CHAPTER 13

Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore

When Pluto got demoted, I spontaneously composed and began singing a song called “Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore,” rhyming “astronomer” with “barometer” and, for the two hours it took us to drive from San Francisco to the Gold Country, making our visiting daughters crazy.

“Stop!” they cried. But I found it impossible to stop, their poking notwithstanding, because Pluto’s demotion struck a deep chord within me. It wasn’t the chord that it struck almost universally, in every town and city in America. Most people were annoyed, dismayed, and even heartbroken that a sure fact of existence, that our solar system comprised nine planets, had turned out be an unsure thing after all. That, however, was not my reaction.

I was not annoyed, dismayed, or heartbroken. I was amused, amused that suddenly everyone had to share, ready or not, in the writer’s constant fate, that solid things turn liquid on a daily basis. For the irreverent and painful morphing of things is as integral to the process of writing as adding sugar is to the making of Christmas cookies. If, as a writer, you want your planets to stay put, are you ever in for some disturbing surprises and rude awakenings!

People want exactly that: solid ground. When they come in to work they want their desk to be where they left it, they want the operating system on their computer to be unchanged, they want the person in the next cubicle to be the same person they said goodbye to yesterday at closing time. If all of this were to change from one day to the next they would feel disoriented at best, crazy at worst, and in desperate need of a drink, a drug, or an explanation.

If you are a writer, forget about solid ground. Here is what happens to you. You start a suspense novel about a Navy wife who learns something she shouldn’t know. Three days in, you find your plot uninteresting. Oh, it’s interesting enough, just not to you. You can imagine somebody else writing your novel and even enjoying writing it, but to you it is just work. Why spend two years on the intricacies of double agents and triple agents when you couldn’t care less?

So you change it. You make it a novel about four Navy wives and recast it as an atmospheric drama about betrayal and loss. But after a week of writing you discover that only two of the wives actually interest you. The other two are there simply because you think you need four wives, because you read somewhere that “four women” novels are invariably successful. You sleep poorly and wish that someone would kidnap two of your wives—maybe someone from Book 1.

Book 2 stalls. Should it be about the two wives you like? If so, what is it now actually about? Where’s the suspense? Where’s the juice? What’s the point? You could get them together and make it a Navy Lesbian Wife novel and maybe start a new genre, but that really wasn’t your intention and besides you would have to do all that research. . . .

In the middle of the night it comes to you that if you set it two hours north of Berlin in a small German town you once visited where they drink that cheap grog whose name you can’t remember and where you got really drunk and recast it as a novel about two German women who teach at a small art college . . . but where in God’s name did THAT come from?

Our author of this morphing novel needs a name. Let’s call her Cassandra. The universe’s tricksters already plague Cassandra. Her hair is never quite the right length or color, pounds creep on while she is sleeping, the man in her life refuses to work, either because he is inept, passive-aggressive, or too much in love with hockey, and her father, whom she would love to hate, had the gall to die, and how easy is it to hate a dead man? Now her novel is doing this constant morphing thing. It is really too much; and even throwing darts at an effigy of Hemingway doesn’t help. It is as if the television set of her mind were controlled by Rod Serling and, in her particular Twilight Zone, she had to watch two minutes of bass fishing followed by thirty seconds of that infomercial about buying resort property in Texas. . . .

What is Cassandra to do? Hang in there. Allow her brain to take her from a Navy base in Maryland to a small town in northern Germany to wherever it will take her next, hoping against hope that when it lands on solid ground and the novel she actually means to write arises she will know it; and that the ground will remain solid for eighteen months straight as she writes that darned (always threatening to morph again) novel. She must hang in there exactly as a trapeze artist hangs in there, tumbling through thin air and trusting that her partner’s hands will appear out of nowhere to grab her wrists.

You must hang in there, even though the “there” is thin air.

In my own case, I am trying to follow up a recent novel with a sequel in which the main character from the first novel, a feisty New York painter, finds herself at risk in the heartland. Of only one thing am I certain: that there will be a midnight raft trip down the Ohio, a homage to Huck Finn, a flight under a full moon from Full Moon, Indiana. But I hope that the word “certain” in that sentence made you fall out of your chair laughing. Who can say whether that midnight raft ride down the Ohio won’t turn into a subway ride through Barcelona by tomorrow evening? Only my dancing neurons can say—and they are busy dancing.

Yes, all this morphing can prove our downfall. By contrast, Pluto’s demotion is purely cosmetic. It had a downfall by definition only; it is the still the same happy, arid, freezing spheroid it was yesterday and a billion years ago. Cassandra’s novel, by contrast, is nothing like it was when it was a thriller about double agents or a “four women” novel. Right now, it is just potential energy, weird ideas, and shifting landscapes. I tell you, Pluto has it easy.

Maybe Neptune will get the ax next. Neither Cassandra nor I will care much. We have books to trap in our consciousness that, like greased pigs, are running and squealing and morphing, not into nice slabs of bacon but into animals undreamed of by gods or by Darwin. All that squealing is addling and the grease is hard to get off your synapses. But there are no alternatives. Maybe you could buy some software that would do the thinking for you— but does that sound promising?

Hang in there, in thin air. It is precarious; but my what a view!

LESSON 13

In the space between your ears, more morphing will occur than has happened in the whole history of natural selection. That makes you something of a god, but a powerless, wacky, and demented one. Enjoy your divinity. If you would like it to be otherwise, better drive a cab or run a corporation. In our mad world, where books appear, we must live with the spectacular nature of the creative process, where profusion and confusion dance together.

To Do

1. Change your name to Cassandra. Why not?

2. Tell yourself “Each book is an adventure.” Mean it, as it is the truth.

3. Do not feel bad for Pluto. It only has to go round and round. You have to ride the wind in a tornado, grabbing scenes as they fly by along with the uprooted trees, the Dorothies, and the Totos.

4. Expect change. Wild change. The kind of change that sends nine out of ten writers packing—but not you.