impelled the first of Brodsky’s many wintry visits.

Still, what mattered most to Brodsky when he read Provincial Entertainments was what he learned about craft in reading the work. The novel taught him, he said, “the single most crucial lesson in composition; namely, that what makes a narrative good is not the story itself but what follows what.” Note Brodsky’s point: the single most crucial lesson in composition is not the story but what follows what, not a crucial lesson in composition.

Now Brodsky is a poet, of course, and the matter of what follows what lies at the heart and soul of poetry. But Brodsky’s insight is that what follows what is as important in prose composition too, even though many prose writers might initially believe that the story itself is central. I’ve argued for some time that memoir is more like poetry than like fiction in that memoir’s meanings – at least the memoirs I love – come at the reader by virtue of the what follow what. The writer has paid attention to juxtaposition, that great compositional tool of the memoirist that beginning writers often overlook in their zeal to write “and then this happened and then that happened and then that happened after this happened” instead of writing “and then this happened which reminded me of this other thing that happened long ago and have I ever told you about my very first love?” That is, the “what follows what” can work, for memoirists, by working with the association of memory, with patterns of events rather than sequence of events. This event made me think of this one, and I can’t figure out why, so let me tell them next to each other, and, oh yes, I think I see why that came to me, and I’ll puzzle about it with you, the reader. Not this event followed that one.

Arrangement, order, what follows what. The reason this is so important in memoir is that we live our lives, not only externally – walking down the street, say – but in our heads simultaneously. We are washing the dishes; we are dreaming of a lost love. If we write only, we washed the dishes, we saw a movie, we went to bed, we’re missing the story. We wash the dishes, we daydream of a lost love, we tell the lost love’s story, and when we get to bed, that bedtime scene is infinitely richer for it. The “and then and then and then” narrative would never get to the bittersweetness of making love to the person you’re with just after thinking about the person you’ll never see again.

And so. Brodsky lets us see why he’s arranged his Watermark in the way he has. He invites us to return to what we might have imagined as a random series of insights. He invites us to see what follows what and how it adds to the overall meaning of the work. And so we get Brodsky’s arrival in Venice on a winter wintry night, and he tells us that his first experience of Venice was “the smell of freezing seaweed.” We get this immediate, anti-touristy Venice experience early; we don’t know why Brodsky comes to Venice in winter, not yet; we don’t know what provoked Brodsky to come to Venice in winter at all. All these insights come to us later. Brodsky starts with a visit to Venice, his Venice, in winter, before we get the back-story. The work would have been completely different had it started, say, with his life as a Russian in St. Petersburg, with his reading Provincial Entertainments, with his decision to visit Venice in winter, then Venice in winter.

That would have emphasized the story itself, and not what follows what.

Think about it. The story itself is not the story in memoir, in telling a life, not ever. The story is in how the memoirist, the writer of a life, arranges the what that follows the what.

How Finished Is Finished?

How Finished Is Finished?

When I go to author readings, I often hear audience members raise questions about a writer’s process, about his/her sources of inspiration, about how long it took for the writer to complete the work. But I’ve never heard anyone ask, nor have I asked: “How much editorial input did you have? How much did you change your penultimate draft [the draft before the last draft] based upon editorial input?” And I’ve come to believe that this is one of the most important questions we can ask published writers.

The reason is this. I’ve noticed, in my teaching, that writers on their way to becoming published writers, sometimes treat their works-in-progress as if they’re sacrosanct, as if they can’t – shouldn’t — be changed very much based upon a mentor’s reading. This assumes that the writer is the best possible judge of what the work should look like. According to this view of the writing process, I, the writer, pen my very best work, and I’ll listen to people’s opinions about what I ought to change, but I’ll stick to my sense of the work: I won’t revise my view of my work very much based upon what another person, even a very well-qualified person, tells me. I’ll make cosmetic changes, say. But I’ll trust my own sense about the narrative, about how it should be told, about what should come first, about what should come in the middle, about what should come last. I’ve sometimes – indeed, often – suggested major changes to works-in-progress and had the writers I’ve worked with not make them even though I know the work would profit by these changes. These writers trust their own sense of what their works should be, rather than trusting mine, even though I have decades of editorial experience, decades of working with editors who’ve insisted that I made changes in my own work-in-progress.

I’ve come to realize that published writers don’t often share what the end of the process looks like; they don’t often speak of how many changes they’ve made (often, they’ve had to make) based upon editorial input. Very many — in fact, virtually all — published works (except, perhaps, those that are self-published) become collaborative efforts at the end of the process. The writer is finished with her/his work. The editor steps in, evaluates the manuscript. And at this point, the author, editor, assistant editor, and copy editor join together to make the book the best book possible. The writer has handed in what s/he believes to be her very best effort. S/he thinks s/he’s finished. But s/he learns, sometimes with a great deal of chagrin, that there is far more work to do. At this stage, there’s a lot of give and take in the process, a lot of negotiation, perhaps even a fair dose of argument. But no book that I know of has gone to press anything like the book the writer completed. So if seasoned writers are willing to take editorial advice, and beginning writers are less willing, I think it might be because beginning writers don’t know precisely how many changes seasoned writers must make to their work because of editorial input.

Let me illustrate.

I had lunch with Mary Gordon just after she met with her agent or editor – I don’t remember which – about her first as-yet-unpublished novel, Final Payments. After the meeting, she realized that she would have to rewrite the entire novel, from a different point of view. She listened to the input that she was given; she undertook that monumental task; the book was a literary sensation. What would have happened had she refused? I’ve spoken, many times, to very well-known writers and have heard them remark, “My editor wants me to rewrite the whole thing,” or “Based on a conversation with my editor, I realize I have to rethink the way the central character comes across throughout the whole book,” or “After meeting with my editor, I realize the structure of the book isn’t working.”

These writers – published writers all – are willing to listen and they’re willing to make fundamental large-scale changes in works they’ve labored over for years. The end of the process is often the beginning of yet another round of changes.

My grandson and I enjoy watching Gordon Ramsay together, and though I’m not a fan of his harangues, I find his programs fascinating. Here is an accomplished chef with a score of Michelin stars under his belt. He walks into a restaurant in trouble. He figures out what needs to be done – a restaurant by the sea needs to simplify its menu and rely more on fresh, local ingredients; a tired-looking restaurant needs to spiff up its décor; a lazy manager who sits in front of a TV instead of greeting guests needs to learn to “work the front of the house”. He tells precisely what needs to be done to fix the restaurant in no uncertain terms. And here’s the astonishing point. Even though all of these places are in trouble, not everyone is capable of listening to and understanding that something needs to be done. Not everyone – in fact very few – are able to “hear” what Ramsay, a spectacularly successful chef – has to say. In fact, many fall back on their old, tried-and-true incredibly unsuccessful practices. Ramsay’s shows illustrate how difficult it is for people to take advice from experts and how wedded so many of us are to practices that just aren’t working. Many of us can’t hear what needs to be done; many of us won’t change even though what we’re doing isn’t working.

Here are some of the major changes I had to make in my own writing practice based upon editorial input. (I say, “had to make” because that’s the way it is in publishing. As one of my editors once said, “You want to publish it yourself, do it your way. You want to publish with me, you want us to use our paper, our ink, our bindery, our warehouse, our trucks, our P. R. people, and you make the changes I insist upon.)

On Moving. My penultimate draft was 100,000 words. The publisher decided, at the end of the process, that they wanted a short, 40,000-word book and they wanted most of the memoirist bits deleted. I refused. But I cut the 100,000 words to 60,000 and deleted much of the more personal material.

Crazy in the Kitchen. My editor insisted that I delete a chapter that she believed was too much like the material I’d already published in Vertigo. Deleting that chapter meant a substantial revision to the chapters that came before and after.

Vertigo. The editorial letter indicating the changes I had to make was about ten single-spaced typescript pages long. The changes had to do with pacing, with phrasing, with characterization. One major change was deleting the term “depression” to describe how I felt, and to rewrite all those scenes telling precisely what I was feeling. (“Depression” is meaningless; it tells the reader nothing; it’s too general.) I had to write a new beginning to the book – this took most of a summer. A new order for the chapters I wrote was implemented, which meant rewriting the whole book to accommodate the new order. And remember: I thought I was finished.

Adultery. The editor wanted me to take a later chapter and make it the first chapter. She wanted the book to start with a punch. This meant rewriting the whole book.

And I could go on. But won’t. The point is obvious, I hope. Not even seasoned writers are finished when they think they’re finished. The seasoned writers hears what’s needed, and does it. The seasoned writer doesn’t cling to the work as s/he’s completed. Seasoned writers listen to expert advice and, more often than not, they take it. And almost always, their published works are far better than they would have been had they not been “forced” to rethink and revise.

Perhaps the best illustration I can give you for this is how Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald worked together on the manuscript that became The Great Gatsby. Susan Bell in “Revisioning the Great Gatsby” in The Writer’s Notebook (Tin House Books, 2009) charts the changes Fitzgerald made after receiving Perkins’s critique. She provides an enormously useful way of understanding how writers and editors can work collaboratively toward the production of a better book. (Perkins’ letter is available online – Google Maxwell Perkins’s letter on The Great Gatsby.) Bell concludes “The Great Gatsby would be a different book, and very possibly a lesser one, without Perkins’s counsel.”

I Can Do This

One benefit of recuperating is that you have to rest a lot. In ordinary life, just like so many of us, I tend to push myself beyond where I should, though I’ve tried to learn to rest when I need it. And since I’m not a television watching type (which, after all, is far from restful), I’ve been reading a lot. In fact, since I started reading again – sometime last week – I’ve read four magnificent books. Michael Chabon’s memoir, Manhood for Amateurs – a gorgeous series of short essays that was just what I needed when I couldn’t read for more than, say, fifteen minutes at a time; the thoughtfulness, the wryness, the incredible style – everything was so very pleasing. Next, Nicholas Rinaldi’s The Jukebox Queen of Malta, set during the World War II continuous bombardment of Malta by the Germans and Italians that went on for years, with magnificent, fully-realized characters, in a rich, vibrant setting. Ann Packer’s Swim Back to Me, a series of astonishing short stories about the smallest of life’s moments that signify.

It was a scene in Ann Packer’s “Her First Born” that forced me to pause and think. In it, Lise, a woman, whose first child has died in infancy, is pregnant with her second child. Her first marriage imploded in the aftermath of that tragedy; she and her second husband are preparing for labor, readying the new baby’s room, with the death of the first child always, always in the background. While she is in labor, hard labor, she tells the midwife, “I can’t do this.” The midwife tells her that’s the wrong message to give herself; the wrong attitude to maintain: “You have to think you can,” she says. For Lise can, in fact, give birth. And she must, because with labor, there’s no way back, there’s only the way through. After the midwife’s admonition, she says, “I can do this, I can do this. . . and then she does.”

During these past several weeks, I, too, have said, “I can’t do this,” that I can’t do what it takes to recover. But, just like Packer’s woman in childbirth, I, too, have no choice. There’s no way back for me either; there’s just the way through. And like every other woman in my position, I have no choice and I do have what it takes.

I’ve never heard my granddaughter Julia say, “I can’t do this.” And the fact that she hasn’t ever said it has made me wonder why those words come into my consciousness so very often, not only in terms of recovering from this operation, but also when I’m in the throes of, say, finishing a book. I can say that Julia was born that way; she has always been a girl with an indomitable will; a girl willing to work and work at something until she perfects it; a girl who sets herself tasks (writing a horror film) and who accomplishes them.

When she was little, I once took her to a local playground. She hadn’t yet perfected swinging from one ring to another – there were six of them and I’m sure there’s a technical name for them, but I don’t know it. I’d hoist her up onto the first ring; she was too small to reach for it herself. She’d do the best she could. And then she’d do it again, from the beginning. And again. And again. Most caregivers understand that kids either want to do something much longer or much shorter than you’d like them to do it. Well, on this particular sunny day, Julia wanted to swing and swing and swing. And I was ready to move on. When I suggested we go, she said, “I’m not finished yet” and so we stayed for in fact we had the time. All that day, frustrated as she may have been, she never said, “I can’t do this.” She never gave up. All she said was, “I want to try it again.” By the time I had to take her home, her palms were rubbed raw, but even that hadn’t stopped her.

Who can say where this tenacity comes from? But I do know this: her parents have never questioned her ability to do something (as mine did). They’ve never questioned whether what she’d chosen to do was worth doing (as mine did). They’ve never ridiculed her for her mistakes early in her learning of a task (as mine did). They’ve never imposed their desires upon her (as mine did). It isn’t that she’s been constantly praised – for we know that parental praise makes kids dependent upon that praise. It’s that they communicate to her that her efforts (not only her achievements) are worthwhile. They’ve reported to her what they’ve observed: Look at that! You can now swing on five of the six rings! What progress you’ve made! And they’ve let her find her own source of strength deep within.

When I was a young writer, I doubted my ability, and my capacity to bring a book to completion. I was giving a talk somewhere in New York, no doubt, about Virginia Woolf, and I saw a crude hand-lettered sign in the shape of an arrow, with the words “Yes you can” within. It was just lying on a table. And I stole it – it’s the only thing I’ve ever stolen. I felt I needed it. I learned that what I needed to do was replace the internal
“No you can’ts” I’d internalized with a “Yes you can.” I know that this sounds all New Age-y. But the point is, why spend so much time telling yourself you can’t, when you can spend the same amount of time telling yourself that you can, or that perhaps you can, or that you might.

Last night, my husband and I saw the movie “The Photographer,” starring Reg Rogers, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Anthony Michael Hall – watching DVDs in early evening, another perk of recovering. And what a splendid movie it was, and I recommend it highly.

The film is an allegory about what happens to many creative people. A photographer, whose first show is a resounding success, believes that he’s lost his touch. It’s time for him to have a second show, and he has nothing. He finds a packet of ten powerful photographs and decides to pass them off as his own. And beyond this, I won’t tell you what happens. But after a Pilgrim’s Progress kind of descent into hell, after finding a host of people to join him on his journey, he learns that he’s been so obsessed with his inability to create, that he’s missed every opportunity for a photograph that has come his way.

And, yes, in thinking about my own process, in working with writers, I’ve learned that we waste so very much time wondering whether we can, in fact, do it. What a phenomenal waste of time! Better to admit that everything we create will be a pale shadow of the ideal work we wish we could create, and get on with it. Because, just like recovery, just like childbirth, there’s no way to back out of creating once we start. There’s only going back. There’s only finding our way to the other side.

Will

So, here I am, one week post-op, still exhausted, still not myself, still not able to carry on many of the ordinary routines of daily life that I value more than anything.

And why should I not be all these things? Like so many people, post-op, I’m anemic. It’ll take some time for that to right itself. I’m doing all the right things: taking iron, making sure I rest, drinking water – all the suggestions my surgeon made. But it will resolve when it will.

Which will bring me eventually to writing. This morning I found myself enraged that I wasn’t progressing faster than I am. Why? Why this non-acceptance? Why this desire to heal faster than humanly possible?

We live in a culture that promises fast this, instant that. Are you sick? Take this drug, and in minutes, you’ll be out playing catch with your son. Do you have allergies? Take this drug, and in minutes you’ll be romping on a beach with your grandkids. Instant messaging. Instant communication. And all of that has lead us – has lead me at least – to get very angry, very impatient, when things take as long as they take.

Somewhere tucked in the back of my brain is the false notion that if I do everything right, if I will things to change, if I apply myself, I can change just about anything. Quickly. Of course, this isn’t true. Though right now I’d like it to be.

If an act of will could achieve miracles, I’d be fine now. But I’m not. I’m still healing. If an act of will could transform ideas into finished works of art, there would be a hell of a lot more art out there than there is now.

It isn’t that will isn’t important. Of course it is. We must want something very much in order to spend the amount of time it takes to write a book. But will isn’t the whole story. Sometimes we have to wait a long time for a good idea to transform itself into a great idea. Sometimes, no matter how hard we work, we have to give up control over our work; we have to step back; we have to realize that the book will take longer than we want it to take.

“A good completion takes a long time.” That’s something I learned when I was studying non-Western thought in graduate school. I never forgot it, though I sometimes act as if I have.

And so, here I am, one week post-op, expecting miracles and getting only reality. The reality of not feeling terrific; the reality of work deferred, postponed; the reality of the body taking its time to heal.

When I get back to my projects, I hope I remember that will can only take me so far. That work takes the time it takes.

Meantime, I can make good use of this healing time. I can let myself watch funny movies. I can let myself rest. I can let myself dream. I can let myself notice the sun moving behind a cloud. But I can only do this if I acknowledge that I can only control my healing to a certain point. Beyond that, there’s the body’s wisdom. And over that, I have no control.

Always Writing

Always Writing

If you’ve never read it, Tillie Olsen’s Silences describes those events in life that have kept writers from filling blank pages with words. Work needing to be done. The raising of children. Caring for a sick loved one. Poverty. And illness. And, when I began writing this, I thought I’d be writing about silence, my own these past several weeks. But no, I’m finding that I’m not writing about silence at all.

I’ve had a silence. At first, self-imposed. An entire month of not writing. August, it was. I wanted to see what it was like not to write, not to write anything. Not chunks of a book in progress. Not scribbles towards an essay. Not journal. Not a blog entry. Not anything. Welll, not not anything. I wrote “to do” lists like I’ve always done. I wrote a few lines now and then about books I read. I wrote a plan about what I’d do when I resumed writing – organize my book about writing, write its introduction, rewrite some of my essays; get to those final chapters for the book about my parents’ lives during World War II. Writing I was – am – eager to get back to.

I haven’t had many silences in my writing life. I remember writing the introduction to a collection of Irish women’s stories I co-edited while I recovered from an operation on my leg – a rather serious one. I remember writing with a sick child sitting on my lap. Those were the days of electric typewriters, and he vomited into it and destroyed it. Lucky for me I was renting it. Lucky for me, the salesman thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard: a fancy electric typewriter destroyed by the vomit of a sick child. And so he replaced it free, and I was off and running.

I wrote while my father was recovering from heart surgery. He was staying with us, and I took care of him, as I penned lines about him that wound up in my memoir Vertigo. I wrote the day my mother died; the day after my sister died. It seemed that nothing stopped me from writing.

But August has turned to September and I haven’t gotten to those promised projects. I have, I must confess, written much in my journal.

And why? A diagnosis of breast cancer. All the attendant doctor visits and tests that accompany such a diagnosis. A writing life put on hold, temporarily. At least that’s what I hope, though how temporary, I can’t say now, for surgery awaits me tomorrow.

Like every patient (how I hate that word)….Like every person awaiting surgery, I’ve been advised to get a good night’s sleep the night before; I’ve been assured that my surgeons (there will be four plus an anesthesiologist plus goodness knows how many nurses and assistants) will be getting a good night’s sleep. And they’ve suggested that I take a calming drug, and I have, though I don’t “do” drugs, never have, except for those necessary to recover from Lyme Disease, to help me with asthma. So hear I sit, at my desk, writing. Writing to all of you. Thanking you for being my audience. Promising that there will be more to come when I’m ready.

And who knows the shape this “Writing a Life” blog will take.

I don’t want to go through what’s been on my mind. Why I haven’t gotten to my desk. If you know – and I know you do know – some one like me whose gone through something like what I’ll be going through tomorrow, you don’t need to be told what you already know.

But for the first time in my life, all I’ve wanted to do was take walks, look at children playing, be with my family, talk to my students via email, read, take baths. And not write. At least not at my projects. But I have written a bit about what I’ve been going through which might, or might not, turn into a book about this experience.

Like most of us writers, getting through a hard time often entails experiencing it, and watching yourself experience it. This double vision – call it detachment if you will – has served me well in the past. Like you, I’ve tucked away conversations as I was having them; I’ve noted some incongruity when I’ve experienced it; I’ve talked to someone and noticed something in the background that I might use in my work. And that’s been happening to me too.

The truth is, that if you’re a writer, you’re writing even when you’re not writing. I told that to a writer friend once, a long time ago, when she was writing an enormous trilogy – she was on the second of the three when we talked. She was beating herself up because she hadn’t written in awhile. How could she have? Her writing mind needed a rest. It needed to just go blank for awhile so it could fill up with words once again. But even as I told her this, I didn’t quite believe it. At least not for myself. For I’d been able to write no matter what. And I believed nothing would stop me.

Arrogant. That’s what I was.

And so here I am in a brand new place wondering where my writing life will be a few weeks from now. (Throughout this week, I know, I’ll be flat on my back, healing, looking at movies, perhaps, funny ones, reading, maybe, sleeping a great deal, I hope.) And I hope to check in to let you know.

But this is as much about you as it is about me. There are times when life trumps art. For all of us. Even for the most steadfast. And this is one of those times for me. Though I have written this, and it has felt good, being at my desk, though now I’ll go back to bed, hoping to sleep the night the way I’m supposed to.

Game Plan

I just finished writing a four-month plan for my writing so that I’ll have some sense of what I’ll be doing in my writing life come September. I do this three times a year: in mid-August for September through December; in mid-December for January through April; in mid-April for May through August. I started doing this years ago because I met a writer who convinced me that we writers need to take the time to plan; we need to take the time to think about what we’ll be doing over a swathe of time. This same writer told me that she periodically writes, and then later revises, five-year plans, one-year plans, and then four-month plans. She begins with her five-year plan, and then works back from those goals to figure what she needs to accomplish, say, in year one.

Many of us have chosen to be writers to escape the corporate life. I love the freedom of being a writer, of having no one tell me what to do. I love not having to “perform” for someone else’s set of goals. I love working on what I myself have chosen. Still, I do believe there are many advantages to thinking about our work over time, just as long as we ourselves don’t set unrealistic goals – finish a novel in a year; write an essay a week over a month’s time.

Before I spoke to this woman, I was the kind of writer who put one foot in front of another day by writing day. I’d write one day; I’d write the next; I’d write a day at a time. But in those days – and that was a long time ago – I wondering whether what I was doing fit into any grand plan, any grand scheme. I knew I wanted to write a novel. Yet I hadn’t written that desire down; I hadn’t set myself the goal of writing a novel; I hadn’t thought about when I’d learn how to write fiction or write the novel itself. I felt frustrated, often, because I took whatever came my way and got myself involved in many projects (some were editing projects) that took an enormous amount of time that weren’t what I myself truly wanted to work on. I hadn’t taken the time to think about who I wanted to be as a writer, what I wanted to write, what I needed to do to accomplish my goals.

When I began to write what I started to call my “Game Plan,” I first tried to articulate my mission statement. What kind of writer did I want to be? What kind of audience did I want? What did I want to accomplish in my work? And I think it’s essential that we do this, for in our writing lives, we’ll learn that others might want us to be the kind of writer we’ve chosen not to be. Will we, for example, be willing to “dumb down” something we’ve written because an editor insists upon it? Or will we hold firm to our vision and risk losing publication? Will we be willing to travel to publicize our book even though we’ve decided that we’re the kind of writer who prefers to stay put? Are we willing to accept the consequences of our decisions? Are we writers who want to reach the widest possible audience and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve this goal? Or are we, instead, writers who are willing to write for a limited audience even if it means that in this publishing climate we might have to publish with a small press or self-publish? Do we want to write fiction? Memoir? Creative nonfiction? Poetry? All of the above?

There are no right answers to any of these questions, no single mission statement that works for every writer. Some of us might want to try to maximize our readership; others of us might choose to write for a chosen few. Some of us might want to engage an agent, and try to sell our work to an important press; others of us might choose to publish with small presses and contact editors ourselves.

I think it’s important that we be honest with ourselves, so that once our writing life begins to bear fruit, we’ll know whether we’re acting in accordance with our own ideals. But a writing life is unpredictable, and we may find that the writer we were is not the writer we now are. So it’s important for us to think about these issues from time to time.

So what do I plan on accomplishing over the next four months? More important, what do you intend to accomplish over the next four months?

I’m nearing the end of two books. I’ve decided to put one book – the father book I’ve spoken about in these blogs – aside for the time being to finish the other book – a book about writing. I have an introduction to write; a few more chapters; a conclusion – all possible within four months’ time. I’ve decided to learn about the kinds of books university presses are publishing because I believe I’ll be writing a book quite soon that will be more suited to a university press than a trade press. I’ve decided to read contemporary novels set in World War II – I have an idea for such a novel and I want to see what’s out there. And I’ve decided to read novels from the 20s – that I’m doing on instinct, just because I want to, though I suspect I might want to write about the late 20s, early 30s sometime in the future. Throughout this time, I’ll jot down ideas toward the completion of the father book.

I’ve written a specific set of tasks also, and I’ve estimated how long it will take me to accomplish these goals. I’ll be working two hours a day, four days a week, on my writing, and my plan seems realistic. But I know I can revisit it any time – pare it down, add items to my list if I move through my plan more quickly.

Until I sat down to write my September to December 2011 Game Plan, I admit that I felt lost. I’d hit a rough patch with the father book; I’d been writing and writing at the writing book without a sense of when I wanted to finish. Writing my plan took less than 20 minutes. I did it, by hand, in my process journal, and then typed it out. I’ve put it in a manila folder, and it now sits on my desk beside me as I write this. Less than twenty minutes it took me, but what I gained was a sense of relief, satisfaction, self-worth, and tremendous energy.

Now I can take some time away from writing, but I’m looking forward, too, to September to begin work on my Game Plan.

Tough Choices

We, as writers, have to make tough choices, and it’s been my experience that we don’t often recognize this. Because our work, for the most part, is self-initiated and self-directed, we might tend to confuse our writing, say, with other pleasurable pastimes we enjoy and we might elide how many choices we make in a day of our writing life. But make no mistake about it, our writing life necessitates a tough-mindedness about our choices that it takes time to cultivate. In fact, I believe our writing life is especially difficult because of the enormous number of choices we have to make.

Here’s a simple instance of a tough choice. Do we pick up the phone when we see that a friend who is in the middle of a tough situation is calling, or do we, instead, go to our desk because we have only an hour in our day to write? We pride ourselves on our capacity for intimacy. Still, if we get on the phone, a half hour of our precious hour will be lost to us. Forever. We can’t get it back. And if we commiserate with our friend, we know that our head will be in another place, and not ready for the focus our project requires. Our friend can wait until late in the day; our writing can’t. It takes a steely will to turn the phone off, to write a note to call our friend later, and to move to our desks.

Writers know they have a universe of subjects to write about. Talk to any writer about what s/he’d like to write next, and I’ll bet s/he’ll come up with, say, five potential works s/he’s been dying to write. So which one will it be? Some of us are lucky enough to have very fertile imaginations, and for those of us who do, the choices will be even tougher than those of us who must, must, must write about this or that. Still, exploring one of our ideas in our writing life means that, for now, we can’t examine all the other ideas crowding our consciousness. Sometimes it seems so difficult to choose, that we become paralyzed, and don’t. But what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter which subject we choose: whatever we begin working on will engage us, and sooner, rather than later, we’ll be fully immersed in our subject, fully engaged, and we will have forgotten the agony of the moment of choosing. Choose sooner, rather than later, I’ve learned. If we make a nice little list of all the great ideas we have, they’ll be there, waiting for us. I recently discovered the outline of my memoir Vertigo in the journal I was writing while writing my biography of Virginia Woolf. I didn’t get to that memoir until four books later, but the seed had been planted, and I believe that it was germinating while I worked on other things. If we take care of ourselves, we’ll have long lives as writers, and we’ll have time to explore many – but not all – of them.

Every moment when we have our work under our pen, or under our keyboards, we’re making hundreds, thousands of tough choices in every writing day. Keep this; change that; move this paragraph here; toughen up the language there; split this paragraph in two. Many of us do this so automatically, we don’t realize that every choice we make matters. We shouldn’t remember this often or it would paralyze us. By the time we declare our work finished, or declare ourselves finished with the work, we’ve chosen every single element of our work, and we’ve decided to keep or change every single word, mark of punctuation, and indentation. Two axioms are helpful for us to understand. I learned both from my teacher, Mitchell A. Leaska. The first is that every word in a completed text is there by choice, not by chance. The second is that the meaning of a text reverberates against its unchosen alternatives.

Sometimes all these choices seem terrifying – at least they do to me. Should the book have four chapters or five? Three parts or two? Should it begin with this scene, or end with this scene? Should I ditch the material that comes at the end of the second section? On and on and on. I’ve found that if I tell myself that my choices will become easier as my work progresses, I’m less inhibited. If I take a work through, say, six drafts, I let myself make the so-called wrong choices at the beginning because I know I’ll have five more chances to make changes, so I can write in an uninhibited way. And I’ve found, too, that taking a work from penultimate draft to final draft becomes difficult in terms of our choices again because we know the work will soon be complete. At this stage of the process, I’ve found that if we treat our work as if a writer friend has written it – if we shift to editor brain rather than writer brain – the choices are much easier for us to make.

The meaning of a text does reverberate against its unchosen alternatives. And it helps us to think of it in this way. What will be the payoff if I put that chapter at the front of my work? What will be the ripoff if I do? For whatever we choose isn’t the only choice we could have made. I like to articulate these choices to myself in this way so that I can think through the outcome of the choice I have to make. It helps me enormously.

One reason why we as writers don’t realize how many tough choices we have to make is because of the way literature is usually taught. When we enter a literature class, the professor (let’s think college for now) asks us to think deeply about the meaning of a sentence, the meaning of a particular word. We and our peers enter into excited discussions about the work. The professor never indicates that this sentence, this particular word, might have been quite different, that the writer had gone through various revisions of that sentence, and had chosen this one, not the earlier versions, to be in the published text. Still, it’s quite possible that the writer’s earlier choices were just as good, just as viable as the later ones. I found this to be true when I edited a complete earlier version of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. Her working title for the earlier draft, she called Melymbrosia. The books are different; neither is better than the other. The reasons for Woolf’s abandoning the early draft are complicated. But it’s sufficient to say that she could have published that draft, and didn’t. She made the kind of tough choice we all have to make: to keep the draft, or to move it along.

And then there’s the final tough choice: when to stop. We can write whatever we’re writing until the end of our time on this earth. I don’t think we want to do that. How to make that tough choice? For me, it helps to establish an endpoint date and to work towards it.

So if you’re tired at the end of a writing session and don’t know why, it’s because you’re doing brain-breaking work making all these choices.