Falling Through Space (18 page)

But this is supposed to be a writing lesson. Here is how I write a book. First I get a wonderful idea and I drop everything I'm doing and go and write it down and expand it as much as I can. Then I get very excited and go off and eat some ice cream or something I usually deny myself. Four or five days later I go back and read what I wrote and I decide it's pretty good, but not as good as I dreamed it would be. A few days later the story or characters I began to create will begin to haunt me; they want another chance to show they are as wonderful as I originally thought they were and I go back into the story and begin to work on it. Work means exactly that. Hard thinking and hard attention and walking around the house with the telephone off the hook and the bed unmade. Trying to remember what happens next. It is more like memory than imagination. The imagination part only happens in bursts of excitement — it happens when it gets ready to happen. Days go by while I work and work and work, and, for some reason, which I have never been able to understand, I am able to put up with this very hard, boring part of writing. Meanwhile I take good care of myself. I sleep at regular hours and eat as intelligently as I can and maybe even clean up the house and buy some flowers for the table. The book is writing itself while these things go on. Then one morning, it was this morning for me for this book, it breaks open, like a flower opening or a storm cloud, and it all makes perfect sense and I know how to write down what I have dreamed or imagined. I know what happens next and what the characters are thinking and how they dance with each other on the page. If it is a short story or a poem two or three of these episodes will do to complete the piece. If it is a novel only Athena knows how long it will take or how many spells of hard, boring, seemingly useless work followed by bursts of illumination must go on before the plot is woven and the book finished.

A piece of writing is the product of a series of explosions in the mind. It is not the first burst of excitement and its aftermath. It is helpful to me to pretend that writing is like building a house. I like to go out and watch real building projects and study the faces of the carpenters and masons as they add board after board and brick after brick. It reminds me of how hard it is to do anything really worth doing.

I
'M NOT
A bad person. If I see a turtle on the road, I stop and pick it up and return it to the grass. I know the universe is one. I know it's all one reality. So why does it make me so furious, why do I want to kill and kill and kill when the turtles on the pond kill the baby ducks? They killed seven in April and five more in May and they are at it again.

Edmund Wilson once wrote a great short story on this subject, called “The Man Who Hated Snapping Turtles.” I could have written that story. I wouldn't have had to invent a character. I could have used myself. One morning I wake up and there are five brand-new beautiful soft fluffy baby ducks following their mother out from behind a grass nest and walking side by side to the water. They enter the water without sound. They glide like angels. The mother looks like my beautiful daughter-in-law Rita. The baby ducks are my grandchildren. A turtle rears its head. Kill, I'm screaming. The neighbors are on their porches. They know what's going on. We have all been sharing the tragedy of the ducks.

Kill, I'm screaming. Doesn't anybody have a gun? I grab an empty Coke bottle and run out onto the pier and throw it at the turtle. Success. It scares him off for the moment. Get those babies back on the land, I'm screaming at the large ducks. Don't you know what's good for you? Can't you protect your young?

I can't stand it. Here we are in the sovereign state of Mississippi and we are helpless to prevent those ducks from getting killed. How am I going to travel and see the world? What's going to happen when I get to Mexico or India? Get back in the bushes, I'm yelling at the ducks. We'll drain the pond. We'll kill all the turtles in the world. What am I supposed to do? I can't stay in the house and never go out on the porch. I can't keep the drapes closed so I'll forget the pond is there. It's there. The baby ducks are on the pond and the turtles are coming to get them.

S
TUCK IN THE
very heart of summer in the middle of a heat wave and I'm sitting here trying to write this book. Why did I ever start this book? What on earth possessed me to think I could write an historical novel? I remember when I started it. I woke up one beautiful fall morning in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and decided I had missed my calling. I should have been a scholar, I said to myself. I should have kept on learning Greek.

I will write a novel set in ancient Greece, I told myself. Anyone can do anything, and I am going down the hill and go to the library and take out every book ever written about ancient Greece and read them and then I'm going over to Daniel Levine's office and borrow all his books and then I'll sign up for Greek classes and I will spend as many years as it takes. I want to be a great and honored writer, a scholar, a serious and noble person.

So I put on my hiking shoes and walked down the mountain and on down to Dickson Street and marched into the library and began. That first month was wonderful. No more the unstructured life of a fiction writer. No more ego. No more taking real life and twisting it into character and scenes and devising plots and opening lines. All I had to do now was sit all day in a little cubby at the university library and read and take notes. I was wearing an old tweed skirt and an oxford cloth shirt and brown brogans and knee socks. My horn-rimmed glasses. At exactly eleven o'clock every morning I would walk over to the student union and eat doughnuts and drink coffee. Who cared if I got fat? I was a scholar now. Lost in the stacks.

Everything was going fine. My time schedule called for me to read and study for five years before I began to write.

I was covering yellow legal pads with knowledge of the past. Plants and herbs, ancient weapons, walled cities, how to mix mortar, how to make cloth, the clothes people wore, their music and sculpture and plays.

Then one morning I stayed home and sat at a sunlit table in a dining room overlooking the mountains and began to read the notes. I was in the dining room. I wasn't in my crowded messy workroom where I am a writer. I was in a sunlit dining room being a scholar. Suddenly an old story I had made up when I was a child began to appear on the page. A story about a young Greek girl who saves an abandoned infant. Suddenly that old unconscious story, about saving, of course, who else, myself, came rising up and I was writing and writing and writing all day.

I wrote for three or four days. That writing is still the best part of the novel. I may never again write pages as good as those. And here I am, four years later, on the fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh draft of the cursed thing and still writing and still studying and it isn't finished yet.

This is what a writer's life is really like. Calling up my editor and my agent nearly every day to get stroked and reassured. Walking around my house blaming the book on everyone I know and scared to death I can't finish it and scared to death it isn't any good. “I would never encourage anyone to be a writer,” Eudora Welty once said to me. “It's too hard. It's just too hard to do.”

T
HE INGRATE
, part one, or, I have had too much of the rich harvest I myself desired. I am sick of being a writer. Not of writing. Not of the wonderful mystical thing I do all alone in a messy little room I call an office. Not the inspiration, the conception, the writing down of poems and essays and stories. Black ink onto yellow paper, magic. But I am sick of answering questions and signing my name and being loved by strangers. “But I am tired of applepicking now, I have had too much of the great harvest I myself desired.”

Maybe it was that one really nasty irresponsible review. Maybe it is being misunderstood and misinterpreted that drives writers crazy and makes them go off to the hills to brood and pout and stop talking to people. Sixth-grade politics. Fourth-grade emotions. Second-grade sensitivity.

So now I am holed up back in Jackson, Mississippi, with the phone off the hook and the television turned to the wall and I am thinking. I have contracts for three books. I have a wonderful assignment from
Southern Magazine
to go up to the White River and freeze to death camping out with my boyfriend at Thanksgiving. I have three children and three grandchildren, all in perfect health. My new book is selling well despite the
New York Times
. I work for the best radio program in the United States of America. I live in the greatest silliest wildest country that ever raised a flag on a flagpole. And I'll be all right as soon as I get some rest.

Yesterday I was talking on the phone to a writer, and she asked, “Are you writing anything?” And I said, “Of course not.” And she said, “Well, that's publication.”

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE
to be stupid while listening to Bach. There is something about the art of fugue that soothes the brain.
I
used to make a joke about this and tell my friends they could stop suffering love if they would stop listening to love songs and listen to Bach instead.

Recently, in the middle of a rainy Sunday afternoon while
I
was lounging around on the sofa in the middle of a pile of books, worrying about my children and getting my mind in a tangle with this or that imagined catastrophe,
I
came upon a chapter in a book of Lewis Thomas's essays in which he explores the proposition that he could go to the scientists of the world and ask them for the answers to three questions.

The first would concern the strange mind-reading abilities of honeybees.

The second question would be about music. “Surely music,” Doctor Thomas says, “along with ordinary language, is as profound a problem for human biology as can be thought of, and I would like to see something done about it. What music is, why it is indispensable for human existence, what music really means. Hard questions like that.”

“Why is the art of fugue so important and what does this single piece of music do to the human mind?”