Radio Station KFKD

I need to bring up radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked, here. It is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to listening to your broccoli that exists for writers. Then I promise I’ll never mention it again.

If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on. You might as well have heavy-metal music piped in through headphones while you’re trying to get your work done. You have to get things quiet in your head so you can hear your characters and let them guide your story.

The best way to get quiet, other than the combination of extensive therapy, Prozac, and a lobotomy, is first to notice that the station is on. KFKD is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer—please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written. Sometimes ritual quiets the racket. Try it. Any number of things may work for you—an altar, for instance, or votive candles, sage smudges, small-animal sacrifices, especially now that the Supreme Court has legalized them. (I cut out the headline the day this news came out and taped it above the kitty’s water dish.) Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.

You might also consider trying to breathe. This is not something that I remember to do very often, and I do not normally like to hang around people who talk about slow conscious breathing; I start to worry that a nice long discussion of aromatherapy is right around the corner. But these slow conscious breathers are on to something, because if you try to follow your breath for a while, it will ground you in relative silence.

So. You sit down to work at nine in the morning, and do the prayer or the small-animal sacrifice or whatever, and then breathe for a moment, and try to focus on where your characters are, only to discover that your mind has begun to wander just a little. Typically, you may find yourself wondering how some really awful writer you know is doing, and why he is doing so much better than you, and what it will be like to be on David Letterman’s show, and whether he will mock you or laugh at all your jokes and let you be his new best friend, and what you should eat for lunch, and what it would feel like for your hair to be on fire or for someone—like a critic or something—to stick a sharp object into your eye. Not to worry. Gently bring your mind back to your work.

Let’s say your character is sitting with his grown son beneath a cypress tree on a lion-colored hillside, chewing over in the sourest possible voice the few ecstatic moments of his life, and all you are going to do this morning is to squint along with him, and listen, and possibly find out what some of those moments might have been. After a minute, you begin to see your man in someone’s grassy backyard, not long ago, playing Ping-Pong with a younger man, a hippie, and they are not competing, just hitting together, and you begin to capture this on paper, and after two sentences you begin to worry about complete financial collapse, what it will be like to live in a car, and then your mother calls joyfully to tell you that something fantastic just happened to someone who was mean to you in the eighth grade. You get off the phone, and your mind has become a frog brain that scientists have saturated with caffeine. You may need another minute to bring it back to the man’s moment in that grassy backyard. Close your eyes. Breathe. Begin again.

I’m sorry, I wish that there were a sharper, slicker way to do this, but this seems to be the only solution. Believe me, I hate natural solutions, or at any rate they are the last ones I turn to. Two nights ago I showed up to teach my class with a raw chest and a raging sore throat, the kind that feels like cancer of the trachea. I happen to have two doctors in this class, and one of them tried to assure me that it probably wasn’t tracheal cancer, that in fact the viral cloud of mid-autumn had descended and many people were having similar symptoms. The other doctor recommended drinking really, really hot water. "Hot water?" I said. "Hot water? I should be home hooked up to an epidural, drinking codeine cough syrup, and you’re prescribing hot water?" Then I threatened to lower his grade. (Of course, this is not a graded workshop, so my students tend to roll their eyes when I threaten them.) At the break, that doctor brought me a cup of boiling water, as though for tea but without the tea bag, and I drank it. My throat and chest stopped aching about twenty seconds later.

I hate that.

Still, breathing calmly can help you get into a position where the workings of your characters’ hearts and the things people say on the streets of your story can be heard above the sound of KFKD. When you are in that position, you will know. I am struggling very hard not to use the word harmony here. So let me tell you a quick story.

Last summer I got a call from a producer in New York who wanted me to fly east two days later, stay in town overnight, do her TV talk show, and fly home. I thought long and hard about whether I should—for about thirty seconds. Of course I wanted to go. But I would have to make arrangements for Sam to stay overnight with his grandparents, and I needed to catch a return flight that would get me back in time to teach my workshop the next night, and the only one that could do that involved a layover at Dallas-Fort Worth. A layover at Dallas-Fort Worth is something for which, believe me, I am not remotely well enough. So I shared all this with the producer and took off for a committee meeting I had at church.

I was a mess. Out of the right speaker, KFKD was playing a dress rehearsal of the TV talk show and of subsequent appearances with Dave and Arsenio. Out of the left speaker was a call-in program on airplane crashes, with descriptions of what happens to the body on impact.

I got to church and my committee had not yet assembled, but four of the church’s elders—all women—three African Americans and one white, were having a prayer meeting. They were praying for homeless children. "Can we discuss my personal problems for a moment?" I asked.

They nodded and I told them all about my airline fears and how many moving parts there were to this trip east. They nodded again. They seemed to believe that between Jesus and a travel agent, things could probably be worked out. I sighed. My meeting was starting in another room, so I trudged off. My mind spun with images of the talk show, the airplane crash, and the madman with the Uzi at Dallas-Fort Worth. I was having a little trouble concentrating. The meeting ended, and on my way out, a little book on prayer caught my eye. I picked it up and stuck it in my purse, figuring I could look at it over dinner and then return it the next Sunday.

All the way to the hamburger joint, I worried that I would be involved in a car accident and the book would be found on me. My survivors would know I had finally snapped, that I had become one of those fundamentalists who think the world is going to end tomorrow right after lunch. I made it to the restaurant, though, and when I sat down, I took out the little book. I opened it before I got it out of my purse so the cover wouldn’t show, as if it were the rankest sort of pornography, like Big Beautiful Butts or something. I started to read and within a page came upon this beautiful passage: "The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it. "

To make a long story short, I flew to New York and everything went fine. I didn’t have to stop in Dallas-Fort Worth, and I got home in time to teach my class. So now I always tell my students about the Gulf Stream: that what it means for us, for writers, is that we need to align ourselves with the river of the story, the river of the unconscious, of memory and sensibility, of our characters’ lives, which can then pour through us, the straw. When KFKD is playing, we are, at cross purposes with the river. So we need to sit there, and breathe, calm ourselves down, push back our sleeves, and begin again.