At some point last night I had a dream in which I was moving through something—a series of roads or alleys in a city. In the hours before sleep I had watched Scary Movie with my daughter, an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the opening sequence of Ready Player One. My brain was tuned to something like race and chase. In the dream I said to myself, or was told by one of my fellow travelers (who, of course, was still a part of me) that I should know where to go since I had made the maze or laid out the roads or alleys. It was, after all, my dream.
I had gone to sleep reminding myself about an idea I had about a scene I had worked on in the previous week. The scene felt unduly exposition-heavy, which pulled the moment in the novel out of the “vivid and continuous dream” necessary for fiction. I decided to leap over the explanation by allowing the narrator to puncture the narrative—which she has been doing all along. The novel takes place in her head—her memories, thoughts, and concerns as the story progresses. So, when asked how she reached a conclusion, instead of telling how she did it, she dissects the art of conclusion.
I guess I have a few points here. First, whatever you feed yourself image, word, or idea-wise is going to reverberate consciously and unconsciously in your mind. This can be a distraction or a benefit. You don’t always (ever?) know which it will be. Your subconscious will occasionally guide your conscious choices, so be aware of that as well. Call it intuition, call it luck, but know that there is a call.
Second, the same way you sleep every day, diving back into the dream world, replenishing the image and idea bank and recharging your batteries, you should write every day. The sleeping dreams feed the waking dreams and the waking dreams feed the sleeping ones. The cycle and connection are unavoidable, and if you avoid either, you do so at creative peril. Trust the conversation between the waking and sleeping dream; it can keep you from getting stuck or blocked.
And third, even when you tap into that great river of the subconscious, you get to shape what flows out onto the page. While you may feel out of control or at the mercy of forces larger than yourself in any particular moment, you are the author of work. Yes, there are forces beyond your control: the weather for instance. Navigate around bad weather. Shouting at the storm is a particularly ineffective madness.
And storms will come—from outside and from within. You cannot control that. All you can do is decide how you will respond—what you put on the page and that you continue putting something on the page.
Is this true for how you lead your life as well? Perhaps. I know too many writers for whom the page was the only place they found some control that I am reluctant to suggest that we are the authors of our lives. We may be, but it is a far trickier proposition. To extend the storm metaphor: Expect bouts of mal de mer, lightning strikes of varying seriousness, and the occasional drowning. Hope for recovery, repair, and resuscitation, but prepare to proceed retching over the side with torn sails and down a hand or two. Or howl at the wind. Or both. You decide.
And, if you write, while all that is happening, get back to work. Put the inevitable horror into your writing—either spelled out in gruesome detail or couched in metaphor (or both!). We are ready to dream alongside you.
The end of Lent means that I can eat sweets again. Even though I am years removed from my Catholic upbringing, and I don’t recall my parents ever guiding us through some chosen fast during the six-week run-up to Easter (although we did not eat meat on Fridays, enjoying fish sticks and cheese pizza during that time), I try to give up something I enjoy during Lent. My practice is partly an exercise in self-control but also, and perhaps mainly, an extended ritual. I wonder how many rituals I practice.
I used to work for a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and they treated rituals like a kind of smorgasbord (one of these, one of those, absolutely none of those), depending on the season. While I understand being open to possibilities (I often quote Dickinson: “I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose”), that kind of openness can too easily lead to egoism: my belief reflects what I think and feel and want. When egoism is brandished without the perpetual interrogation of the self (What do I want? Why do I want it? And: what are the consequences of my desire?), it tends to become a rather sloppy exercise. We may fall back on Whitman’s handy “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself” (If he can do it, why can’t I?) but without putting in the hard work of loving the contradictory multitudes of the kosmos.
Belief is more like weather. You know that it is there and part of an intricate system, but the weather does not care if you have a picnic scheduled for Saturday afternoon. In fact, the weather does not care; it simply is. Sailing taught me that hard lesson. We would huddle around the satellite radio for the computer-generated voice that told us what was likely to be around us in the nights and days ahead, but short of sailing out of the way of a microburst—sometimes reversing course for hours—we plunged through. Stormy sea, or sun-drenched calm with the motor running to push us out of windless placidity, forward was our only way.
Much of life, the universe, and everything is like that: out of our control and uncaring. Either that casts you into an existential crisis (as it should), or you declare, “Fuck it (choose your exclamation)! I’ll do whatever I want,” or you put on clothes that suit the moment and struggle on. I’m a fan of the struggle. Many of my rituals—you might think of them as routines—engage the struggle. My 5-6 day-a-week workouts are arduous enough to get my heart rate above 170 bpm. My Sundays in the museums set a benchmark for my writing—the art beckons: Beauty and brilliance are possible. Attain this! Even my mornings, jump-starting my brain with some puzzle before driving 30-40 minutes accompanied by music that sets the course for the work day ahead, are parts of my daily ritual.
What is the difference between a ritual and a routine? Perhaps intention. My brain switches to full-on during ritual. I recognize that some who meditate (and meditate as a ritual) do so to quiet their minds. I recall sitting in Quaker Meeting, having left the world at the Meeting House doors, and waiting for that still, strong voice to rekindle my spirit. Some days, it did; many days, it did not. Many days the world clattered too noisily. Many more days, my mind was dropping plates and banging a wooden spoon against a dented pot. I can understand the wisdom in trying to quiet the mind of its desires.
Perhaps I use ritual to find music in the cacophony of life. The external and internal noise blend together to create something like order in the chaos. I write “something like” because part of my writing ritual is to transcribe something that doesn’t simply seem real but mimics the real in all its disorder.
I try not to say this part out loud too much, but as a writer, the whole idea of silencing the mind is antithetical to my craft. I always listen for a voice that is sometimes still and strong, sometimes bumptious, sometimes shrill, sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous, sometimes the voice of two women discussing the responsibilities of sovereignty, sometimes the voice of a horse who charges into the abyss, sometimes the voice of a man contemplating the relationship between light and gravity, and sometimes something like my voice. Ritual helps me set aside voices and noises that make claims on my precious attention. More often than not, those noises are not discordant but precisely organized like steps in a march, and they would regiment my music out of me—even if that music is a march, or a waltz, or some mad scramble on some impossible dance floor, or just the call of birds at dawn.
Ritual does not preclude thought (or my self) so much as it helps me tune out everything that stridently insists: “not your thought, not your self.” Ritual is an exercise of will against everything outside the demands of my work—so that I can listen freely to all the voices; so that I can be distracted into flights of fancy; so that I can (and will) think more deeply, reflect more keenly, and write.
“But, isn’t that just egoism? Aren’t you just doing what you want? And weren’t you just complaining about that?” you ask. And yes, if writing were just a routine, something I did by rote, or just to accumulate something else (appreciation, remuneration), then I would agree. But ritual is also sacred, part of a trumpet call from the unknown, wherever and everywhere that is. To borrow from Kafka: “Ich weiß es nicht,” sagte ich, “nur weg von hier, nur weg von hier. Immerfort weg von hier, nur so kann ich mein Ziel erreichen.” Ritual opens the door back into the unknown world.
After my last post, my friend, Brian Clements, responded:
“Writing is more about limiting the scope of one’s vision, on not-seeing.” This is exactly why I gave up on writing fiction—seeing too many possible directions and being unable to focus on a path. In poetry, leaping around can be more of a virtue.
A quick note, you should read Brian Clements’s poetry, especially his Book of Common Rituals. It does leap, in fact, Brian’s leaping goes a long way back to when Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry was a regular feature of his early Introduction to Creative Writing syllabi.
And here, let me disagree and agree with my friend—and myself. Yes, novel writing is about staying on a path, but like any wonderful walk along a path, the point of the walk is not the gravel, pavement, or dirt under the walker’s feet. We walk to see, to be surprised by the hue of an early autumn petal, or the way the person we walk with traverses a wet rock, or the conversation heard in passing (“Who’s castle was that?” asks the woman with a group of her friends while passing the Smithsonian Castle). Yes, when reading (or writing) a novel we want to follow the lives of the characters, but because the novel should in some way mirror some kind of experience of the world, what makes the reading (and the writing) breathe are the surprises (distractions) along the way.
Today at the National Museum of Asian Art, a screen caught my attention. It was painted by Tawaraya Sōsetsu early in the 17th century—400 years ago. It is a painting (on a screen) of painted fans: 30 or so fans over 6 panels. My initial impression—a painting of paintings (art of and about art) puts it in along line of more recent works (Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings, Marcel DuChamps’ LHOOQ, Matisse’s artist’s studio paintings, an innumerable run of pop art works, works by Carrie Mae Weems and Cindy Sherman, this list is far from exhaustive, feel free to suggest additions). I briefly dove down an attribution rabbit hole (is it “Sōsetsu” as the gallery card reads, or “Sōtatsu” as the website indicates? Has the name been revised as an understanding of transliterations of Japanese has altered? There is research ahead and an email to send). So the distractions and connections are many.
The one that I hold onto, that brings me back to my path, are the duplications and variations, and that both fans and screens, while art, are also useful objects. They exist in distinct categories (or realms)—not only useful and, for want of a better word, useless, but also “art” and “decoration.” Things (or people) that exceed the boundaries of single categories? I’m all in, and I suspect that all the work I produce over the next 20-40 years will hearken back to this. The current work is hitting that hard.
So these screens are a distraction and a reminder. While my book has nothing to do with 17th century Japan, no one in it carries a fan (Could they? Should they?), and no Tawaraya Sōsetsu (or is it “Sōtatsu,” damn, that’s going to bug me until it doesn’t) appears, thwacks me in the head and gets me on something like the path.
Last week I received a post card from this same Brian Clements. It reminded me of another old friend, Ross Martin, an artists who made (and please let it be “makes”) “mail-art” and then “book art” (quick check on Ross, whose friendship I lost in a break-up two decades ago). Brian’s card—prose poem, really—echoes back to many things we shared (Lupos, Nebraska, seriously, Newt Gingrich?) and all the automatic writing leaps that guide and distract us. It’s always both, yes? Surely this won’t be on the path.
But then there is an incantation, magic words that change the course of the characters in the book—some stripped down to their most basic, path-like essence (“Forget” and “Remember”), others more ornate, more specific, and less understandable—as if specificity conferred clarity. I will be sure to hone that incantation as this final revision wraps up, and then will consign the project to someone else’s hands while I get back to the next, applying the lessons I have learned to what follows. I will “move along.”
I started writing poetry in the 10th grade, stopped, then started writing fiction in my final year of college. I got into a writing workshop on the strength of a story about a mine disaster based on fact (there were/are/will be mine collapses) and was inspired by the immediacy and detail of a scene in Conrad’s Lord Jim (a boiler explodes). After college, I tried to write a mystery/thriller novel with Monet’s Haystack paintings as its centerpiece. It didn’t get far. Then I started another about a pair of young men who masqueraded as even younger men so they could be freshmen again and restart the process. No. Then, another about a young man with no memory who happened to be an all-star pitcher. This one also died a quick and quiet death, but the idea of someone without a memory persisted, and 40 years later (after several odd turns) became the spine of the novel I finished.
I will leave out the other fits and starts and hazard to mention that I attended a Ph.D. program in Creative Writing for six years and have published a few stories and poems. My writing life has centered more on frustrating periods of silence than flourishing runs of production. I have written other things along the way—articles, curricula, and this blog—but the impetus (novel, novel, novel) that started me writing was not fully engaged until I set aside other obligations. I am no longer the manager of an Italian dive restaurant in Philadelphia. I am no longer a director of religious education or the principal of a small boys’ school. I am no longer a full-time teacher. I continue to teach part-time but spend the better part of my workday in a well-lit corner of the library chasing pages.
When I was younger, I thought I had plenty of time to figure out my writing and that I would somehow perfect the creative process to get properly tuned into the muse. Many of my teachers focused on quality, brandishing red pens, and working as gatekeepers, and I ate that up. Only one teacher wrote an encouraging “Keep Writing!” at the bottom of every story I delivered to workshop, no matter what other positive or adverse comments he made. Maybe my teachers took for granted that the most significant driver of creativity is not perfection in all its glory but a desire to spend hours every day at the task. And—and this is the hard pill to swallow—the world is not just set against providing anyone with the hours required to do the work; it will also sponge up and divert the emotional and intellectual attention that writing requires.
I acknowledge that some writers get by on an hour borrowed here and there, getting in a solid jag on their off days. Some. I had one—and only one—teacher who advised against attempting to balance writing with a full-time teaching job. He suggested that driving a soda delivery truck would be a better option. And he taught. He recognized how easy it was to get wrapped up in the briar patch of teaching. Even when it is a bed of roses. However, writers, novel writers at least (okay, this particular novel writer; I really can’t speak for anyone else), revel in the unceasing details of life. Even driving a truck full of soda bottles can provide grist for the attention mill. Writing is more about limiting the scope of one’s vision, on not-seeing. One either ignores everything that doesn’t advance the progress of the current project, or the attention-seeking device in the writer’s mind will fly with a preternatural attentiveness to every corner of the room, out the window, and down the street to a vast and varied countryside. Again, yes, some novels venture into the encyclopedic (including some novels I love), but once you lash yourself to the mast of a story, you must learn to pass through the siren songs of everything—anything—else.
As previous posts note, I value distraction. I welcome something (anything?) that nudges ajar the closed doors of perception and lets in the light of inspiration. Except. The distractions I choose are just that: my choice. The inexorable enforced distractions that modern life promulgates, especially those that are delightful, noble, or profitable, will not contribute to the necessary accumulation of pages that a novel requires. Virginia Woolf recommended a room and three guineas as the basis for a creative life; something like that still holds.
In the end, I have become significantly less concerned about the origin arrival of the next idea and whether it is good than with securing time, place, and inspirational distractions. The mind will generate ideas as surely as it produces dreams night after night without prodding or worry. Back to work!
I’m sure it’s happened to you. Someone has told you the right way to do something. It could be something as simple as folding towels and then hanging them up on a towel rack in your bathroom, folding a t-shirt and putting it in a drawer, or wrapping a birthday present. Maybe you offer such advice, although it’s not really advice. It’s a dictum: THE RIGHT WAY. I wonder where people get these ideas, and I suppose, as often as not, they come from parents who explained how to wash a fork or how to tie shoelaces. Someone once watched as I tied my laces and corrected me. “That’s not the right way.”
My parents never offered such advice. After my mother taught me the wrong way to tie my shoes, I became a free-range kid—long before there were such things as free-range kids. My brothers and I roamed through our exurban neighborhood, sent on our way for hours every day with only a momentary return for a PB&J at lunch. When I was eleven, I read the instructions on a box of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza and made pizza dough from scratch on Saturday afternoons. I asked for and received a pizza tin for a birthday. My father set out the chess pieces, and after explaining how the pieces could move, I was on my own. Did I find a book in the school library that offered suggestions? Yes, I did, and then, eventually, beat my father. I learned to tie a bowline knot in Boy Scouts (the rabbit runs around the tree method), and my father didn’t care how I tied it when we sailed on the ocean together, so long as I could do it when the ship was bucking over chop.
I can’t tell you how many things I learned on my own, occasionally seeking guidance. While I took swim lessons, first in the pool of a local family, then at a Red Cross class at a nearby pond, later when I wanted to ascend from the junior varsity to varsity team at my very competitive high school, I turned to Doc Counsilman’s Science of Swimming to work on my breaststroke. My first car was a Volkswagen Beetle, and I owned a copy of John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive and used it to guide me through replacing the clutch; it was more complicated than I imagined. Replacing the McPherson struts was beyond my ken, mainly because I didn’t own something to compress the springs in the suspension. Even with expert advice, I knew when to turn to a professional.
I learned to cook by deciphering recipe instructions in my mother’s worn copy of The Joy of Cooking—the only cookbook she suffered to own. I watched cooking shows on PBS when I was a teenager, and in my early twenties read James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking for fun. When I worked there as a waiter at La Fourchette in Wayne, I asked the head chef how to make a beurre blanc, which I needed to know to make scallops stuffed with pesto in a beurre blanc. I asked about the pesto, too; there was no internet. I learned about pastries from the pastry chef. For one Bastille Day dinner, I replicated his white chocolate mousse recipe, straining raspberry coulis through a well-cleaned lint screen from the dryer in my apartment’s basement. Not the right way, but one of many possible ways.
My early school teachers remain a blur. I remember one who told me my world map looked messy—my crayon blue oceans were too streaky. But there was Mr. Hecht, who asked me to join the math club, and Mrs. Vandergriff, who had us do a lesson in prejudice by segregating the blue-eyed blond students to a single table. We weren’t allowed to use our hall’s water fountains or restrooms. My seventh grade history teacher (Mr. Moore) taught us how to take notes, and I can still organize any lecture into a fairly plastic but organized outline. I made deeper connections with my teachers in high school, in no small part because we ate three meals a day with them; I attended a boarding school. But besides dates and processes (which I loved), I don’t recall learning how-tos. Ryck Walbridge did not walk us through how to work an autoclave; we had one, but how it worked was a lesson beyond us all. Buzz Gardner read Catcher in the Rye from start to finish aloud in class. Neither Dick Broad, Buzz Gardner, Arthur Jackson, nor Alexander Revell taught me how to read more effectively—or “Read Like a Professor,” as Thomas Foster advises. I came to reading on my own.
I was not an early reader. Sure, my mother dropped us off at the Paoli Library while she shopped. My brother and I wandered through the small dark corners, pulling books from shelves, settling on Dr. Seuss’s preposterous rhymes and Richard Scarry’s encyclopedic illustrations. We had few books at home: a multi-volume photographic history of World War II, another multi-volume medical dictionary acquired volume by volume by shopping at the Acme grocery store, and a few Reader’s Digest compilations of abridged novels. I must be misremembering a little because, at some point, the shelves in my 11-year-old bedroom began accumulating books, among them E.B. White’s Stuart Little and the anthology Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves, and a hard cover dictionary. In seventh grade, I met a boy who was reading Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare,and when he was finished, he loaned it to me. Thus began a reading bender that has not ended. I tore through those adventure novels, some early Michael Crichton, all of Vonnegut in paperback (Player Piano through Slaughterhouse Five).
Somewhere in that jungle of pleasure reading, I started to pull books apart. While reading MacLean’s The Way to Dusty Death, finding the title phrase buried in a description deep in the novel delighted me. I was 11 or 12 and began to dig through books looking for interconnected words as if the repetitions would unlock the book. I read books like puzzles. Of course, I never considered that MacLean alluded to Macbeth (I had, at the time, neither read nor watched a play by Shakespeare). Later, my magpie mind would make that connection and a thousand more.
I guess my point is that no one said, “Brian, look for repetitions” as a method for unpacking a novel (or, for that matter, the world). I learned to read, moving from Dick and Jane to The Story of Ferdinand the Bull to “Who Am I This Time?” to Leviathan to The Waves without anyone saying, “This is the right way to read.” Did I stumble along the way? Yes. Even in graduate school, one of my professors marveled at my compendious collection of interlinked parts of Donald Barthleme’s The Dead Father but suggested that I hadn’t stumbled on a reason for that compendium. “This lacks a thesis,” she wrote—as if connection wasn’t the thesis. Sometimes I think that what I believe to be so obvious that it beggars definition. It’s not. I have to be painfully clear.
So, I want to tell you there is no right way; there is only your way.
But.
You will only find your way by working at it. You will need to test your method in several unrelated fields. “But I don’t like math,” you will complain. Or, or, or I don’t like “fill in the blank.” Look, even if you don’t like math, or Latin, or chemistry, you can’t say, “I don’t like trying.” You may be at a loss for knowing what you want to spend the rest of your life trying. The whole point of school is not to teach you some balance of everything. School is here to give you a reasonable amount of exposure to things you would not necessarily consider as avenues for something like success. And—and this will frustrate you—school teaches you that effort—genuine slog through the mud, sweat in the field, freeze on the mountainside effort—has lasting value. You may not remember the Krebs cycle or the quadratic formula, but you will remember the effort.
Let’s suppose you are that rarest of rare birds, “the natural.” What you are a natural at is not baking, auto repair, baseball, drawing, or writing. Naturals have the ability to expend genuinely unfathomable effort in some—usually one—direction over and over again without giving in to the fear of failure. They begin every day and try. The rest of us, the regulars, must learn how to try. “The right way” is just a shortcut—and when replacing a clutch, I’m happy to have that shortcut. Imagine winging a clutch. Good luck.
Even if there is a right way, there is no right way to try. That you have to figure out for yourself. Figure it out. Try. And you will find your way.
I finished a first draft of a novel in the fall of 2019–a smidge past 88,000 words, huzzah! huzzah! I almost immediately began working on the next one. While at this new work, I managed a copywriter-style edit over the next year that swelled the thing by another 5,000 words, but other than adding connective tissue, it hadn’t substantially changed. I kept at the next book but felt a nagging unfinished feeling about the previous one that hindered my progress. Other events conspired (as they often do). An annoying fallow period set in when the twinned butterflies of ideas and scenes clashed until book #2 relented and declared, “Finish the other one and get back to me when you’re ready.”
It took about 15 painful minutes to realize I had arrived at the wrong ending. Actually, 15 glorious, freeing, soaring minutes, but then came the less soaring, freeing, and glorious realization that the hard work of revision waited. “Why not just change the ending?” you might ask. Because no matter how messy a novel is, with its few hundred threads strewn across the living room floor—some leading to the kitchen, some to the garage, and some impossibly outside through the dryer vent (can we not talk about those that lead down the WC, please?)—the line from beginning to end is the single thread that holds the vivid, continuous dream together.
And so, revision. Fortunately, the events will remain (mostly) the same (that much I got right). Still, the permutations of characters and the thickets of motivations they brought with them to, say, a stone wall in Central Asia, changed. And so how characters walked, strode, strolled, marched, limped, ran, trudged, or galloped (one of the characters is a horse) to that wall also changed.
I know exactly why I ended the book as I had—a kind of brutally insistent wish fulfillment. And one of the nice things I realized is that the book had been fighting that resolution at its bones. So now it is throwing flowers at me as I realign characters (Oh, he said that–not her, and she said this instead—head smack—duh!), even though it demands new work and new consideration. I don’t know exactly how it all will come off, but it beckons with a willingness that is at once surprising and exacting. As I fall asleep, the book whispers, “You see this now, yes? So, do it.”
I will share a few of the changes as I proceed. I will try to explain why these changes occurred and what they mean in a general way. If this process only helped me with this one book and not in all the books to follow, what’s the point? We take the lessons as they come; I hope I’m not too obstinate to apply them. Others will surely follow.
There is no guarantee that these changes they will make it through to some “it’s out of my hands now” final draft. But I think much will.
No writer sits down without some darling in mind, whether that darling is a reasonable payday, fame, or a glimpse behind truth’s brocaded curtain. Sometimes the writer doesn’t know at the beginning of their current project what the darling is. They just feel compelled to reenter the swamp—hip deep with words and ideas—and trust that something worth their love and attention arises from the murk.
Then it does.
Whether you rescue your darling from a crocodile’s gnarled teeth or the soul-sucking mud of despair, the writer wades in and declares, “This darling is mine!” Then you fight to the death. Everything else you have written—all those flat sentences and chapters that advanced something like the plot—must go.
Keep your eyes fixed on your darling; that’s why you write, not to serve some “should”—even if it is a self-inflicted “ought.” Save that old draft (it may surprise you later), but carry on in the service of love. Be a hero. Save your darlings.
I pulled the paddle into my lap and raised my gaze from the bow of the canoe to the sky. Insects thrummed from both banks of the river. Over my head, the telltale wings of raptors drifted. The smaller sets of wings belonged to hawks, the larger to the few eagles that patrolled the river. One began to circle—head down, eyes scanning the water, wings in a sturdy glide—one loop then another, as it made its way upriver, as slowly as my canoe drifted downriver. “Does it see me?” I wondered. “Does it care?”
I hadn’t looked up much. I paddled alone; that’s not true. I paddled in a group of sixteen students and five adults. A momentary miscalculation and late invitation made our group oddly numbered, which does not suit traveling in canoes. Yes, of course, one canoe could have set off with three. Still, three in a canoe with a river running low after a summer of less rain (I opened an umbrella once or twice and almost always—and only—during summer afternoon downpours) leads to too much scraping through what would have been more boisterous water. As our party assembled, I suggested that I would paddle solo. There was one slightly smaller canoe. Advice was offered. Off we went.
A very long time ago—almost fifty years now—I was required to solo to pass a course. I remember being in some quiet part of Pickering Creek and rocking the canoe from side to side to watch the ripples cascade against the shore. The instructor chastised me and threatened to withhold certification. What fourteen-year-old boy does not revel in the movement of water, whether caused by throwing rocks as heavy as he could muster from whatever height was possible or watching a leaf float down a dreary current in August? YMCA instructors advocate safety and not exuberance. I passed.
So as I took my seat—the molded plastic bow seat now used as a midstern soloists bench—I began simple “J” strokes, gauging how much my pull would shift the canoe on either side. One of the joys of canoeing with a partner is that you can take full strokes. While it’s not like lifting weights, catching the water and pulling the canoe forward with the strength of one’s arms, shoulders, back, and hips is gratifying. Exertion that has an immediate result is a pleasure. With a partner in the canoe, finding a rhythm and effort that matches and propels the boat forward in a resolutely straight line is like singing in an improvised harmony. Get it right, and it’s beautiful and swift.
I realized quickly that I was slower than the other canoes in the flotilla; I paddled with half the horsepower of the other boats. If the day before my partner and I had led us at a crisp, easy pace, today I would be challenged to keep up with eighteen-year-olds who were quick to fire. If the young like ripples, speed—whether running, swimming, paddling, or (prepare for this) driving—is an intoxication. Fortunately, after the first flurry, effort abates. I played the part of the tortoise and kept at it.
However, when soloing, each stroke contains a moment of counterpoise. Paddle too strongly, and the canoe will veer hard to the right or left, depending on which side of the boat you paddle. Fast in the wrong direction will not do. And so each stroke ends with a curl—the bottom of the “J”—that corrects direction but slows the boat. You are constantly foiling your effort to proceed forward. Think of it as “Yippee! Damn! Yippee! Damn!” I learned quickly that my right-armed strokes were too strong; they needed more “J” and, therefore, more slowing than my left-armed strokes. I am, after all, right-handed—naturally unbalanced.
The whole reason we were on the river was to forge bonds going into senior year. My school gathers the seniors for an overnight trip during which they hike and canoe together. Paddling alone ran counter to the purpose of our journey. Yet, there I was as they pushed ahead. I caught them when they rested, proceeded onward while they snacked, and then greeted them again as they passed me. Again. And again.
I scanned the water ahead and planned and planned and planned, reading and, almost as often, misreading the lay of the river. Paddling alone, I stayed focused on the water because the water was low, and I needed to find a way forward. Too often, I lacked the speed to catch the right course through the rocks that rested just below the surface and scraped to a halt, losing all the advantage of the river’s brief flurry of forward momentum.
The Hound and Hunter, Winlsow Homer
However, keeping my eyes at river level meant that I witnessed turtles sunning themselves on rocks, a family of brown feathered ducks tucked in against the river bank, and once, when I was well ahead, a doe and fawn swimming across the river. At first, it looked like one small brown lump—I thought some small river mammal. I had never seen a deer in the water; the closest thing was a painting by Winslow Homer, The Hound and the Hunter. The deer I saw transforming from a brown lump to a full-bodied animal had no horns. She slowly emerged, an entire brown body of deer, picking its way across the rocks and onto the ledge at the river’s edge. Then the second body, still adorned with a fawn’s spotted coat, followed its mother. They stood by the water, then proceeded through the weeds covering the bank—eschewing a man-made stairway that led from a shed to the water—and into the woods. I was aware that they were aware and that if I had been surrounded by my group, their passage would have been quicker, affording a glimpse at best. Alone, I had moments with them.
Later, when I joined the crowd for lunch, one of the grown-ups recounted all the raptors they had seen along the way. I left the lunchers for a final three miles and put my paddle down, this time looking up. I had not looked up, my attention so much on the water and the passage.
On the final stretch, the wind picked up, and because canoes are keel-less, it pulled arrow-like into the wind, pulling me off the straight line of the river. However, if I paddled on my left side, I discovered that I could lay into my strokes more aggressively. The wind corrected my course without the impediment of the “J.” I began, over otherwise flat water, to make speed. I watch the blade of my paddle cut whirlpools that trailed deep. I watched my arm and hand as they worked lightly with effort. I may be sixty-two, and my knees ache, but movement delights me. I was delighted. Then the wind slackened, and my course went cattywampus. Everything is adjustment.
I arrived at our pick-up spot minutes before the students and teachers arrived. I pulled my canoe onto shore, tipped it over to expel the little water that had trickled into it while I shifted my paddle from side to side, and waited. Not long. One of my fellow grown-ups said, “You’ll sleep well tonight.” Little did he know that what would blanket me wasn’t lingering exhaustion but abundant happiness.
As I write, I realize that I have so much out; brief conversations as students and colleagues paddled around, then by me; a turtle that fell from a branch of a fallen tree; the angle of the sun. More. There is always more. And I acknowledge that there are several metaphors and lessons just below the water, and for once, I will ask you to avoid them as best you can. You won’t miss them all, just as I did not miss all the rock ledges that cut along the bottom of the south fork of the Shenandoah River. This is just about canoeing solo and together and the three and a half hours it took to go from Point A to Point B. Of course, it’s not, but put the paddle in and see where you go.
Okay, I don’t know if this scene will stay or not, but while drafting (and until someone snatches it out of my hands, it is all drafting), I wrote this:
We walked into the sunlight outside. The sidewalk was empty; Willi and Benjamin had already turned at the corner and another corner. Cars crept slowly down the one-way street, pausing at the stop sign and squeezing into city traffic. The waft of a pizza oven turned my nose in another direction, away from lunch with these men.
“Are you ever not paying attention?” Carlo asked. “It’s like you are everywhere else before you realize exactly where you are.”
“Isn’t that how everyone is? You pay attention—”
“Not like you,” he answered. He strode forward quickly. “If we don’t hurry, Benjamin will clean them out.”
Aletheia and the Thieves
My hero, Aletheia, has just managed a draw in a chess match with her mentor, Carlo. They are walking to lunch at the Reading Terminal Market, where they will join their friends. I had just finished writing the scene of the match and was getting them out the door and onto what was next, but I had an appointment to keep and didn’t want to leave the project on a closed note (the match was finished). I like to stop, when I stop, midair. Sometimes I stop mid-scene. Sometimes I stop mid-sentence.
When I want to move on with intent (write this tomorrow), I will end a writing session with a “tell” (as opposed to a “show”). I know the “tell” is not doing the work, and telling invites immediate revision. I set it down even if I have a glimmer of what the “show” will be. Tomorrow calls. Of course, as we know all too well, tomorrow is never guaranteed, but this novel writer must wrap himself in a heavy blanket of hope. More words will come.
This was not always the way.
In his column “The Greatest Life Hacks (For Now),” David Brooks included “The biggest lie we tell ourselves is, “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.” As much as we value multi-tasking, our brains don’t hold onto the gems. We think they will, but they don’t. We are eminently distractible. Something bright and shiny (or dark and jagged) will capture our attention, and flashes of brilliance dull quickly as we fall back into the morass of the already known and easily predictable. Surprise is the enemy of the homeostatic mind.
I carried a journal (hard cover, unlined) with me for years, taking notes about everything: movies, meals, architectural details, people. I accrued notes on pages of yellow, narrow-lined legal pads. Years of art history classes taught me to write quickly and legibly in the dark. I could (years of typing has muddled my handwriting) watch and listen and take notes simultaneously. I wrote everything down.
Yet, for all my writing, I did not have a daily specific writing practice. Even in graduate school, working toward a Ph.D. in Creative Writing (yes, that’s a thing), I wrote to meet deadlines. One short (1500-2000 word) and one long (6000 word) essay in each Literature class. Weekly seminar essays. Scrambling toward workshop slots (sure, I’ll have a story next week). I did not have a body of work to mine for revision. No particular point of view, no overarching theoretical approach, no “story of my life” that I wanted to unfold, refracted in fiction and poetry. I had come from a restaurant job where I worked 60-80 hours a week and had squeezed out enough chapters of a novel to get me into school, but once there, I was on terra incognito.
So I wrote everything down. Most of my work came about because I discovered new ways of writing each time I read something new. And everything was new. I wrote in response to—response through,really—the fiction, poetry, and philosophy I encountered in classes and on my own. I read constantly. My program’s joy (and hazard) was that the writing program was ensconced within an academic department. The creative writers met the exact requirements of our academic classmates: area distribution, exams, translation, and dissertation. In the course of my study, I didn’t just write. I learned about writers and writing, about processes and the vast array of forces that influence process. I took volumes of notes, repeatedly surprised by ideas and approaches, by the workings of minds so different and similar to my own.
Except.
Even though a biography of Dickens, Woolf, or Joyce will point out the peccadillos and triumphs, one thing rarely mentioned is the hours at work. Dickens could write in the company of friends as they gathered before a night out. Later, his study was off-limits to his family; he was not to be disturbed. Woolf wrote fiction in the morning, then focused on essays (or the other way around) after lunch. Yes, there were interruptions. Of course, there were interruptions, but writing became a habit. Are there writers for whom habit is anathema, who wait in a field with their pen held high, waiting for the jagged lightning of inspiration? Sure.
When you establish the habit of writing every day—and putting yourself to work for several hours every day—you never actually stop writing. You may not be typing. You may not be scribbling in your favorite notebook. However, your mind simmers. If you commit to 1500 words a day and stop after two or three or five or six hours, your mind will continue to work. You will not passively wait for pearls (or bakelite beads), so you will not be surprised when they come.
And you will not need to scurry to the pad when lightning strikes. You will be the blaze. Back to work.
We walked into the sunlight outside. The sidewalk was empty; Willi and Benjamin had already turned at the corner and then another corner. Cars drove slowly down the one-way street, pausing at the stop sign and squeezing into city traffic. The waft of a pizza oven turned my nose in another direction, away from lunch with my friends. My head turned toward the smell.
“Who’s driving the green sedan?” Carlo asked.
“A woman,” I shot back. “Was she wearing jewelry?”
“Wait. What?”
“Jewelry. Was she wearing jewelry?”
“Earrings. Something dangling. Not hoops. I think.”
“No, you don’t ‘think.’ You know. What were they?”
“Fish,” I answered, recalling the glint beneath the voluminous red hair pulled back in an unkempt ponytail. “Gold fish hanging head to tail. Probably real gold. The sedan was a Mercedes 300.”
“Good.” Carlo hadn’t stopped walking. He hadn’t even turned toward me while he questioned me.
“Did you see her?” I asked. “No,” he answered. “Why would I? We’re walking to the Market, and I was thinking about the crowds.” He turned his head and glanced at me. “Besides, I knew you would.”
“Is that good?” I slowed down, and Carlo stayed on pace. I caught up to him at the corner. “Should I not pay attention?” The light for the cross traffic turned from green to yellow. I shifted my weight, ready for the walk sign. Carlo raised his arm to stop me when the white “WALK” sign lit up.
“Why are you stopping me?” He nudged me back from the curb and tilted his head to a space beneath a shop awning that was out of the flow of foot traffic.
“Do you want to pay attention?” he asked in front of a store that promised fast copies, faxes, and passport photos.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you look up and down the street and think about what you notice? Do you want to pay attention, or is it just what you do?”
“It just happens.”
“All the time,” he stated without a hint of a question.
“All the time.” A car horn barked at a man who had stepped into the intersection too late. A woman with red fingernails smoothed the back of her dress as she walked past. The man at the fax machine looked up at Carlo and me, and when I met his gaze, he looked away.
“Let’s walk.” Carlo reached out and guided me by the elbow. I felt adrift, like I would collide with everyone else on the sidewalk as he pushed me forward.
“Stop,” I insisted when we were less than halfway down the block. The city—all of it—seemed foreign, as if I had ever been here before. I felt out of breath.
I have spent hours in Gallery 69 at the National Gallery of Art over the past three years. The conversation between the Sargents, the Whistlers, and the Eakins inspires me. The seminal Whistler Painting Symphony in White, a portrait of Joanna Hiffernan, is currently in London, along with other paintings Whistler made with Hiffernan as a model. It will return along with those other paintings in July 2022. However, I have always been drawn to Sargent’s portrait of Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White. My first impression was that she was a bit imperious, and this was highlighted by the painting hanging across the gallery from the wistful, uncertain, and expectant Joanna Hiffernan. Over time, “Daisy’s” exquisite assertiveness won me over.
Ellen Peabody Endicott, 1901, John Singer Sargent
While I noticed that Eakins’ somber men held one wall, that Whistler’s presentation was more idiosyncratic, and that, one way or another, the curators selected Sargents that displayed women as they aged from childhood to sagacity, my attention was drawn to the two women in white.
Or, to put it another way, I missed something. Sargent’s 1901 painting of Ellen Peabody Endicott (Mrs. William Crowninshield Endicott) portrays a prominent “society hostess” from Massachusetts and later Washington DC; her husband served as Secretary of War for President Cleveland. The curator notes the sitter’s “melancholy expression,” which seems to mistake control for sadness. We have a more challenging time recognizing the depth of reserve—that chillier Spartan virtue. We live in warmer times.
We perform emotions with operatic range—if it’s felt, it must be loud. Compliments must be modified with “fucking” as in “fucking excellent!” as if excellent wasn’t already, well, excellent. Sadness unaccompanied by an ugly cry isn’t sad enough. In part, I believe that we have inured ourselves to parsing the ordinary everyday emotional life, and also because we have conflated reserved with sterile, or worse, sad. If we aren’t in the full bursting bloom of performative positivity, we must be bereft.
I was playing Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks, which, besides being blue, is contemplative and revelatory. You may recognize “On the Nature of Daylight,” featured in Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. Frankly, I don’t trust constant revelation and proclamation. The drift from light to dark (and dark to light) puts revelation on a steady simmer. It’s a fleeting experience but perpetual. I think we prefer the experience of Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” and running from the bath to proclaim that he had discerned that the king’s crown was not pure gold (and that he had discovered displacement). At any rate, Richter eschews “Eureka” for a more diaphanous experience of revelation. One of my colleagues passed by and said, “Could you play something happy? That sounds like a funeral.” So much for the slow boil.
Ellen Peabody Endicott may have been melancholy—her husband died in May of 1900, months before she sat for Sargent. She is dressed in black (but that white lace!). Or she may be contained and self-controlled. We don’t have much good to say about control. We celebrate the romantic impulse of the barbaric yawp. YOLO! All in! We seek peak experiences. Maybe I’m overselling. Maybe I’m not taking Mrs. Endicott’s privilege into account; she lived life on the social mountaintop. Peak experience, indeed. She could afford—actually afford—self-control.
As an educator, I engage in discussions about students who lack self-control, but even at the level of “Friedrich lacks self-control,” we acknowledge his authenticity. Chaotic and unrestrained is how and who he is. We also recognize the authenticity of our more controlled students—in their own ways, not in some made to fit a prescribed mold. But we wouldn’t recommend our students forgo individual expression for something more staid. That would seem too controlled as if we were fitting them for muzzles.
Ellen Peabody Endicott’s self-possession would not fit. Perhaps the Southern affect that permeates my school makes monied New England restraint that masks stern and savage conviction seem so foreign. Terse condescending retort contrasts with the snide deference of charm. When some older member of my community says, “Bless your heart,” we all know by the tone exactly which epithetic calumny was meant. And we all know that it was meant. The young play at the clumsier “Let’s go, Brandon!” It’s not that offense was not given by those of Endicott’s ilk, but it was not coded. They played by the dictum that “a gentleman [or lady] never gives offense unintentionally.”
Perhaps I should not call Ellen Peabody Endicott “reserved” as much as “intentional.”
So, what did I miss? What does she teach me? For one, there is a value in being intentional. I tend to get distracted by the beautiful and magnificent. Who doesn’t? Daisy and Joanna would eclipse roomfuls of women. As a writer, I chase the beautiful—the elegant run-on sentence describing the transformation of a Jinn into a pillar of basalt, the frenetic conversation between a group of friends at dinner. But I must also be attentive to intent. I must get the words on the page in as straightforwardly (and, please, as often) as possible.
Are there hazards to chasing beauty? Yes. Are there perils in control? Yes, again. I learn to balance, to somehow manage the dual impulses of wild beauty and patient, controlled effort—what Adrienne Rich called “a wild patience.”
But the real hazard is failing to see what was right there all the time. I recognized the name earlier–Crowninshield is an old New England name that Washington Irving uses as one of the names that the devil harvests in “The Devil and Tom Walker.” I borrowed it for a minor character, even modeling her on the portrait. I hadn’t realized that she was more. She is, and that realization surprised and delighted me.
Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler, 1893, John Singer Sargent
This is the second time I missed a Sargent painting, falling back on the too generic label “mannered society portraiture” that dogs Sargent. Whether the women he painted had the kind of intensity that his portraits reveal, or whether he imbued them with some kind of mannered focus, I cannot tell. I know that not all his portraits share the focused intensity of Ellen Peabody Endicott, Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White, or Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler. The painting of Marie Buloz Pailleron (Madame Édouard Pailleron)) catches a woman mid-scowl. There is more emotional distance between her, the painter, and the audience. The paintings in Gallery 70 also show an artist who will show other markedly less intense attitudes.
Street in Venice, 1882 John Singer Sargent
So, I sharpen my eye and sharpen my pencil (figuratively). There are characters to uncover, and surprises to come. Onward.mm
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