Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Bookkeeping: Dreams of My Own Library

Sometimes I sit in bed and surround myself with books. Usually it’s a weekend morning before I have fully woken up, and I’m wrapped in my sweater coat—picture an afghan with a hood and sleeves. A cup of tea steams on the nightstand. The books sink between folds of quilt and sit on top of pillows. I’ve pulled off the shelf any novel or essay collection that might offer an inspiring sentence or paragraph and allow me to think in that slow, thoughtful way where ideas and images take their time shifting across my consciousness. I flip through the books, read a page here, a line there. Sometimes I know what I’m looking for, a section underlined in pencil or notes in the margin. Other times, I let the covers fall open to see what a book wants to tell me. I pretend it does, in fact, want to tell me something, and it’s fun for the moment.

It’s not just that the books are imparting a message. It’s that the writers are speaking. They put themselves into these works. I’m sitting in bed surrounded by books, but really I’m surrounded by voices, by people, by the lives and intellects of writers whose words endure. The paperbacks and hardbound works wait for me on my shelves. The physical books are comforting. I can keep them and open them when I need to, and they feed my imagination and take me out of myself. Having them neatly lined on the shelves is soothing. They remind me of the work I want to do and the things that I have learned and studied. Too much of the everyday makes us forgetful of art and thinking and ideas. Books counteract the routine.

So it is always with some consternation that I try to explain this to people who don’t desire shelves filled with books. They don’t seem to understand. They want to know why I keep so many volumes, especially because I have had to move frequently over the past few years. Yes, I keep taking my books with me. Everything else in my life may be transitory, but at least they last. Friends who have helped me move refer to my “library.” The truth is I do want my own library. I want an entire room filled with books. Maybe I could even get one of those ladders that wheels across the shelves. And maybe a secret passageway behind one—yeah, I’d like that. That would be like living in a book.

I learned recently that one of my relatives won’t let her husband keep too many books because they collect dust. They also pile up if you love them as much as I do—but isn’t that why shelves were invented? While I understand the avoidance of clutter, it never crossed my mind that books would constitute clutter or that anyone would actually believe they did. The situation perplexed me.

Of course, for other people, it’s not books. They feel the way I feel about books when it comes to vinyl records or surfboards or baseball cards or antique trains or paintings (my relative has many of those on her walls, so for her, I realize, it is art). I can appreciate these kinds of collections. The saving, the preserving, the reminders of what we’re passionate about. They are the things we keep because they say something about who we are.

This past weekend, I had to pack—again. Maybe it’s because I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet, but whatever the reason, it was particularly painful to take the books off the shelves. The set of Joan Didion first editions, the series of Virginia Woolf books—they were in their place, and putting them into storage felt neglectful and wrong. I set a few choice books in a bag to keep with me while I find a new stopover. That seemed to help. In any case, it will have to do. Moving my books time after time can feel like an impractical and unnecessary burden. But they make me happy—in the same way R. says sports and music (and his books, too) make him happy.

I’m hoping they—I—will soon be in a new home—but that’s just it; for so long I haven’t felt like I’ve been in a home, only temporary way stations. And maybe the real reason I refuse to give up my stacks of novels and story collections is because I don’t have a place where I belong. Instead, wherever I go, my books make me feel at home.

—C.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Movement in Four Parts; Scenes as Snapshots

I.
They drive all day in the winter air, windows down, cold like they cannot catch their breath. Balancing out the sunroof, camera clicked, accelerating away intoxicated silly, they will dream of this later, hear of it in someone else’s song, double take it in the rearview. They will smell the winter in some other icetime, shake their heads to something lost.

Later—a cactus in the window, silhouetted by a Pennsylvania sky, November and blue.

II.
From the doorway he says I take too much shit. Only, he is not saying it to me. He is looking at me but saying it to them and he is saying she takes too much shit.

In my office, he leans back and presses his foot against the wall I repainted the week before. His shoe leaves a print. He tells me he doesn’t understand why I’m so unhappy.

I want to tell him to wash off the shoe mark.

III.
“Admit it,” she says.

“Nothing to confess.” He shifts his weight from foot to foot, then stands with his fists in his pocket.

She leans over the railing. The porch banister is glossy and slick with dew. The moisture soaks through her sleeves. She needs to know about an almond tree, with almonds still green, and whether he has seen one growing, in a walled garden with sweet basil. Or what about cranberry fields flooded for harvest, red beads floating and glinting with water? In Maine, maybe, just before the leaves changed?

He takes his hands out of his pocket and steps closer.

“Remember that time?” he asks.

“I remember not being able to get warm again,” she says.

IV.
When I insist I’m going to break, he takes me to ride go-karts. He’s relieved I’m no longer pressing his Honda Civic’s gas pedal to the floor. We laugh. We forget. But he can’t keep up; I lap him.

Another weekend, we drive to the coast and sit on the harbor rocks. We leave responsibility behind. I’m so sick my lungs hurt when I inhale the freezing air, but I don’t care.

“Don’t want to go back to real life,” I say.

On the bright blue water, white sailboats escape to open sea.

“This is real life,” he tells me.

—C.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Methods to the Madness: How We Write


The Wall Street Journal had a great article by Alexandra Alter that interviewed authors about their writing processes. (A subscription is needed to view the article online.) The interviews reminded (and reassured) me that there’s no right way to write a novel and that authors do all kinds of creative and eccentric things to produce. Junot Díaz writes on the side of the bathtub. Dan Choat keeps color-coded note cards in his pocket. Russell Banks works in a converted sugar shack. John Wray rode trains all over New York City with his laptop while working on Lowboy. To portray a character who is a poetry professor, Nicholson Baker donned a floppy hat and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures.

I especially appreciated reading about Hilary Mantel’s strategy of tacking parts of dialogue, descriptions, and interesting phrases to a 7-foot-tall bulletin board in her kitchen. I, too, have a bulletin board and do something similar with sentences turning in my mind, overheard conversations, and images I want to capture. I also make “story boards,” which allow me to cut up typed pages and rearrange scenes and even sentences. The physical construction helps to see what I actually have written and how I want to proceed. Once, I papered over an entire wall in my bedroom with parts of a novel I was working on. I stayed up late into the night pinning up pages. When I woke the next morning, I’d forgotten about it and scared myself when I turned over and saw the page-covered wall.

Other strategies I’ve tried have involved note cards and a large, circular piece of wood my grandmother found in her garage. I’ve written on the back of typed drafts, jotted notes and ideas on staff-meeting agendas, scrawled on scraps of paper late at night, written e-mails to myself—all as a trick to feel like I’m not doing actual “work.” Other times, the tricks are ways to get at the material developing in my mind. I’ve made myself sit on a rock by the river until I could see an entire story in my head and then gone back to the dorm-room computer lab with a bag of M&Ms and written until 3 a.m. Though now that I have a 9-to-5 job and healthier habits, I have trouble allowing myself the extremes of writing late into the night with candy for fuel.

In September, I visited my father’s cousin in Florida. One evening, we had dinner with a friend of hers who is a painter. The painter told me how she and two of her friends used to set up their easels in her kitchen and paint on Saturday mornings. But to make those scheduled painting hours fruitful, she said, she needed “dreaming time.” I call it thinking time, but it’s true—art requires expanses of time where nothing concrete emerges but lots of thinking and dreaming is done about what will later materialize.

That’s the other thing I liked about the Journal article. It reminded me that no (well, very few) great novels are written over night. Sometimes it does take years. Sometimes you do throw out a hundred pages and start again. The article talks about how Kate Christensen “was two years and 150 pages into her first novel … before she discovered what the book was really about—so she dismantled the draft, threw out a bunch of pages and started over. The process repeated itself with her second, third and fourth novels.” It also described how Margaret Atwood has abandoned two books after a couple hundred pages, keeping a single sentence from one and working two short stories out of the other.

This past week I’ve been writing longhand in a yellow legal notepad, putting down bits of scenes and ideas that interest me for the fiction I’ve been working on. It’s premised on the characters in the story that I’ve been reworking, re-imagining, and finally thought I had tossed aside. And while the recent work is problematic in its lack of coherency, it feels like it is leading in the right direction. Sometimes this kind of mess is necessary to get to what I’m really going to write, even if the time it takes to make the mess can be anxiety-inducing. And with each new project, the process is different. Each new piece requires finding the rhythm and a way of working again. I often liken writing to running. It’s really painful getting started, getting back in shape, but once you pass the pain threshold, it’s easier to keep going back for another run, and once in a while, you have that really great run that feels like flying. The other days, though, you just have to keep showing up. And you break through.

For the moment, I've decided to stop worrying about hammering out a completely planned plot and just see what happens with the images in my head. So it helps to remember that other writers work from images, too, and that those images begin to tell their stories. The Journal article describes how Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient “started out as two images: one of a patient lying in bed talking to a nurse, and another of a thief stealing a photograph of himself.” Choan said his novel Await Your Reply began as “scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy's severed hand, resting on ice.”

Though maybe the best takeaway from the article is when Ondaatje (who apparently doesn’t understand writer’s block) says, "If I get stuck, I work on another scene.”

Then there’s Atwood who says, “Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot." The article continues: “When questioned about whether she's ever used that approach, she adds, ‘No, I don't have to.’"

--C.