THE WAY YOU START WRITING is by writing. Over and over again I have proven this to myself but I always forget it the next time. I always believe that I will never write again. The first time I finished a book a painter was visiting me. Her name is Ginny Stanford and her wonderful paintings have been the covers for nine of my books.
“I’ll never write again,” I told her, the week after my editor told me my book was finished and I should quit writing it.
For days after that conversation I had tried to start something new but couldn’t think of a thing to write. “That’s it,” I told the painter. “It’s over. It was great while it lasted, but now it’s done.”
That afternoon she made me a wonderful drawing of a ship sinking in the waves of the sea. “I’ll never write again,” it said on the bottom of the picture. “September, 1981.”
Since then I have published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Still, I believe it every time. I accept the fact that the part of my life that was writing is over, and I go, at first gingerly, and then wholeheartedly, back into real life. I call my friends, I visit my family, I write letters, invite people to lunch and dinner, buy a new bathing suit, consider risking skin cancer by getting a tan, throw myself into exercise programs, dye my hair platinum blond.
This goes on for weeks or months or even, in its last manifestation, for several years. I write a few magazine articles, perhaps a poem that I throw away, I begin to read again, real books, fiction by people other than myself, or I reread books I have loved.
Then, one day, the germ of an idea begins to enter my head. I begin to see a book before me. I see it mostly in the mornings and maybe I go to the typewriter and make some notes or take a legal pad outside and sit in a sunny chair and make some notes. This is nothing serious, I tell myself, I’m just fooling around. I’m not a writer anymore. Who am I fooling? Maybe I never was a writer. Maybe I was pretending to be one.
Finally, I get the idea in my head that if I write a book I will be paid for it and I could use the money for my grandchildren’s education or to help out with a new baby someone in my family is having or to replace my old car or fix the roof. All of this is a lie I tell myself to disguise the fact that I’m dying to start writing again and I don’t know if what I’m going to write will be ANY GOOD OR NOT.
That is exactly what my students tell themselves that blocks them from writing. They tell themselves I DON’T KNOW IF IT WILL BE ANY GOOD OR NOT because it’s true. They don’t know and the only way they can find out is to do it.
My job as a teacher is tell them that I’ll help them make it better if they will grind out a first draft. You don’t have to make a home run, I tell them. Just get on first base and I’ll knock you in. That is what Frank Stanford told me when he helped me put together my first book of poetry.
But I digress. I want to finish telling you about how the spell of writing comes over me. I tell myself I will get paid, then I call my agent and ask him to get me a contract for a book. He always says he will as if there is no question that anything I write will be welcomed.
Then I start writing in earnest. At first, for the first few days, “it is hard to get back into harness,” another thing Frank Stanford told me. I am accustomed to going out to run first thing in the morning. It is difficult to sit at a typewriter instead but I spur myself on with the prospect of being paid and I make myself do it. By the third or fourth day I don’t want to go out and exercise. I have started a process and I want to see where it leads. Or else, my unconscious mind has decided to start telling me what I’ve been thinking and I can’t wait to hear what it has to say.
Now my nunlike life kicks in. I stop wearing makeup. I take the phone off the hook. I wear my oldest, most comfortable clothes, I’m careful what I read and who I talk to, I only make appointments in the afternoons and not many of them. I am a writer again and every moment of my life and every breath I take is to prepare me for the time when I wake from sleep and go to my typewriter and serve the muse. There is a muse. She has been with me since my first book. Perhaps she is Athena or the ghost of Edna Millay or maybe the bard himself, walking around London listening to his fellow men and remembering the fields and flowers and seasons of his childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon, or imagining the forest of Arden, which was his mother’s maiden name. Is this mysterious or what? You bet it is.
Why do I come back to the typewriter so headily each morning? Because it feels good. The brain is easily addicted to feeling good and nothing on earth, with the exception of great sex, feels as good as having written well and truly in the morning. Actually, it is better than sex because you control the whole activity and the afterglow can last for years if the work is published and other people profit from it. The lasting pleasure is not in their praise but in your knowledge that you have contributed something of value to the culture from which you derive your being.
FALL 2002