IT IS SUNDAY MORNING. Ever since yesterday afternoon I have been sad because I talked to my five-year-old granddaughter and she said her mother said I should not have bought new clothes for her when she was visiting me last weekend because she didn’t need any new clothes. “Here is just what she said,” Juliet continued. “She said I have a hundred clothes and I did not need any more.”
Juliet is in the middle of her parents’ terrible divorce. She spends the weekends with my son and the weeks around the corner with her mother. She is a very wise, self-protective little girl and extremely honest and open. She tells everyone everything that anyone says. (She might make a good writer.) She does not prevaricate or soften the messages or leave out the implied guilt trips. If you don’t ask her questions you don’t have to hear things, but if you question her you get straight answers.
I am often saddened by things she tells me but in the end I am happy to know that she is so aware and smart and attentive and such a great little politician. (She might make a good president.)
She tests in the extremely high gifted and talented range and goes to a school that teaches in French half of each day. Her mother is English and Juliet has flown back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean dozens of times in her five years. She has visited England, France, Turkey, Tunisia, and several other countries and is exposed to a constant stream of visitors from other cultures. I am in awe of Juliet and am going to learn to do two things. One, stop buying her clothes when she visits me. Two, stop asking her questions unless I really want to hear the answers.
There are deep and powerful emotions surrounding this divorce and I am knee deep in them as I have been since the first child of the misalliance was in the womb. I love these two little red-headed girls with all my heart. I am in constant fear that my son will lose them in some way. No matter how hard I try to stay rational I cannot defeat these emotions with rational thought.
Love and marriage and children and broken hearts and disappointments and dreams that don’t come true are the stuff of poetry and fiction. My students know this better than I do. I used to know it, but I have forgotten it because it doesn’t affect me as much as it used to, except for grandchildren-in-the-grips-of-divorce sort of problems.
I may be able to write better than my students can but they are closer to the material out of which real stories come into being. I am dazzled by the emotions my students struggle with and write about.
Some of them are learning to use these struggles as material. I am learning how much I have forgotten and left behind.
I am doing the best I can to teach them but there is really very little to teach about writing. All I can do is edit their work to make the writing more beautiful and seductive, and tell them over and over again the few, simple strategies I know. I learned most of them from a book by Ernest Hemingway that I assign to students every semester. It is called On Writing. It is a very small book of all the things about writing scattered around in Hemingway’s body of work. On Writing was put together by the man who is now the editor in chief of Little, Brown, my publisher for many years. An editor at Random House actually made the book but Mike Petsch did the legwork and searched the Hemingway books for the pieces.
It was in that book that I learned to quit each day while I still knew what to write next. I learned to be satisfied by four pages of good, well-written prose and then go out and live my real life and be fresh when I come back to the piece the next morning. I learned to go back frequently and reread the entire story or book up to the place where I was working. And many more things. I cannot recommend this book enough to young writers.
As a teacher I keep telling my students the same things over and over. The ones who are listening and take my advice turn out to be the ones who publish and win prizes. I do not know exactly what role I play in all this but I am having a good time thinking part of the credit goes to me. I love this deal. The students do the hard, mind-wrenching work and all I do is get dressed up in new clothes I buy with my salary and go into the workroom and tell them what to do next. I have arrived at a management position. How wonderful, how unexpected, how divine. My old engineer daddy would adore it. I hope there is a heaven and that he is looking down on me and thinking how well I have turned out.
APRIL 2004