Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (21 page)

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Why is this a better moment than being interviewed on NPR? Because when you tear that padded envelope open and hold your book, when you open it and feel the texture of the pages, see the elegant spine and the glossy jacket, as you fetishize this object that you’ve been fantasizing about for
.
.
.
well, quite possibly for your whole life, nothing has happened yet. All is possibility.

But then your book begins to make its way into the world, and it feels a bit like watching helplessly from the sidewalk as your toddler navigates Times Square. You are not in control.

No one is, in fact, in control. Not your agent, not your publisher, not your editor, not the lovely booksellers fighting the good fight all over this country. There is something ineffable, wholly unpredictable—something my agent calls “magic fairy dust”—that either happens to a book, or doesn’t. A few of my books have had tiny sprinklings of this fairy dust over the years—but never as much as I’d like. I could give you a list right now of the writers whose books came out at around the same time as mine, or who are at the same point in their writing lives, who have gotten more. It’s hard to admit this. I didn’t want to write this chapter, to tell you the truth. Because envy is an ugly, shameful thing, better shoved under the rug. Except that we all feel it. We have experienced that stomach-churning sickness, that spiritual malaise, of coveting another person’s good fortune.

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Dani Shapiro

If you were to sit a roomful of writers down and administer a truth serum, they would divulge a short list of other writers who they secretly envy, maybe even hate. Every book’s publication has, for its author, a shadow publication—a book displayed more prominently in bookstores, or better publicized, or more widely reviewed. When I was in graduate school, my mentor, Jerome Badanes, published his first novel,
The Final
Opus of Leon Solomon
. The book jacket of Jerry’s novel was muted, dark, almost mossy-looking, as befitted a novel about a Holocaust survivor about to commit suicide. I remember browsing through the stacks at the old Shakespeare & Company on the Upper West Side with Jerry (the bookstore and the man, both long gone now, though if I stand for long enough on the corner of Eightieth and Broadway I can conjure them) and his obsession with a particular, bright orange book jacket.

The other novel, the story of a traveling carnival—was also a debut, brought out by the same publisher. It was receiving glowing reviews and selling well. And Jerry—my gentle, wise, compassionate mentor—was not happy about it. Not one little bit. That orange book was his shadow publication. It went on to be a finalist for the National Book Award.

The agony! The nagging sense of what might have been!

There is always someone who, at this very moment, has more.

More acclaim, more money, more access, more respect
.
.
.
I see this even when I watch my son with his middle school 216

Still Writing

friends. There are girls in full bloom—girls who are the envy of their classmates, girls who are at this moment as pretty and popular as they will ever be. Boys who’ve had growth spurts and are practically shaving, who are envied by the smaller boys who wonder when—and if—they will ever grow. Observing them, from the sidelines of ball games and dances, I want to jump up and shout:
This isn’t it! You think this is it, but it isn’t!

Your whole lives are ahead of you with ten thousand joys and
sorrows.
Of course I say nothing. My son would kill me. But I think about this—about myself and every adult, writer or not, who makes the all-too-human mistake of comparing one life to another.

When I first learned of Buddhism’s eight vissicitudes—

pain and pleasure, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute—I was taught that it is
unskillful
—that gentle Buddhist word for
fucked-up
—to compare. We will never know what’s coming. We cannot peer around the bend. Envy is human, yes, but also corrosive and powerful. It is our job to pursue our own dharma and covet no one else’s. And perhaps the greatest challenge of all: to recognize our shadow books and wish them well.

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I don’t know how to write a novel. I don’t even know how to write the novels that I’ve written. Once I’ve finished a book—

truly taken it as far as I can—I look at it with some of the same awe and incomprehension that I felt when my son was born.

As he lay swaddled against me, I opened the hospital blanket and counted ten fingers, ten toes. I took in his fine blond eyebrows, eyelashes. Elbows, heels, rib cage. Ears like seashells.

How had he grown inside of me? How was it possible?

When
Family History
—the most intricately structured of all my novels—was sent to me by the copy editor before its publication, she had carefully taken the book apart and noticed a structural aberration. Apparently the narrative moved between the past and the present in a complex pattern that I had strayed from once during the course of the book, and the copy editor wanted to point out this anomaly to me so that I could address it. The manuscript was covered by different colored Post-its: pink for past, green for present, yellow for what I needed to fix.

Except
.
.
.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Seeing the structure of my book laid out like a map was confusing. How had 218

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I done this? I didn’t know. Did it even need fixing? I reread the book—employing every trick I knew. I read it as if I were my own benign best reader. But my book had been reduced to calculus, and I had never been very good at calculus. The structure wasn’t some sort of equation that needed to add up. Pulling it apart de-animated it, made it flat and incomprehensible. I knew what I was doing as I was doing it, but once the book was finished I no longer felt like its author but, rather, as mystified by it as I was by Jacob’s perfect ears.

It seemed impossible to me that I’d had anything to do with its creation.

This is why, when writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier.

I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know—if we know anything at all—

is how to write the book we’re writing. All novels are failures.

Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown.

That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeat-ing what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job—as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy—of the 219

Dani Shapiro

artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be
birthed
by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt—spectacularly, brazenly—into the unknown.

Fine, fine, you might be thinking. All well and good
.
Uncertainty, rejection, solitude, risk, pajamas all day—this is our lot.

We’ve learned to keep good sentences in our ears. To protect our time, work regular hours. But what about the business?

We hear that it’s important to go to book parties and writing conferences to make connections. To write a book that has a hook. And to have, you know, thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers. And Pinterest. Goodreads. A presence. A platform.

Excuse me while I throw up a little. I don’t want to write about this. I really don’t, because like most writers I don’t like thinking about business, or talking about business, or being aware of business at all.
Writing career
is an oxymoronic phrase. Writers are notoriously pathetic when it comes to money. Have you ever watched a group of us try to divide up the check after dinner? All those credit cards and dollar bills 220

Still Writing

piled in the middle of the table? The tipsy suggestion that the waiter (himself quite possibly a struggling writer) divide it by seven, except for the bar bill, which should only be divided by four, and then add a 20 percent tip?

Also, platform is one of my all-time least favorite words, unless it’s attached to the sole of a very cool shoe. I’m not fond of networking, either. It seems a calculating and manipulative way of choosing who one hangs out with. And hooks? Hooks are for coats, and even then, only in winter.

But the fact is that I have managed to support myself and my family as a writer for the past twenty years. Through a precarious and ever-evolving combination of book advances, foreign sales, movie options, royalties, screenwriting, speaking engagements, ghost writing, essays and journalism for magazines, book reviews, the odd corporate writing job, and teaching in academic institutions, retreat centers, as well as privately. Oh, yes, and I do have a Web site—though it doesn’t contribute financially—and a fair number of Facebook friends and followers on Twitter.

It might seem to you that all this has been the result of a methodically carried-out plan. Or any plan at all. But I planned none of it. Almost everything that has happened in my writing life has been the result of keeping my head down and doing the work. My work led to publication. To teaching jobs. To magazine assignments. To whatever it is I’ve ever 221

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done—including founding a writers’ conference. If I had tried to plan any of it, none of it would have happened—of that I am quite certain. And I couldn’t have planned it because I couldn’t have
envisioned
it. I wasn’t thinking about a career. I was thinking about one book at a time.

I often tell my students—especially the ones who are impatient—that good work will find its way. When the work is ready, everything else will fall into place. I know you’re sitting there, shaking your head. You don’t believe me. Someone named Bookalicious whom you follow on Twitter, who has never published a word in her life, has shared her fourteen social media strategies for writers. You’re back to contemplat-ing platforms and hooks again. You may imagine that there’s a magic key that will unlock the door and all the secrets of well-published writers will come tumbling out. But I’ll bet you that just about any contemporary writer you admire has never spent a single moment thinking about what their platform or hook might be.

If you work hard—with focus, diligence, integrity, hon-esty, optimism, and courage—on your own tiny corner of the tapestry, you just might produce something good. And if you produce something good, other writers will help you.

They’ll call their agents, their editors. They’ll write letters on your behalf. Your teacher will lift you up on her shoulders.

She will hold you aloft so that you can catch hold, so you 222

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can have the same chance she’s had. Believe me. Nothing will make her happier.

Coming to the end of writing a book is bittersweet. It must be a bit like seeing your kid off to college. You
want
your kid to go to college. You’re pleased that you’ve raised an independent person. You marvel that this tall, complex creature is what’s become of that lima-bean-sized blur you first saw on a sonogram eighteen years earlier. The printout from that sonogram is still tucked in the back of your bedside table. How have eighteen years gone by? You pack boxes, cart computer and stereo equipment, help set up a dorm room, and then you get into your car, put your head on the steering wheel, and weep.

If you have done your job—as a parent, as a writer—you’ve thrown your whole heart into this. And now your job is done.

And you are bereft. A writer who has finished a book is an empty nester. What now? Whenever I have found myself in this condition, I always promise myself that this time,
this
time,
I will do what Anthony Trollope did each time he finished a novel. He drew a line across the page beneath his final sentence—and then he started a new one. No time to think.

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No time to mull over all the reasons why not. He just simply
.
.
.
kept going.

But I never do. That was Trollope’s rhythm, not mine.

Many of us need time between books whether we like it or not. When I finish a book, I’m depleted. All the concerns that I kept at bay while working on the book now march back into my consciousness.
Remember us?
A mild depression settles in, surprising me. It surrounds me like a fine mist and before I know it the world is unapprehendable. At precisely the moment that I am free to go back into civilization and stay a while, I feel, instead, more isolated than I do when I spend days and days speaking to no one. Once again, I feel trapped inside myself, as if someone has pressed the mute button.

What do I feel? What do I think? When I’m not writing, I don’t know.

I’ve tried many remedies for this between-books funk. I tell myself that I should use this time to relax, think, catch up on paperwork, give myself time off. But the only remedy—the only cure—for the writer is writing. It isn’t about the project, it’s about the practice. Whether in the midst of a serious piece of work or just taking notes, the page is where we come to meet ourselves. Most of us can’t tolerate extended breaks.

We are reminded how lousy, how out of touch we feel when we’re away from the page. So as you come to the end, promise yourself—as I am promising myself—that you will sit down 224

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tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Not to start something new. Not with the expectations or fantasies of what you might (or might not) accomplish. But to stay engaged with the practice of writing.

For eighty years, Pablo Casals, one of the greatest cellists who ever lived, began his day in the same manner. “I go to the piano and I play two Preludes and Fugues of Bach. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, and with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.”