Introduction: Excuse Me, Don’t We Know Each Other?

Maybe you’re that woman in the corner of the coffee shop. You’re gazing over the lid of a laptop, then typing fast, then gazing again. Or possibly you’re that man with a narrow-ruled notebook, writing fat paragraphs in black ink. Your handwriting is so dense that when you turn the page, the paper looks thick and stiff.

And I? I’m the woman with messy gray hair who’s at risk of spilling her coffee down your neck, because she can’t help glancing over your shoulder to get a glimpse of what you’re writing. Is it, perhaps, a story? Is it a novel? A memoir? I have my own notebook or laptop, or a manuscript I’m scribbling on, but I can’t seem to help sneaking a look at yours.

For decades I’ve been reading, writing, and teaching writing, but it seems that I haven’t gotten enough of it. Oh, maybe on the last day of a writers’ conference, when I’ve thought and talked writing for more hours than would seem possible, when I’ve read piles of stories, listened to hours of readings—maybe then I think, “We’ve got to stop this!” But a day or two later, I’m glancing over your shoulder again. And now I have written a book about writing—especially about fiction, but also of use, I hope, to writers of memoir. Some of what I have to say may be helpful to you; some won’t; you’ll know what to read and what to skim or skip.

Writing about writing, trying to make sense of this thing you and I do, is a way of getting a little clearer in my own mind (and maybe coming up with something of use to you too) about what happens in stories and novels, how we may improve them, and how we may avoid misery in the process. The Kite and the String is the working-out of an idea I’ve thought about for many years, the idea that writing well doesn’t result from following rules and instructions. It comes when we express strong feeling boldly and freely and then look steadily and critically at what we’ve done, in a mood that’s neither despairing nor defensive.

Thinking clearly, you can decide what needs work and what is right as it is. But you may need some help before you can decide: you need some suggestions on what to think about, how to learn from what you read, how to use your agile brain—which gets you through the rest of life—to help you write. And you need some courage—not just courage to write (I see that you’re already writing) but courage to write in new ways, to try what may seem intimidating.

This is not a book to pick up if you’re trying to work up your nerve to write your first story. (Just write it! You don’t need a book!) It’s not a how-to manual, and I’m not sure I believe in manuals for writing. This book describes one woman’s way of thinking about writing. My imagined audience consists of people who, like me, not only have had the impulse to write stories, but have acted on it repeatedly—enough to have written something or a good many somethings that other people want to read. Or maybe you’ve mostly accumulated frustrations. Published or not, you aren’t a beginner; you’ve worked at this art.

It’s not as easy as it perhaps once was to make a clear distinction between people who are and aren’t writers, not when those with multiple responsibilities and little free time (people who earn their living and manage friendship and love, who look after children or frail parents, or who are slowed by their own ill health) write when they can, take it seriously, and may be quite good at it. In this book I’m talking not only to people who have published books or are likely to do so soon, but also to fine writers who may not write much, whose output may consist of a few stories that will be published, with luck, in journals. Writers come in many varieties. They are students in master of fine arts programs, alumni, and those who are considering applying. They are also people who write on their own, maybe showing work to a few friends, as well as those who lead or belong to a workshop at a college, a writers’ center, a retirement community, or a friend’s house.

I’ve taught fiction writing to students in master’s programs, to undergraduates, to participants in writers’ conferences, to people who came to my house once a week for thirteen years to attend a workshop that usually met in my attic; when a wheelchair user joined, we moved to the kitchen. Some of my former students have published well-received books, while others have placed stories in journals, have a lively presence online, teach writing in community colleges, four-year colleges, or universities—or are taking time off from writing to work, look after their kids, or otherwise manage their lives.

The writers I meet have similar difficulties with the task, reasons why this book might be useful. Some are so eager for rules and techniques that they can’t allow themselves the many messy stages of writing good fiction, the dreamlike, irrational state of mind that would let them write what’s senseless and only later, gradually, turn it into something that makes sense. Others write freely and spontaneously, but have trouble judging what they’ve done, or thinking in an orderly way about structure or plot. Many lack confidence, and may write less well because they don’t have the courage to tell the story they should be telling.

I came to writing fiction late, partly because I didn’t know how to start or how to improve but also because I was busy: working, taking care of children, writing what wasn’t fiction—interruptions I don’t regret. I also had trouble—specifically, an eye ailment.

When I was contemplating writing my first novel, in my late forties (I had written poems and stories), I read John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, in which the beginning novelist he referred to was always “he” and often “young.” We still have remnants of the old idea that a beginning writer is a rough-looking but confident young man who shows up in a class somewhere in a flannel shirt and worn boots, and astonishes the academics with his intense, moving stories. He is forgiven for leaving the practical questions of life to others—primarily a patient wife, who may be supporting him—and when he isn’t drinking or riding a motorcycle (or maybe cheating on her), he spends his time writing. My book is for his wife, who always did have a promising manuscript hidden under the dish towels in a kitchen drawer. That is, I assume that my reader (male, female, or other; gay or straight; single or part of a couple) squeezes writing into an ordinary life—one with the usual ties, obligations, interruptions, doubts, and calamities. I can’t tell you how to find room in your life for writing (I think you will have to be mildly selfish), but possibly something in my life, or in what I’ve learned as a writer and teacher, will prove relevant.

I majored in English at Queens College in New York City, to which I commuted by train and bus from my parents’ Brooklyn apartment, and graduated in 1962. I went on to study sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, chiefly poetry, at Harvard. I thought I’d be a scholar and write poems in my spare time, but I wasn’t good at scholarship, and after graduate school I found a job that excited me more than literary scholarship: teaching expository writing in a community college in Connecticut. I was living in New Haven and newly married to a Yale law student. After we finished our degrees, we moved to Modesto, California, where Edward had been offered a job as a legal aid lawyer in a statewide program that served migrant farmworkers and where I taught in another community college. It was the time of the Vietnam War, and sometimes we drove to San Francisco for peace marches. I had a baby and quit teaching to look after him. Through all those years I thought of myself as a writer—a poet—yet I barely wrote. I had scraps of poems but didn’t work on them.

When the baby was four months old, we moved to a tiny house in Sonoma County, under redwood trees, because Edward was now the director of a different office in the same legal aid program. I spent much of the baby’s first year breast-feeding in a stained bathrobe or, having managed to take a shower and dress, walking with him in a Gerry pack on my back. I couldn’t seem to do much besides care for him, not even laundry. The washer and dryer were in our basement, down a long outdoor staircase. I couldn’t leave the baby alone in the house, even asleep, to do laundry, because I wouldn’t hear him from the basement. When he was tiny, I put him into the laundry basket on top of the dirty clothes and carried him down there, but at a year he no longer fit into the basket. I finally realized that if I hired a sitter, I could write in the basement—and even do the laundry. I brought my portable typewriter downstairs.

A young woman came for two hours twice a week, and from the basement I heard my son’s rapid footsteps over my head. Once, I found a dead mouse in the washing machine and wrote about it in a poem. I did do laundry, but mostly I wrote—and, for the first time in years, stopped feeling guilty for not writing every time I had ten free seconds, because I finally had real writing hours. At the public library I found a list of magazines that published poetry, and I sent poems out; one was accepted. The time in the basement changed me. Writing emerged, dominant, undeniable. I thought that from then on I’d be a serious writer, and I have been.

But with a child, Edward and I wanted to live closer to our families. I wanted to live in a city, where I could put the baby into a stroller and take him to a playground, as my mother had taken me years earlier in Brooklyn. We moved back east and returned to New Haven. Edward again worked as a legal aid lawyer, and I still stayed home. After a few months, when my need to write became intense, we joined a cooperative day care center staffed mostly by parents. By now it was the early seventies, the women’s movement was making changes everywhere, and both mothers and fathers were required to work four-hour shifts each week at the center. Our son went to day care for four hours a day, and later his two younger brothers went there as well, so I could write (and, several years later, teach part-time)—a fact that still seems astonishing to me: we put our child into day care though I had earned, so far, $35 from the sale of one poem.

Not that the decision was easy. I was sure people thought I was lazy and self-indulgent: my husband took vacation time every week, and spent it playing with kids and changing diapers at the day care center, so that I could stay home and—of all things—write poems. I had no reason to think I’d be a successful writer. It would take three years to publish another poem, and nine years to publish a book of them. Doubtless people did think I was lazy and self-indulgent. I wasn’t lazy—writing is hard work—but I was self-indulgent. My husband, in turn, was regarded as heroic, and maybe he was. I think he agreed to join the center out of self-defense, because by then it was clear that I wouldn’t be fun to live with if I didn’t have writing time. Also, he liked it. He was a shy father, but in the seventies fathers were suddenly expected to participate. The day care center taught him how. People at home with kids ask me regularly how they can write, and I tell them to take advantage of a nice spouse, if they have one, and if not, to look for another way to be a little selfish.

When our youngest son was a baby, I began writing stories. On the strength of the few poems I’d published by then, I had been assigned a creative writing course in the nearby college where I taught English part-time, and since my students would be writing some fiction, I thought I’d better know something about it. Also, I’d had a dream: I was looking over the clothes in a closet, sliding hangers along, and they were actual dresses I’d worn when I was young. Then I turned, and next to the closet was a woman with no head—an omission that in the dream was not surprising or gruesome. She wore a long red plaid dress, a dress I had never owned. She and I embraced, and I knew that in some sense she was I. I woke up. Later that day, raking autumn leaves, I thought, “The dream means I should write fiction.” Maybe the woman without a head, in a dress I had never worn, was the “I/not I” who narrates stories: the stranger who emerges from the author’s self. Or maybe I was looking for a reason to try a story.

Usually I worked upstairs, but when I sat down to write my first short story—which was about a deaf young man who bakes bread—I put my typewriter on the kitchen table, where the baby was sleeping in a slanting plastic chair. Why he wasn’t in his crib I don’t know; maybe he’d fallen asleep in his chair and it was simplest to leave him there and stay nearby. Or maybe writing fiction required a different view. That story was never published, but I got some encouraging rejections, and anybody in the business knows how important those are.

For seven years after that, in my thirties and early forties, I wrote both poetry and fiction. I eventually published a collection of poems, but never stopped having trouble publishing individual poems in journals. I couldn’t publish fiction—and felt obscurely that it would never be any good until I stopped writing poetry for a time. Finally, in 1983, when I was forty-one, I decided I’d write only poetry in the cold months and only fiction in the warm months. It was spring, and so I wrote fiction first—and it immediately became freer, looser, and more intense. Gradually poetry disappeared—my definition of “the cold months” shortened each year—until finally I no longer had ideas for poems. I had been afraid this would happen, and I minded less than I’d thought I would. Writing is mysterious, and we are stuck with the odd way our particular selves go about it. A couple of years after I began writing fiction exclusively, I began to publish it—first stories, then collections of them, and novels.

Gradually and without knowing what I was up to, I had become a writer of fiction, and writing fiction still dominates my life—a life that (like yours) isn’t spent writing fiction all day every day, or writing anything all day every day. Artists’ colonies like Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony re-create the freedom bestowed in past times on men who wrote, if they had devoted wives, servants, and either money they had inherited or rare commercial appeal. Most of us, most of the time, must earn money in other ways, often while managing households and children. We stop writing for interruptions good and bad—to celebrate or mourn, to go on vacation or to the hospital. A political movement absorbs our attention; a sick relative needs an advocate; a ceiling falls down. A few months after I began writing fiction exclusively half the year, I discovered a gap in the vision of one eye, which turned out to be caused by a genetic ailment. Since then I’ve been unable to read with my right eye: anything I look at directly with that eye disappears. I was too young to expect permanent physical loss, and it scared and troubled me. Decades later my eyes are worse, with several other problems, but I can still read, write, and teach; as I age, I’m no longer shocked to have to work around physical limitations.

I’ve been lucky but also fierce. Selfish. I learned to protect my writing time. But I disagree with those who think writers must protect themselves from everything. I have three children and three grandchildren. I want to spend time with friends and family, to do many other things besides write. But I don’t know a way to be a professional writer without putting writing ahead of other worthy considerations at times—even though we can’t be sure that what we write will be worth reading. It’s a gamble we have to make.

The qualities a writer primarily needs, both you and I—not just in order to sit down on the chair but to produce good work—are emotional as much as intellectual. Often the next task is not to learn a technique but to find the courage to use one you already know. New writers speak of the need to find the courage to write, but once they’ve shown up at an MFA program or a writers’ conference or even just that coffee shop, they may think that the emotional work is done and they can now follow prescribed rules and procedures to make up characters and the rest, if only they can find out what those rules are.

Writers must be at peace with the process, so they trust themselves when they come up with an idea for the next scene—which may well turn out to be wrong, but which may suggest something right. We need the courage to waste time, even though we have so little of it. It takes time to discern what’s obscured in the dark at the back of the mind, but is what the piece needs—but often we won’t have much of an answer if we’re asked if we’ve accomplished anything.

People sometimes ask, skeptically, if it’s really possible to teach someone to write. They seem to think that those who have the impulse ought to be able to figure out the rest on their own—and if they can’t, they’re just not writers. But all the writers I know have learned something essential from some kind of teaching, whether in classes, in informal groups, from reviews, or from books. We learn, if not what to do next, how to start thinking about it. In The Kite and the String, I hope to help you think about your writing, and to approach the task with more confidence, excitement, and hope.