This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (3 page)

The Getaway Car

A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life

I
WAS ALWAYS GOING
to be a writer. I've known this for as long as I've known anything. It was an accepted fact in my family by the time I had entered the first grade, which makes no sense, as I was late to both read and write. In fact, I was a terrible student when I was young. I've always believed the reason I was passed from grade to grade was that I could put together some raw version of a story or poem, even if all of the words were misspelled and half of them were written backwards. Like a cave child scratching pictures on the wall of bison and fire and dancing, I showed an early knack for content. Only writing kept me from being swept into the dust heap of third grade, and for this reason I not only loved writing, I felt a strong sense of loyalty to it. I may have been shaky about tying my shoes or telling time, but I was sure about my career, and I consider this certainty the greatest gift of my life. I can't explain where the knowledge came from, only that I hung on to it and never let go. Knowing that I wanted to write made my existence feel purposeful and gave me a sense of priorities as I was growing up. Did I want to get a big job and make a lot of money? No, I wanted to be a writer, and writers were poor. Did I want to get married, have children, live in a nice house? No again; by the time I was in middle school I'd figured out that a low overhead and few dependents would increase my time to work. While I thought I might publish something someday, I was sure that very few people, and maybe no one at all, would read what I wrote. By ninth grade I was drawing from the Kafka model: obscurity during life with the chance of being discovered after death. Young as I was when I made this commitment, it wasn't quite as morbid as it sounds—so many of the writers we studied in school were unknown in their lifetimes (or, better still, scorned and dismissed) that I naturally assumed this to be the preferable scenario. It was also in keeping with my Catholic education, which stressed the importance of modesty and humility. I did not daydream of royalty checks, movie deals, or foreign rights. Success never figured into my picture. The life I would have would be straight out of
La Bohème
(having never heard of
La Bohème
): I would be poor, obscure, alone, possibly in Paris. The one thing I allowed myself was the certainty of future happiness. Even though the history of literature was filled with alcoholics, insane asylums, and shotguns, I could not imagine that I would be miserable if I received the only thing I wanted.

It turns out that I was right about some of the details of my future and wrong about others, which is fitting, given the fact I was making it all up. No writers came to St. Bernard's Academy for Catholic girls on Career Day, and so I marched towards the vision in my head without guidance or practical advice. This is where it got me.

I am now a veritable clearinghouse of practical advice, and since I have neither children nor students, I mostly dispense it in talks or short articles. There is a great appeal in the thought of consolidating the bulk of what I know about the work I do in one place, so that when someone asks me for advice I can say,
Look, it's here, I wrote it all down.
Every writer approaches writing in a different way, and while some of those ways may be more straightforward than others, very few can be dismissed as categorically wrong. There are people who write in order to find out where the story goes. They never talk about what they're working on. They say if they knew the ending of the book there would be no point in writing it, that the story would then be dead to them. And they're right. There are also people, and I am one of them, who map out everything in advance. (John Irving, for example, can't start writing his books until he thinks up the last sentence.) And we are also right. There are a couple of habits I have acquired through years of trial and error that I would recommend emulating, but either you will or you won't. This isn't an instruction booklet. This is an account of what I did and what has worked for me, and now that that's been said, I will resist the temptation to open every paragraph with the phrase “It's been my experience . . .” That's what this is: my experience.

L
ogic dictates that writing should be a natural act, a function of a well-operating human body, along the lines of speaking and walking and breathing. We should be able to tap into the constant narrative flow our minds provide, the roaring river of words filling up our heads, and direct it out into a neat stream of organized thought so that other people can read it. Look at what we already have going for us: some level of education, which has given us control of written and spoken language; the ability to use a computer or a pencil; and an imagination that naturally turns the events of our lives into stories that are both true and false. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides. In short, the story is in us, and all we have to do is sit there and write it down.

But it's right about there, right about when we sit down to write that story, that things fall apart. I've had people come up to me at book signings, in grocery stores, at every cocktail party I've ever attended, and tell me they have a brilliant idea for a book. I get letters that try to pass themselves off as here's-an-offer-you-can't-refuse business proposals:
My story will be a true blockbuster, a best-selling American original. Unfortunately, my busy schedule does not afford me the time to write it myself. This is where you come in
. . . . The person then offers me some sort of deal, usually a fifty-fifty split, though sometimes it's less. All I have to do is agree, and he or she will tell me the (
Compelling! Unforgettable!
) story, and I will type it up in his or her own voice, a task that is presumed to be barely above the level of transcription. Like those random Internet letters that begin
Dear Sir or Madam
and tell of the countless millions that will be left to me,
This is my lucky day
.

I feel for these people, even as they're assuming I'm not bright enough to realize where they've gotten stuck. I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize on the record to Amy Bloom, because once when we were madly signing books at the end of a
New
York Times
book and author lunch (with Alan Alda, Chris Matthews, and Stephen L. Carter in between us, a very busy event), an older woman appeared at the front of my line to tell me that the story of her family's arrival from the old country was a tale of inestimable fascination, beauty, and intrigue, and that it must be made into a book, a book that I must write for her. I politely but firmly demurred, saying that I was sure it was a fantastic story but I scarcely had the time to write about my own family's journey from the old country, much less all the things I made up. She kept on talking, outlining in broad strokes her parents and their sacrifices and adventures.
No
, I said, trying to hold on to good manners,
that is not what I do.
But she didn't budge. She leaned forward and wrapped her fingers beneath the table's edge in case someone thought to try to pull her away. Short of
yes
, nothing I said was going to dislodge her from her spot. The crowd was backing up behind her, people who wanted to get my signature quickly so they could be free to adore Alan Alda (who was fully worthy of adoration). When I was completely out of tricks, I told the woman from the old country to ask Amy Bloom.
Amy Bloom might be interested
, I said, and I pointed my pen three authors away. The woman, seized by the prospect of a new captive audience, scurried into Amy's line. It was a deplorable act on my part, and I am sorry.

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick, a point that was best illustrated to me on one of the more boring afternoons of my life. (Boring anecdote, thoughtfully condensed, now follows.) I once attended a VanDevender reunion in Preston, Mississippi, a dot on the map about forty-five minutes from Shuqualak (inevitably pronounced “Sugarlock”). I went because I am married to a VanDevender. It was not a family reunion, but rather a reunion of people in Mississippi named VanDevender, many of whom had never met before. The event was held in a low, square Masonic Lodge built of cinder blocks on a concrete slab that was so flush with the ground there was not even a hint of a step to go inside. All we could see was a field and, beyond that, a forest of loblolly pines. Because we had come so far with our friends, distant VanDevender cousins, we were planning to stay for a while. It was in the third or fourth hour of this event that one of the few VanDevenders I had not already engaged said that my husband had told her I was a novelist. Regrettably, I admitted this was the case. That was when she told me that everyone had at least one great novel in them.

I have learned the hard way not to tell strangers what I do for a living. Frequently, no matter how often I ask him not to, my husband does it for me. Ordinarily, in a circumstance like this one, in the Masonic Lodge in Preston, Mississippi, I would have just agreed with this woman and sidled off (
One great novel, yes, of course, absolutely everyone
), but I was tired and bored and there was nowhere to sidle to except the field. We happened to be standing next to the name-tag table, where all the tags had been filled out with
VanDevender
in advance so that you could just print your first name on the top and get your lemonade. On that table was a towering assortment of wildflowers stuck into a clear glass vase. “Does everyone have one great floral arrangement in them?” I asked her.

“No,” she said.

I remember that her gray hair was thick and cropped short and that she looked at me directly, not glancing over at the flowers.

“One algebraic proof?”

She shook her head.

“One Hail Mary pass? One five-minute mile?”

“One great novel,” she said.

“But why a novel?” I asked, having lost for the moment the good sense to let it go. “Why a great one?”

“Because we each have the story of our life to tell,” she said. It was her trump card, her indisputable piece of evidence. She took my silence as a confirmation of victory and so I was able to excuse myself. I found my husband and begged him to get me out of there.

But I couldn't stop thinking about this woman, not later that same day, not five years later. Was it possible that, in everybody's lymph system, a nascent novel is knocking around? A few errant cells that, if given the proper encouragement, cigarettes and gin, the requisite number of bad affairs, could turn into something serious? Living a life is not the same as writing a book, and it got me thinking about the relationship between what we know and what we can put on paper. For me it's like this: I make up a novel in my head (there will be more about this later). This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don't take notes or make outlines; I'm figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

And so I do. When I can't think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It's not that I want to kill it, but it's the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I'm left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That's my book.

When I tell this story in front of an audience it tends to get a laugh. People think I'm being charmingly self-deprecating, when really it is the closest thing to the truth about my writing process that I know. The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost. So maybe Mrs. X. VanDevender in the Preston, Mississippi, Masonic Lodge was right; maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words. This is why we type a line or two and then hit the delete button or crumple up the page. Certainly
that
was not what I meant to say!
That
does not represent what I see. Maybe I should try again another time. Maybe the muse has stepped out back for a smoke. Maybe I have writer's block. Maybe I'm an idiot and was never meant to write at all.

I had my first real spin with this particular inadequacy when I was a freshman in college. As a child and as a teenager I had wanted to be a poet. I wrote sonnets and sestinas and villanelles, read Eliot and Bishop and Yeats. I entered high school poetry competitions and won them. I would say that a deep, early love of poetry should be mandatory for all writers. A close examination of language did me nothing but good. When I arrived at Sarah Lawrence College as a freshman I submitted my poems and was admitted into Jane Cooper's poetry class. I was seventeen.