We’ll Be Okay

 

I’ve been reading Augusten Burroughs’s wonderful This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike. His chapter, “How to Be Sick,” is the best advice I’ve read about how to live a life with/in illness. His cogent insight, borne out by my own experience, is this: “Thinking about something that could happen to you is always worse than when the very thing you dread actually happens.” Put another way, no matter the illness, no matter the declining condition of a person you love, “once you’re in it, it’s okay.” Or rather, it can be okay if we adopt Burroughs’s advice that we must be in it, not “in a state of refusal” about it.

I love this essay because of his insights about how much time we waste on anticipatory anxiety, how much energy we waste worrying about how much worse things can become. If I’ve learned one thing as a writer and as a teacher of writing, worrying that we won’t be able to write about something difficult, painful, perplexing, horrifying, embarrassing, humiliating, exasperating, or worrying that we’ll fall apart while we’re writing about that moment, is good writing time wasted, is good life time wasted. Ditto worrying about whether the writing will get harder as we progress; whether we’ll be able to finish the piece/the poem/the book. We expend a lot of time worrying that we won’t be able to write about something, or that we’ll never finish the work we’ve begun, or that writing about something will cause us enormous pain. It would be far better for us to be immensely curious about what happens to us when we allow ourselves to be present to our experience of writing.

I tell my students we can’t predict what will be hard to write. I’m currently writing about my sister’s suicide. I’m working a little at a time because that’s all I can do right now. “Isn’t it awfully painful?” a friend of mine asked. I could give her the inaccurate answer, and say that yes it is, but that it’s something I need to/want to do anyway. But the truth is that it’s not all that painful. And sometimes it’s not painful at all. Sometimes it’s even fun.

I’m not saying that I’m without feelings as I write, or that something I write doesn’t spring from feelings I have, or that writing something doesn’t elicit feelings in me. I’m saying that writing about this tough subject isn’t as painful as I assumed it would be. And why? To repeat what Burroughs has said, “Once you’re in it, it’s okay.” At least that’s been my experience in my own work, and in witnessing my students writing theirs. And let me say that it’s okay even if it’s hard.

The most difficult thing I ever wrote was this, and I never could have anticipated it: writing about how my mother would turn over our cereal bowls at night as she set the table to make sure no dust would get inside them. Writing that scene knocked me out. Unexpectedly. In a good way. Because in writing it I understood so much about her: how we’d lived in a filthy working class neighborhood where, by breakfast, the cereal bowls would have been filled with traces of soot from nearby factories; how she kept this habit even when we lived in a house in the suburbs; how caring and yet how crazy I thought the gesture was; how I wished I could have been empathic to her when she was still alive.

I’ve witnessed writers smiling as they’ve penned the most difficult scenes imaginable: being raped by a trusted friend; being abandoned by a parent; watching a loved one die. I’ve also witnessed writers connecting with powerful, difficult feelings while penning the most terrible scenes imaginable. I do know this: we can’t predict how writing about something will affect us until we’re in it. But however the writing affects us, it’s okay, we’ll be okay. And we’ll be far better off than if we don’t write.

Of course there are those who argue that writing about difficult material can push us over the edge. Witness Plath.

I’ve written before about how necessary it is for us to take care of ourselves as writers. And many writers whose lives I’ve studied do. And many writers whose lives I’ve studied don’t. Being okay while we write about difficult things assumes we’re taking care of ourselves as writers. Sylvia Plath didn’t: taking on too much (beekeeping after childbirth), acting as if she had superhuman strength, not asking for help, drinking too much, marrying a man who harmed her the day she meet him. Henry Miller, not at first, but in time, did. To take care of himself as a writer, Miller often took an afternoon nap. In his pajamas. Which is what Burroughs recommends doing. Taking a nap when we’re going through a rough patch. Or having soup. Or a brownie.

Good advice for those of us writing about difficult material. Rest. Eat soup. Reward ourselves with a brownie.

Little by Little

These days, recovering from Lyme Disease, I have far less energy than usual, and I never know when I’ll become fatigued. It’s what all of us who have or have had this illness talk about: how we don’t know from one day to the next, or one minute to the next when we’ll be flattened, and so it’s almost impossible to live our lives according to a schedule or to make plans. I was a writer who (at least after my kids left home) thrived on routine: at my desk by a certain time, write for a certain amount of time, do this about five days a week. But now that’s impossible. And so I find myself living like so many writers do: in a condition of uncertainty about when and whether we can write.

I’ve spent some time being angry about this. But then I realized that anger wouldn’t change the reality of my situation.

One stumbling block is the myth that we need blocks of time—a few hours or more—to do our work—what one writer about creativity calls great swaths of attention. Well what if we don’t have those hours? Do we stop work until we recover, until our kids leave the house, until we can retire? Or do we find other ways to work that respect the situation we’re in? I think this is a myth that needs debunking particularly because there are so many important stories that need to be written by precisely those of us who don’t have hours and hours of uninterrupted time.

What’s key is honoring the circumstances we’re living with: respecting the situation we’re in; understanding what we can change (if anything); accepting what we can’t (this is an ongoing, never ending process, at least for me); trying to find a way to work nevertheless.

An illuminating exercise I give my students is to tell them to write for, say, five or ten minutes. And then to count the number of words they’ve written. And to match that number against the number of words a writer like Virginia Woolf penned during a workday. We then figure out how long it would take for us to write a draft, say, of a 60,000 word book if all we ever had was ten minutes a day to write.

We learn that we write more than Woolf did; we learn that if we worked when we could each day, if only for ten minutes, we would eventually produce the draft of a book that, of course, we’d need to revise. We learn that stopping ourselves by telling ourselves that we don’t have enough time is a bogus excuse. We learn that we can find ten minutes by giving up doing something else.

While I was still in the early stages of this round of this disease, I came across “The Pomodoro Technique,” a time management idea created by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s. He wasn’t doing as well as he wanted to do at university and he realized that he allowed himself to be distracted too often. He learned that the successful students stayed at a task and worked consistently. He also learned that working for too long without a break is counterproductive. So, after trial and error, he realized that if he briefly outlined what he wanted to accomplish (for example, write at fire scene), and he worked on the task for 25 minutes (using a timer—a “pomodoro”—one of those kitchen times shaped like a tomato: Cirillo is Italian), and he took a five minute break after, and recorded what he’d done so that he could evaluate how long it took to do certain tasks, he could be consistently productive throughout a day. When the timer rang, Cirillo stopped working no matter what. He called each 25-minute unit a “pomodoro”; after four of them, he took a 25 to 30 minute break (which strikes me as being a sane way to think about work). The technique is more complicated than this, but you get the idea.

I think it’s a great technique and I’m now using it to write the book about my sister’s suicide. It is working for me because I never know when I’ll have enough energy to write; and it’s working, too, because this is a tough subject don’t want to stay with for a long time.

I can’t work every day (days after IV infusions are particularly hard). And when I write I rarely write for more than one twenty-five minute period. But I have been able to work often enough for one or two 25-minute stretches that I’ve written a little over 10,500 words since I became acutely ill in September. Knowing that I can write this book little by little helps me enormously. Keeping count of what I’ve accomplished in these short periods of time gives me hope, helps me continue. For I’ve learned that even a little bit of writing whenever we can write adds up to a whole lot of writing over time.

 

When It’s Ready

Several years ago, when I was searching for the ghosts of my ancestors throughout the south of Italy, my husband and I were staying at in elegant hotel in Ravello, overlooking the sea, a few villages south of Positano, the now posh but then poverty stricken place where my maternal grandmother had lived. My husband was sick, confined to bed. I was spending leisurely days on a balcony overlooking the water, reading, knitting, dozing. It wasn’t the sightseeing-packed holiday I’d planned, but it turned out—at least for me—to be even more enjoyable.

 

One twilight evening I was still outdoors deciding whether to rouse my husband for supper or to let him sleep. And from the street below I heard what seemed to be the music of a marching band. I could hear a trumpet, a trombone, the beat of a drum, a tambourine. Knowing that Italians celebrate saints’ holidays, and knowing that there are many saints’ days in Italy to celebrate, I scurried down to the front desk to ask what was going on.

The proprietor of the hotel was there, a gracious, graying, beautifully dressed man, and, in answer to my question, he shrugged his shoulders in the way that Italians have to indicate they have no idea what you’re talking about, and furthermore, they don’t care.

“But can you look outside and tell me?” I asked.

The two of us descended a few more flights of stairs. By now the band—for that was what I’d heard—was further down the street, about to make the turn that would take them to another road that made its way into the heart of the village.

“It’s only the local band,” he said.

“But what are they celebrating?” I persisted.

“Nothing,” he replied. “They get together and practice. And then when they know they’re ready, they march.”

“But why aren’t there any flyers?” I asked for I would have loved to watch them as they passed.

“Because they never know until the last minute when they’ll be ready and so they never know until the last minute when they’ll be marching.”

End of encounter.

This very Italian moment has stayed with me, and I return to it each time I want to hurry my work along, each time I agree to a deadline, each time I insist that my students hand their work in on time. For I know that there is a difference between creative time and clock time—time cut up into minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. For I do believe that creative people work best if they themselves let the process of doing their work tell them when their work is ready rather than having an external deadline imposed upon them.

How can I know beforehand when a work of mine will be ready? How can I agree to make it ready in a year, or two? How can I, in good conscience, ask my students to have their work ready by a particular date on the calendar? For what if my work—or theirs—isn’t ready by then? What if it needs a few more days, or weeks, or months?

As I’ve aged—I’m now seventy-three, and feeling the press of time—I’ve paradoxically let myself slow down in my writing work; I’ve started acting like the members if that band—I’ll decide when my work is ready, and only then will I go public with it. I’ve started telling myself that I have all the time in the world (whereas in fact I don’t) and that the book I’m currently writing will be ready when it’s ready. And my creative time now, though it’s limited by illness, feels expansive rather than restricted; calm rather than anxious; free rather than constrained.

During the last few semesters I taught, if a student thought her/his work needed another week, another month or two or more, I said fine, remembering that band in Ravello that marched only when they themselves knew they were ready. I am thinking of one particular student. By the end of the semester his 20-page memoir was fine—through several revisions he’d made great progress. He handed his work in on time. But then he emailed me.

“It’s not ready,” he said. And then I committed a cardinal sin of teaching by responding, “I’m satisfied; let me decide.” As soon as I answered, I knew that was bad pedagogy, so I responded again, “Forget my last email. Take the time you need and we’ll figure out what to do about the grade.”

A few weeks later, he sent me another draft of his work. This time he’d examined aspects of his upbringing that he’d never touched on before. His first version was inauthentic because I’d forced him to “perform” before he knew he was ready.
The second version had everything a teacher could want in a work: soul, depth, authenticity, and beauty.

They practice, and then when they know they’re ready, the march.

Loss and Repair

First, that book about my father that I’ve written about so often in this blog, Chasing Ghosts: A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War, has finally been published.

I’m housebound again for another illness. This time, it’s Lyme Disease. And it’s pretty much off to the doctor’s a few times a week for IV, resting and recovering at home, a few lunches out and family meals, and that’s about it.

It’s at times like these when I’m so very grateful for the fact that I can listen to broadcasts of Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” any time I choose instead of when I used to during my commute to Hunter College (I’d time my hour or more long commute around her show).

A few days ago I listened to her interview of the artist Andy Goldsworthy on the occasion of the release of his new book, Andy Goldsworthy: Ephemeral Works, 2004-2014 and an exhibit in NYC. If you don’t know Goldsworthy’s work, looking at a slide show on the NPR website will show you what its like. Goldsworthy works with nature, in nature, with natural materials, though his is not nostalgic “back to nature” work but a meditation on time, change, nature’s beauty, its implicit destruction, and how the hands of human beings have continually manipulated the natural landscape. You will see leaves chosen for their colors formed into concentric circles; bones placed inside a rotted tree; sticks and twigs arranged into fascinating structures placed in streams where they will inevitably be washed away. The only way to document the works that Goldsworthy often undertakes around his home in Scotland is to take photographs of them. This new book contains a range of a decade of his work.

There is something about Goldsworthy’s work that speaks to me. The fact that so much of it is private and ephemeral and initially and often viewed only by him (although neighboring farmers sometimes come upon him while he’s working) is very moving in this age of the artist/writer as self-aggrandizing public figure. For Goldsworthy, in the interview, states that his interest is in the making of the work. And that for him, a sense of loss and making art to deal with loss is key to his work. A tree dies; he’s known it for years; he’s bereft when he sees it; he witnesses the rot at its core. He feels intense pain at its loss, but he does something with that pain, not to make it go away, but to use it to create something beautiful. Each creation necessitates dealing with practical and logistical problems and although he doesn’t want a project to fail, and he does want to understand the nature of the material he’s using (even rain, which he uses when he lies down on the ground during a rainstorm, leaving a rain shadow—an outline of where his body has been), if he can’t complete the work, still, he’s learned much from doing it.

I write memoir. And perhaps I’m so drawn to Goldsworthy now because I’m embarked upon a project—a series of “requiems” for my sister who killed herself many years ago—that I’m not sure I’ll ever publish, that I’m not sure I can or will finish although I know I shall try. Still, there is something, now, so immensely satisfying with just being with the material, just doing the work, just returning to it day by day by day for the less than an hour that I have the energy to work that is immensely satisfying. And I realize that much of my work is impelled by loss, as I think most memoir is. Years ago I read a book by Andrew Brink called Loss and Symbolic Repair, which described a creative response to loss and grief as one of the major functions of, art making. It’s true for me, as it is for Goldsworthy.

And at the end of a day’s work—or to be more accurate, an hour’s work—it is immensely satisfying to me to pause and look at a photo gallery of Goldsworthy’s work.

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/08/446731282/sculptor-turns-rain-ice-and-trees-into-ephemeral-works

Labor/Work

On this Labor Day, I think it’s important for us to remember that what we do when we sit down at the desk and write is work. Too many of the beginning writers I have known regard the writing that they do as not entirely necessary, as a pursuit that isn’t quite serious, as a task that is self indulgent, as something that can be put off to do something more serious, like clean the bathroom and make the beds, tasks which we do define as work. If we tell ourselves that we are going to our desks to write, rather than to work, we might lapse into believing that our writing isn’t as essential or as important as it truly is, or as essential and important as all the other kinds of work that we do.

When my mother was alive, she used to love to call me at just about 9 o’clock in the morning. She knew that that’s when I sat down to write. It was the time just after I would get the kids off to school and there was a blessed silence in the house. My mother would call me at this time because she thought it was perfectly fine to interrupt my writing because she didn’t construe writing as work, work that shouldn’t be interrupted because it’s important. She was aging, and I didn’t think it was right not to answer the phone, because I feared she needed me, and so I had a dilemma: how to save that time for myself, how to get my mother to understand that I didn’t want to be interrupted.

I tried telling my mother how important it was for me to write. But that didn’t work. She was a working-class woman, used to hard physical labor, and what I did at my desk didn’t meet her definition of work. I tried not answering the phone, but then I worried that something had happened to her. Finally I told her that I had a huge project for Hunter, where I was teaching, and that I was devoting two hours each morning to this very difficult work. “That’s fine,” she said, “I’ll call you later.” That kind of official work she wouldn’t interrupt. But my own personal writing, she felt free to interfere with.

Soon after, I started saying that I had to work at that time rather than saying that I wanted to write at that time. And all the people in my life respected that I had to work even as they had not understood that I wanted to write. “Don’t call me before 11,” I would tell my husband,”I’m going to work.”

And I continue all these years later to call my writing work. It helps me respect what I do, and it helps the people in my life to understand that what I do is serious.

Sent from my iPad

Learning From Roy Lichtenstein

A few weeks ago I went to Guild Hall in Easthampton to see its current show of works by Roy Lichtenstein, “Between Sea and Sky.” It was a dreary, rainy day, and the joyfulness of Lichtenstein’s work, its playfulness, its exuberance was just the thing I needed on such a day.

Accompanying the exhibit was a documentary in which Lichtenstein talked about his work and his process. I always find that documentaries about artists have something to teach me about the creative process, something that I can learn and use right away.

Lichtenstein said that when he got an idea, he went into the studio to see what he could do with it. I was struck by this statement because Lichtenstein didn’t say that he got an idea, then evaluated the idea he got, then tried to figure out whether it was worthwhile to pursue this idea.

No. He got an idea. And he went into his studio to see what he could do with it.

What would our creative process look like if we did the same thing? If we got an idea (a sentence, an image, a subject) and went to our desks to see what we could do with it. No self-censorship. No consideration about whether it was worthwhile to pursue this idea. No hemming and hawing. No deliberation. No second guessing.

We get an idea. We go to the desk to see what we could do with it.

After I heard Lichtenstein say this, I thought about how often ideas, sentences, images, memories come to me. And how often I don’t pursue them. I let them go. Or I consider them not worthwhile enough to take my time. Or I worry about whether there’s enough potential in the idea to make it worth my while to pursue it. Or I criticize it because it’s not a “big” idea.

Lichtenstein’s paintings in this show are, as its title indicates, about sky, sea, and horizons. That’s the idea he had; that’s the idea he went into his studio to work with; that’s the idea that propelled him to find new materials to work with (something like the material used on dashboards in cars; a motor to tip one of his paintings back and forth as the horizon tips when we’re on a boat); that’s the idea that he played with to produce the magnificent works in this exhibition. He didn’t say to himself, “Sea, sky, horizon, a million painters have done that; that’s not a very good idea.” He had the idea and he saw what he–and not anyone else–could do with it.

After I saw the show, I promised myself that I’d try to incorporate this way of behaving into my process. Get an idea. Go to the desk to see what I could do with it.

And the line that came to me was simple, “My house is filled with my sister’s pottery.” When I went to my desk to work from this line, I began to capture important moments that I hadn’t written about before—one, that my sister started making tiny pieces of pottery close to the time she died. I thought that they looked like votive offerings put into tombs to accompany the dead on their journeys. Another, that when my sister gave me a dinner set it took her a long time to make, she told me she wanted me to use it every day, to use it every day so that I would remember her. Remember her: I didn’t realize then that she might have been indicating her desire to kill herself a year before she did so.

Had I judged writing about my sister’s pottery to be unimportant, I never would have recalled those moments, the uncanny making of those tiny pieces, the words she said when she gave me a gift of dinnerware that she made the year before she died. I’ve been working with this since I saw Lichtenstein’s show and now I have another piece for the book I’m writing. It’s close to 1400 words long. More important, it helped me continue to unravel the conundrum of my sister’s death. And I have these words and these meanings now simply because, like Lichtenstein,  I got an idea, and I went to my desk to see what I could do with it.

Witness

Critics who don’t understand the memoir form often condemn it for being too I-centered, for being a solipsistic genre, for being navel gazing. And yes, perhaps there are some memoirs that are like this. But the memoirs so many of us find compelling are those in which authors write not only about their own experiences, but also about those of their families and the communities they have been born into or joined either voluntarily, reluctantly, or against their wills. These memoirs witness the lives of others even as they chart the often complex relationship these writers have had with the people and the communities they describe.

It’s a tricky business. There are some who believe that we writers have no business composing works about anyone but ourselves. That every time we describe someone else we’re acting as a succubus to that person’s life. This is a tricky ethical question. Still, if none of us has the right to compose narratives about other people, who or what could we write about, for isn’t memoir, first and foremost, about interrelationships and about how our experiences with other people formed us? How could any of us compose a memoir without writing about all those in our lives who shaped us, who transformed us, who harmed us? It just isn’t possible.

And then there’s the argument that such narratives should be labeled fiction to protect the people being described. Still, people who read memoir learn much from the fact that the events in the narrative did in fact happen, that the writer did in fact reflect upon those events, and that by doing this has contributed something significant to our understanding of human behavior.

I think it’s important for us to understand that when we write about other people, we act as compassionate witnesses to their lives. This seems to me to be a memoirist’s ethical obligation. So many of the memoir writers I know grapple with the challenge of whether they have the right to speak for or about other people. And this is no matter that can be resolved simply or easily, once and for all. But it’s essential that we understand that if we don’t pen certain stories, no one else might perhaps because no one else can. And if we forbid ourselves from writing about what we’ve observed, in addition to writing about what we ourselves have experienced, we’re ruling out what might become our most important work.

Two former students of mine have published memoirs that are significant acts of witness—Amy Jo Burns, whose Cinderland: A Memoir (Boston: Beacon, 2014) was recently published in paperback; and Ryan Berg, whose No House to Call My Home: Love Family and Other Transgressions (NY: Nation, 2015) is just out today. And, as you can imagine, I’m extremely proud of them.

Burns’s Cinderland charts a community’s response to several girls’ charges that a music teacher sexually abused them. Burns was ten when the events in the narrative transpired—she, too, was abused—and her memoir differs from any other abuse narrative I’ve read because she describes not only what happened to her, but also what happened to all those other girls. In writing her narrative this way, she shows us that any act of sexual abuse harms and traumatizes an entire community. Especially important is how Burns charts the ways in which certain members of the community sought to preserve the reputation of the teacher by ignoring or challenging what these girls lived through, thus retraumatizing them. Not confining her narrative to her own experience is a brave and transgressive act, for Burns describes how and why she herself chose not to speak out (there was a trial, and witnesses, and sentencing) when she was young for she understood that to do so was dangerous.

During the time we worked together, and while Burns worked on her own, I learned through her description of her process how difficult it is to strike the right balance between self-revelation and acting as a witness to what has happened to others. As her mentor, I thought that there should be more focus on her own story and I was wrong for I didn’t understand that Burns wanted to create a communal narrative—this didn’t happen just to her. To find the right way of telling a story takes a very long time and there are no shortcuts and sometimes you have to reject other people’s suggestions, for it’s your narrative not someone else’s. That’s the way it is with such complex narratives. In rendering an entire community’s experience, Burns as writer had to step into so many other people’s shoes to understand what they went through. This, too, took courage and a very long time.

Berg’s No House to Call My Home charts his experience as a residential counselor and caseworker for an LGTBQ foster care program in New York City. But the work begins with an important and grounding preface giving the reader facts about the traumas LGTBQ youth face and how they respond to them—for example, research “shows that children placed in foster care are more likely than veterans of war to develop post-traumatic stress disorder” (Berg). Set against this background, Berg recounts the lives of several of the young people he came to know even as he describes his own responses to what he witnessed.

Like Burns, Berg took a long time to discover where he belonged in the narrative in relationship to what the young people he wrote about experienced. He realized the ethical challenge in writing this book: he was an outsider to their experience even as he was witnessing it, involved in it, honoring it, and in some way trying to shape it. Still, he understood that none of the people he worked with was likely to write their own narrative, and so if he didn’t, what he witnessed—which he believed to be important and not often described—would go unreported.

I emailed Berg to ask him about his process, and he responded as follows. “I started this book when I entered grad school in 2006. My last round of edits took place May 29, 2015 (my birthday). This book took on many different lives in many, many different forms. I wrote countless drafts, re-working sections, adding and subtracting massive chunks. The narrative structure was altered dramatically a year ago. At one point the book was constructed as a duel narrative (personal, and observed narratives). Over time I had to admit that that form wasn’t working. So I cut 140 pages. I was left with a bunch of disjointed sections. After grieving the loss of the book I wrote, I re-worked the whole thing, finding the connective tissue to reconstruct the body of the book.  As a result, I feel the book is more concise and direct, and hopefully the stories are now more powerful, lean and moving.”

When we worked together, a subject we discussed many times was how much of Berg’s experience should be in the narrative. I suggested that his personal story was as important as those of the young people’s lives he described. And for some time, Berg tried to write that duel narrative. But in time he learned that the form didn’t work, and I am very happy that he did not stick to the suggestion that I erroneously made. For as Berg learned, and as his book makes clear, this is his story only tangentially. The lives of these young people should be—indeed, must be—front and center.

The process of both Amy Jo Burns in writing Cinderland and Ryan Berg in writing No House to Call My Home teaches us how important it is to work long and hard on a project, to take the time we need to figure out the right balance between narrating our lives and those of others, and to think through—and reject if necessary—advice we’ve been given to find the right voice and the right form to tell the story you’re compelled to write.

600 Words

I was out on the East End of Long Island for the past two weeks, and I picked up one of those free magazines that are always stacked outside the supermarket. They mostly have photographs of houses that are for sale, and pictures of the famous people that are out in the Hamptons. I love to look at them mostly because my life is nothing like the articles depict and I don’t want it to be—I’d never attend a benefit, never go to a horse show, never play in the artists and writers ball game even if I were asked, and I wouldn’t be.

But in one of these “rags” as my husband and I call them, there was an interview with E. L. Doctorow by George Plimpton. It was a truncated version of the interview that took place at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City that subsequently appeared in the Paris Review. (You can find it here: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2718/the-art-of-fiction-no-94-e-l-doctorow)

In the interview Doctorow was asked about his work habits—a common feature of all interview that are printed in the Paris Review. He said that he worked perhaps six hours a day but that in reality he wrote about 600 words a day. He always single-spaced his work, and a day’s work would fit on a single sheet of paper. He said, too, that if he wrote 1200 words it was an extraordinary day, but the problem with that was that the next day might not then be a good workday. Writers always have to save something for the next day.

This summer, I’ve been writing about my sister’s suicide, and I have written, here, about how I’ve deliberately written only an hour on the days I’ve been working. (It’s summer, and I’ve been taking lots of time off.) But here was another way of working for me to try out.

When I discovered the Doctorow interview, I was reading his World’s Fair. He died recently (which is why that publication was running the interview), and I have a habit of reading one of a deceased writer’s books whenever I hear about an author’s death as a way of honoring them and their work. I hadn’t read anything of Doctorow’s since I’d read Ragtime many years ago, and so it was wonderful to relax on my screened-in porch reading him again, connecting with a writer whose work I admired. World’s Fair is written as a memoir and its description of 1930s in the Bronx was the kind of summer time travel that I love.

After I read the interview, I went back to World’s Fair and saw that, yes, there is a circle of meaning or a unit of meaning every 600 words or so.

As I thought about this way of working—this slow way of working—I thought about the difference between Doctorow’s method and mine and what I might learn from his. In the last book I wrote, Chasing Ghosts: A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War I wrote myself into many, many corners, and the work was very anxiety producing because I always had a lot of pages in process and nothing really approximating finished work for many, many years. So I wondered what it might be like to work more slowly, to spend one day on, say, 500 or 600 words as Doctorow did, and to bring them to a more complete state of finish.

I’ve been doing this for just a short time, but the difference in the way I feel is extraordinary. For, usually, I carry around with me the knowledge that there is a lot of revision to be done on the work I’ve provisionally completed. And that can make me crazy. But these last several days, I know that those words that I wrote, say, yesterday, are the best I can make them right now, though I will, no doubt, revise again when I put the book together. And aiming for 600 words takes a lot of pressure off, and anything that does that, helps the work.

On our way home from the East End, we got into a massive traffic jam. We’d just started using that magical GPS ap called “Waze” and after I took a wrong turn, it routed us through the Bronx to get to the GW Bridge and so, home, and we drove through E. L. Doctorow’s part of the Bronx, where I’d never been, and where I’d never planned on being, and we came to the light, and there it was, the street sign that said “Bathgate,” and as you no doubt know Billy Bathgate is the title of one of Doctorow’s most appealing works.

Coincidence? No doubt. Still it was magical to have read the interview with Doctorow, to be reading World’s Fair, to be bailed out of a stupid driving mistake to get out of a horrific traffic jam by Waze, and to have Waze take us through the Bronx of E. L. Doctorow.

Limitations

Some time before I began writing my current work in progress about my sister’s suicide, I was given a copy of “The Collage Journal, The First Decade: 2005-2015, Peter Jacobs” by Eric Levin, an editor at New Jersey Monthly. Levin wrote the introduction to this stunning catalog of an exhibition of Jacobs’ daily collages, currently at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey. He began this daily practice on March 31, 2005 and has continued producing one collage a day until the present and he says he’ll continue with this practice for the foreseeable future. You can view Jacobs’ remarkable work at thecollagejournal.com and thecollagejournal.blogspot.com.

Levin quotes Jacobs’ description of why he started making a daily collage. Jacobs and his wife, also an artist “were sitting around talking about the value of discipline in making art, and about finding projects that have some weight.” His wife, Elizabeth, suggested that they do “something every day.” And Jacobs thought about what was a part of his everyday world, and realized it was the newspaper. So he decided “to do an assemblage every day.”Part of his motivation was to have “a visual dialogue with the state of politics, the environment and the divisions in the country.”

So Jacobs began making collages from images in the day’s newspaper, cut from the paper with an X-Acto knife, assembled and pasted onto a 9 by 12 inch Strathmore watercolor pad. Some of the collages are figurative; some abstract; some surreal.

To prepare for writing his introduction, Levin interviewed Jacobs about his creative process, and about the limitations he’s imposed on himself to do his work. Jacobs sees his work as “a visual game . . . a puzzle I try to create a different ending each time.” He begins each day, not knowing what he’s going to do, what the work is going to look like. But to create his works, Jacobs imposed some self-styled limitations. And here I’m quoting Levin’s introduction:

“1) Make one collage every single day. 2) Make it only from that day’s newspaper. (With very few exceptions, usually involving travel, the paper has been the New York Times.) 3) Start the collage first thing in the morning, or as early as possible and complete it in about two hours. 4) Once work commences, continue until the collage is finished. Do not put it down, incomplete, think about it, and come back to it later. 5) The finished collage must form some kind of square or rectangle. 6) It can be of any size as long as it can be glued, whole, onto one page of a 9-by-12-inch Strathmore watercolor pad.”

Jacobs has discovered that “‘through these limitations'” he has found “‘freedom’.”

I knew that in writing about my sister’s suicide, I was taking on a difficult project that would tax me as a writer. For writing about a subject like this is not only difficult in terms of craft; it is hard emotionally. So that when I learned about the limitations Jacobs set for himself, I immediately knew that I couldn’t write this book unless I imposed some limitations on the way I worked. This is the reason I love to read about artists’ and writers’ creative processes: because doing so inevitably teaches me something I need to learn.

I loved that Jacobs started each day’s work without a preconception about what he’d create. And I decided to do that, too. I thought that because thinking about the suicide of a family member is so hard, and that I–at least–can’t dwell on the subject for too long, and that ideas and images about the event come and go, it would be important for me to begin each day not knowing what I’d write so that I could grab the most immediate image or idea that came to me when I sat down to write, or as I made my way to the desk to sit down to write. This was the first limitation I set: that I wouldn’t decide what to work on until the moment I started working.

I also knew that I could get lost in the subject and that it wouldn’t be good for me emotionally. So that, imitating Jacobs, I set a time limit for my day’s work. I decided that I would work about one hour. This has worked well because it means I don’t have to spend that much of my day mired in this difficult subject. It has also stopped whatever writer’s block I might have about this subject because I know that I must finish whatever circle of meaning I’ve begun by the end of the hour. This is the second limitation I set: to write for one hour and one hour only.

I haven’t stipulated a time for me to work on this project, and so I’ve found myself working on it at various times of the day. The only limitation I’ve set is that the work has to be finished by the time I start cooking dinner–around five o’clock. This is the third limitation I’ve set: to complete the hour’s work by 5 PM.

I knew from working on the book about my father, Chasing Ghosts, A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War (coming out from Fordham University Press in October), that I could get lost in the subject if I let myself write several versions of the same moment the way I did when I worked on that book so that I sometimes had to wade through fifteen versions of the same scene to see which worked best, which detail I’d left out of the best version. It was, I must say, a maddening process although perhaps necessary for the writing of that book. But not for this one, a far more difficult subject. And so I set the fourth limitation on my work: to work as directly as possible; to revise in the document; to print only one version of what I worked on; and if I decided to revise, to destroy any earlier versions. This has worked very well for me. For what I have is the latest version of each piece.

I decided to write short pieces that work together juxtapositionally rather than to compose a linear narrative. And so a fifth limitation is that each piece–with few exceptions–can’t be longer than the revision of what I can draft in one session. What this means is that on day one of working on an image or an idea or a set of meanings, I draft what I can in an hour. The next day, I return to that beginning and continue to work. But I can’t extend the work beyond the range of meanings I established on day one. And I can’t revise the work more than four times. This, too, has worked well because I tend to be a compulsive reviser and this is helping me write, revise, finish, and move on.

I’m very grateful to Eric Levin for giving me a copy of the catalog. It provided me with exactly what I needed when I needed it.

Too often the creative process becomes equated with openendedness, that we keep writing on a given day until we feel like stopping. But I’ve found, with this project, that these strict limitations have helped me enormously.

Limitations

Limitations

Some time before I began writing my current work in progress about my sister’s suicide, I was given a copy of “The Collage Journal, The First Decade: 2005-2015, Peter Jacobs” by Eric Levin, an editor at New Jersey Monthly. Levin wrote the introduction to this stunning catalog of an exhibition of Jacobs’ daily collages, currently at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey. He began this daily practice on March 31, 2005 and has continued producing one collage a day until the present and he says he’ll continue with this practice for the foreseeable future. You can view Jacobs’ remarkable work at thecollagejournal.com and thecollagejournal.blogspot.com.

Levin quotes Jacobs’ description of why he started making a daily collage. Jacobs and his wife, also an artist “were sitting around talking about the value of discipline in making art, and about finding projects that have some weight.” His wife, Elizabeth, suggested that they do “something every day.” And Jacobs thought about what was a part of his everyday world, and realized it was the newspaper. So he decided “to do an assemblage every day.”Part of his motivation was to have “a visual dialogue with the state of politics, the environment and the divisions in the country.”

So Jacobs began making collages from images in the day’s newspaper, cut from the paper with an X-Acto knife, assembled and pasted onto a 9 by 12 inch Strathmore watercolor pad. Some of the collages are figurative; some abstract; some surreal.

To prepare for writing his introduction, Levin interviewed Jacobs about his creative process, and about the limitations he’s imposed on himself to do his work. Jacobs sees his work as “a visual game . . . a puzzle I try to create a different ending each time.” He begins each day, not knowing what he’s going to do, what the work is going to look like. But to create his works, Jacobs imposed some self-styled limitations. And here I’m quoting Levin’s introduction:

“1) Make one collage every single day. 2) Make it only from that day’s newspaper. (With very few exceptions, usually involving travel, the paper has been the New York Times.) 3) Start the collage first thing in the morning, or as early as possible and complete it in about two hours. 4) Once work commences, continue until the collage is finished. Do not put it down, incomplete, think about it, and come back to it later. 5) The finished collage must form some kind of square or rectangle. 6) It can be of any size as long as it can be glued, whole, onto one page of a 9-by-12-inch Strathmore watercolor pad.”

Jacobs has discovered that “‘through these limitations’” he has found “‘freedom’.”

I knew that in writing about my sister’s suicide, I was taking on a difficult project that would tax me as a writer. For writing about a subject like this is not only difficult in terms of craft; it is hard emotionally. So that when I learned about the limitations Jacobs set for himself, I immediately knew that I couldn’t write this book unless I imposed some limitations on the way I worked. This is the reason I love to read about artists’ and writers’ creative processes: because doing so inevitably teaches me something I need to learn.

I loved that Jacobs started each day’s work without a preconception about what he’d create. And I decided to do that, too. I thought that because thinking about the suicide of a family member is so hard, and that I–at least–can’t dwell on the subject for too long, and that ideas and images about the event come and go, it would be important for me to begin each day not knowing what I’d write so that I could grab the most immediate image or idea that came to me when I sat down to write, or as I made my way to the desk to sit down to write. This was the first limitation I set: that I wouldn’t decide what to work on until the moment I started working.

I also knew that I could get lost in the subject and that it wouldn’t be good for me emotionally. So that, imitating Jacobs, I set a time limit for my day’s work. I decided that I would work about one hour. This has worked well because it means I don’t have to spend that much of my day mired in this difficult subject. It has also stopped whatever writer’s block I might have about this subject because I know that I must finish whatever circle of meaning I’ve begun by the end of the hour. This is the second limitation I set: to write for one hour and one hour only.

I haven’t stipulated a time for me to work on this project, and so I’ve found myself working on it at various times of the day. The only limitation I’ve set is that the work has to be finished by the time I start cooking dinner–around five o’clock. This is the third limitation I’ve set: to complete the hour’s work by 5 PM.

I knew from working on the book about my father, Chasing Ghosts, A Memoir of a Father, Gone to War (coming out from Fordham University Press in October), that I could get lost in the subject if I let myself write several versions of the same moment the way I did when I worked on that book so that I sometimes had to wade through fifteen versions of the same scene to see which worked best, which detail I’d left out of the best version. It was, I must say, a maddening process although perhaps necessary for the writing of that book. But not for this one, a far more difficult subject. And so I set the fourth limitation on my work: to work as directly as possible; to revise in the document; to print only one version of what I worked on; and if I decided to revise, to destroy any earlier versions. This has worked very well for me. For what I have is the latest version of each piece.

I decided to write short pieces that work together juxtapositionally rather than to compose a linear narrative. And so a fifth limitation is that each piece–with few exceptions–can’t be longer than the revision of what I can draft in one session. What this means is that on day one of working on an image or an idea or a set of meanings, I draft what I can in an hour. The next day, I return to that beginning and continue to work. But I can’t extend the work beyond the range of meanings I established on day one. And I can’t revise the work more than four times. This, too, has worked well because I tend to be a compulsive reviser and this is helping me write, revise, finish, and move on.

I’m very grateful to Eric Levin for giving me a copy of the catalog. It provided me with exactly what I needed when I needed it.

Too often the creative process becomes equated with openendedness, that we keep writing on a given day until we feel like stopping. But I’ve found, with this project, that these strict limitations have helped me enormously.