Writing Is My Drink (18 page)

with the air-conditioner pumping out cool air, working my way

through a pile of library books.

Famous-to-the-Well-Read’s story had been collected into a

volume of
Best American Short Stories
. I remembered reading through the collection with a sense of wonder and profound

jealousy. I had recently turned thirty, an age when career envy

can reach a shrill high C. Everything you were going to do by

thirty mocks you, and you real y don’t get that you’re not alone

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in that. There on my sofa I read his amazing story chock full of

literary merit and grit, which had everything I hoped my writ-

ing would possess. After finishing the story, I flipped back to

the author’s bio. He’d been in the Writers’ Workshop at the Uni-

versity of Iowa, natch. Like the other writers in the collection,

he was a rock star, distant and unreachable. How he’d gotten to

where he was as a writer, I’d never know. I’d be more likely to run into David Bowie at our desert town’s Smith’s Food King.

And now suddenly, five years later, he was coming to my

MFA program. He’d be teaching our workshop next year, and

in fact, in just a few weeks, he would be visiting our class. Coin-

cidental y (or was it fate?), he’d be coming to our class the very

day my story was slated to be workshopped. What’s more, our

regular instructor thought it would be a great idea for Famous

to
lead
our workshop.

If I get very quiet and honest, I call up a memory of my hope

that Famous would be blown away by my story. That perhaps

with a few deftly delivered pieces of praise he’d raise my group

status from middle-of-the-pack to literary star. Later we’d be-

come friends—not quite equals but close—hashing out writing

troubles over coffee in crowded Seattle cafés. It is difficult to access that memory now, though, because the events that followed

diverged so sharply from that fantasy.

Did he love my story? No. Did he like it even? Nope. Did he

think the story worthy of a line-by-line scrutiny? An absolute

yes. And so that’s how I spent an hour one mid-May afternoon

near the end of the millennium: sitting in silence (the writer

never talks in workshops, just quietly sits and considers all the

sage advice shooting around her like gunfire, occasional y scrib-

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bling something thoughtful in her notebook, such as “Fuck off”)

as Famous careful y explained line by line everything that was

wrong with the story. The story was set in San Francisco during

the 1989 earthquake, and included a detail about watching the

headlights of the cars on the bridge heading north toward Marin

County. This detail excited Famous to a point of near-fury.

“If the narrator is in San Francisco and she’s watching cars

heading north, she’d be looking at
tail ights
, not headlights,” he announced to the class, as if making his closing argument to a

grand jury.

Pregnant with baby number two, I barely held it together,

sitting through the next few minutes in that overly warm and

crowded classroom. Baby, objecting to the heat and the stress,

pounded out her objection with her small feet and then pulled

an elbow across my enormous midsection. Shock and anger vied

for position, but mostly I burned with shame as my lifelong fear

of being inaccurate had just been played out in a public setting.

All the other literary crimes committed in the story—lack of ac-

tion and imagination, bad dialogue, a passive narrator—seemed

not so bad compared to the Giant Crime of Inaccuracy, of getting

taillights mixed up with headlights. And while the goal of fiction

is to make up swaths of life that feel real, I’d offered up, yet again, something real that seemed made up because I couldn’t even

accurately report what I’d actual y seen, a failing that I general y try to keep well hidden. (If an eyewitness to a crime is needed, I

am not—
should not be
—your first pick. I don’t know whether it’s that I’m just spacey or if it’s the second-guessing that undoes me, but accuracy in reporting is not my strong suit.)

A full-scale loss of face and dashing of hopes had not been

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my plan for the day; in fact, I’d been hoping from Famous for

something I shouldn’t even been asking for from anyone else:

permission to write. And now saddled, with working with Fa-

mous for the rest of the MFA program, I’d be spending lots of

time in public situations with someone in authority, someone

whose work I respected, who didn’t “get” me, who didn’t like

my writing, and who was extremely good at picking it apart. It

didn’t help that I knew that Famous’s criticisms of my work were

accurate. My narrators were passive. My stories lacked action

and certainly imagination, and sometimes I got details wrong.

In short, the moment I’d predicted when I held JoJo’s failed man-

uscript in my hands had arrived. I sucked and people knew it.

Ideal y, this story should end up with Famous being just the

school of tough love I needed and the best teacher I ever had.

It should end with my fiction making a dramatic turn for the

better, my characters turning from wimpy to active, my details

sharp with accuracy. It doesn’t. It ends up with me becoming

increasingly down on my writing and increasingly irritated with

Famous. It ends up with me learning quite a bit in spite of him

and sometimes because of him and then graduating from the

program with a shaky sense of my own ability to write fiction.

But there is a good part. Real y. The good part came a while

after I graduated from the program and saw Famous for per-

haps the last time. By then I was mostly stay-at-home mom and

I wrote when I could, taking care of Natalie and her new sister,

Jessie, most of the time. No one in the world cared whether I

wrote or not. Usual y I had an hour a day during nap time to

do whatever I wanted, and most days—when I wasn’t total y

exhausted—I chose to write. My stories were still fictional but

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gradual y becoming memoir. I started to write triptychs again.

It was weird that I’d somehow forgotten them during the fic-

tion writing program, but I had. But the triptych had waited for

me to come back. I started taking the words that my new life

had evolved into—marriage, motherhood, family—and put-

ting them at the center of the page. No matter what I learned in

graduate school, I had to keep reminding myself to be myself, to

listen to the sound of my own voice.

Almost every new writer yearns for permission to write. Ide-

al y, an established, maybe even famous writer will examine a

small sample of your writing and quickly issue a You’ve-got-it

declaration. We imagine that, like the results of a pregnancy test, the answer is binary: yes or no. Thumbs up or down. Positive

or negative. Once this permission has been received, your flight

will launch, never faltering, never touching down in the Land of

Doubt again.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, established writers are flawed,

subjective beasts who may be unable, unwilling, or just too tired

or busy to issue the permission you crave. They, for whatever

reason that may have no bearing on your talent or potential,

could
despise
your writing. Let’s say, though, that they
do
like your work and they are able and willing to toss you a crumb of

approval. It’s still not going to satisfy you. The trouble with ap-

proval is there’s never enough of it. Given approval once, you’re

not set for life—busily writing and overcoming every obstacle,

steadily nurtured by the nod you received ten years ago. No

matter how potent, once a shot of approval has faded in your

bloodstream, you’ll be wanting another one. Sounds decidedly

like addiction, doesn’t it?

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Beyond approval, I’ve also wanted from my instructors’ vali-

dation that sitting down to write was a worthy use of my time. I

wanted permission to stop my endless chain of obligatory tasks.

I wanted someone to clear the brush of doubt around me and

give me the peace of mind to write.

In Virginia Valian’s “Learning to Work,” the essay that helped

me get through my thesis, she describes her own fear of work and

that of others who’ve shared a common fear of “relinquishing

control of oneself: of being a slave, or going into a tomb, being

buried alive, being shut off from the world” and that she had to

learn that “losing myself in my work was not dangerous.” These

words hit me as hard today as they did twenty-five years ago

when I first read them as a graduate student staring down the

abyss of a one-hundred-page thesis. Today the Internet is down

in my house. I have no pressing work to do. My kids are off at

arts camp and don’t need to be picked up for several hours. And

adding to the quiet of this day, it is gray and cold even though

it is July and many people I know are out of town on summer

vacations. This is the day that I’ve said I’ve been waiting for: a

writing day. And yet, it scares me. There is nothing between me

and the page, and that does feel dangerous. I can stand perched

above it for a good long while, the same way I can stand on a

warm dock above a cool lake, terrified of the moment of contact

with the water. Terrified of breaking through the skin of the sur-

face and being in, committed ful y to swimming. And yet, I want

to swim. Why not just dive in?

Ideal y, I’d be pushed in. Stripped of my volition, I’m given

the chance to do what I long for. For many writers, a deadline

is the push. Someone’s waiting for your work; you have to do

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it. But for much of the work we truly yearn to do, there is no

deadline. The only broken promise is the one we made to our-

selves.

So here I am, beginning to swim. The guy from the phone

company still isn’t here to fix the Internet and probably won’t be

for several hours. I’ve used all my tricks to coax myself in. A pot of black tea. Background music. Looking over notes for a good

while before actual y doing the writing. But final y I do get to it, and partly I am here because of my teachers—teachers like Famous—who taught me by the example of their own work that it

is safe to be alone with my own thoughts, that I won’t be “buried

alive” when I give myself over to writing.

My need for someone to tell me that it’s okay to write, for

me to take the time to sit and follow my own thoughts, seems to

be relentless. I thought it would go away once I was in an MFA

program, then once I was published in a magazine. After that,

I hoped that maybe a published book would do the trick. But

whatever writing milestones I hit, the desire for someone to tell

me that I can spend the afternoon, the morning, or the week to

write is always there.

What does it look like to give permission to ourselves? For

me, it’s the computer not turned on. The e-mails unanswered. It’s

sitting in the quiet of a morning punctuated by only a crow’s caw

and the occasional roar of children’s voices from the neighbor-

hood park. Nothing adding to those sounds except the scratch of

a pen rhythmical y moving across the paper. It’s the unanswered

phone. It’s looking out the window and letting one thought give

rise to the next, an endless succession of waves that rise, crest,

and fall onto the shore. It’s the sound of the calico cat making its 1 3 9

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ascent to the windowsil . It’s knowing that all the other stuff you need to do will get done. Or it won’t.

It’s the stillness we both crave and repel. It’s the knowledge

that following our own thoughts is as important or even more

important a pastime as following another’s.

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Try This

1. When making your schedule for the week, pencil in a time

for writing. Ideal y, you will be able to pick regular times of

the day or a certain day each week, which will allow you to

condition yourself that these times are for writing, reinforcing

the idea that you are “allowed” to write during these times.

Keep in mind, however, that schedules work very well for

some people but actual y cause some to feel constricted and

therefore to work less.