SINCE I BEGAN TEACHING I have begun to get telephone calls from people who are dear to me, mostly men and mostly lawyers, but a medical student also called, asking me questions about how to write short stories. “How long does one have to be?” the medical student asked, but it turned out what he really wanted to know was how many pages you needed altogether to make a book and get paid for it.
It is as if, after years of being very close and secretive about my work, I have opened up to share what I know with the world and my close friends have sensed it is all right to ask me to tell them while I’m at it. It is very strange to feel this sea change in me, this unaccustomed unselfishness. All these years I have thought that other writers were competition and I wouldn’t go on the practice court with them because I might meet them in a slam and they’d know my moves. Now, because I am being paid for it and because it has turned out to be a joy, I am willing to train my competition, maybe even, someday rejoice if they best me.
This opening up, this unselfishness, is very wonderful. I am naturally an unselfish person, but where my work was concerned I was as tight as my deepest Scot ancestor in his mountain hold.
But it isn’t selfishness alone that makes me not want to talk about my work. It’s a kind of shyness, something I don’t really understand. My work is my refuge, my hideout. Occasionally I like to talk about it but mostly I don’t. Now, for some reason, I am becoming more open. A reporter described me recently as “an extroverted recluse.” I felt the description was apt. When I am working I am as disciplined and closed-up as a nun on a retreat. When I am finished for the day I like to dress up and go downtown and see what’s going on but I don’t go to my friends. I go to the mall and walk around and look at strangers or wander into toy stores and buy presents for my young grandchildren or go by the cosmetic counter and ask the Chanel representative about the new antiwrinkle compounds. I want to completely leave myself when I reenter the world and my friends would ask me questions about where I’ve been.
I don’t want to answer questions about the strange, quiet place where I dream and write. “What are you writing now?” is a terrible question to me. I don’t want to talk about it while I’m doing it. That’s the end of that.
When something comes up in a class that involves a student’s work and I can help the student by giving him or her an example from my own work, it is different. I initiated the revelation and since I am the teacher I can cut off the discussion if I don’t like where it’s going. Is this about power? If I like power it’s news to me but it could be true. I’ll be watching to find out.