The Writing Life Page 9

  The year before that I discovered Tony Hillerman and read the books until three in the morning for a month. I sent them by Federal Express to a lawyer friend who is part Chickasaw Indian and he was reading them as fast as I was. I was spending the night at his house recently and we began talking about that wonderful six weeks when we read Tony Hillerman instead of sleeping. “It was so good,” I said.

  “I wish we could find some more books that good,” he answered, and we sighed, as though in memory of a great, lost love.

  “Let’s read them again,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s start right now.”

  I took his copy of Coyote Waits and went up to the guest room and got in bed and started reading. A reader doesn’t ask much of the writer but the one thing all readers want is more of a good character. The books don’t all have to live up to the standard of the first one. We just want to know more, as much as the writer will give us. When Larry McMurtry wrote Duane’s Depressed a few years ago, catching us up on the hero of The Last Picture Show and Texasville, I almost sent him flowers. Thank you, thank you, generous writer.

  You create characters by writing about them until you know them. Write down who their great-grandparents were and where they lived and what they did for a living. Tell me what the hero’s mother cooked for dinner and how long she lived and if she yelled at him or indulged him. How many siblings did he have? Where are they now? What did he think about when he was seven, eight, nine, ten? Did he play sports? Did he go to church? What was his favorite food? What did he get for Christmas when he was ten?

  You have to know all of that and so much more. You don’t have to use it, but you have to know it.

  Create characters. Think up something for them to do. Start writing. Tell the story and be sure to make it ring true. Believe in the story your imagination gives you. Stick to it. Don’t worry about what anyone is going to think when they read it. They will never read it unless you want them to.

  How to Become Inspired

  YOU CAN PRIME THE PUMP, which seldom gives very good results. You can need money; this will work but it’s not the absolute best way. You can read great literature and hope you’ll want to write an answer. Or, best of all, you can be inspired by something the world does to you or for you or that you notice. Today I was inspired by something that has never done it for me before. I was inspired to write a short story by reading a review of my Collected Stories that made me laugh out loud three times. I was laughing at my own stuff and at the reviewer’s very funny reaction to it.

  I had forgotten I had written the things she was quoting. They were so silly I couldn’t believe anyone would write them. Where on earth did I get the moxie to write things so absurd and true? Of course it is because I do absurd, compulsive things and I know they are funny when I do them. I do them to make myself laugh and I was probably still laughing when I wrote them down and am still laughing. Carpe diem. I invented the behavior.

  How can such knowledge about my own work help my students? I don’t know. I tell them all the time, “If you think it’s funny, it is funny. If it makes you laugh, it will make the reader laugh. Trust yourself, especially about humor. Humor is the highest art form. Satire, irony, whatever you choose to call it. If you think it’s funny, the reader will too. Don’t second-guess the highest form intelligence takes and for God’s sake, don’t edit it. Trust it, love it, keep it.”

  Here’s how this inspiration began. I was watching a tennis tournament on television. I wasn’t looking for inspiration or thinking about doing any serious writing. At three in the afternoon I decided to go out to the mailbox, telling myself that going to the mailbox was probably not worth the trip. The check a speakers’ agency in New York owes me won’t be there. I will get advertisements of credit, notices of sales at Talbot’s, discount coupons from Pier One, manuscripts I will never read and solicitations from people wanting me to do things they think up that I don’t want to do and won’t do unless they pay me for doing them.

  I got all of the above, no check, and a fat envelope from Little, Brown with reviews of the paperback edition of my Collected Stories.

  I threw all the junk mail away and put the reviews on the dining room table for later. Much later, while I was watching the semifinals of the NASDAQ 100 tennis tournament in Miami, I put the reviews beside my recliner to read during advertisements or times when the match got too tight and I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. That wasn’t going to happen this night anyway because it was Serena Williams against Jennifer Capriati and I didn’t care which one of them won.

  During the first break, when they were still on serve, I picked up the reviews and began reading them. I don’t usually read reviews. I just sort of look them over to see if they are well-intentioned or not.

  I was really reading these, especially the one that later inspired me to write. It was a brilliant, funny piece by a woman named Susan Miller Williams for the Women’s Review of Books at Wellesley College. It was beautifully written and wonderfully funny. I just laughed and laughed and then, a little later, I went to bed and slept like a baby, still basking in the glow of laughing at my own work and being pleased by having been praised by a good writer.

  I got up the next morning and wrote the first seven pages of a funny, outrageous story about a woman my own age who takes a lover, breaking all her vows not to have sex that has to be chemically augmented.

  What does all that mean for someone who wants to know how to become inspired? I think it means you have to be living a life full of other interests besides writing at the same time that you are writing every day whether you are inspired or not. If you are in the habit of writing down your thoughts you will have the basket waiting when the inspiration manna starts falling from heaven.

  There I go again, articulating things I thought could not be articulated.

  My students think they have to travel to remote parts of the world to have material to write about. The male students think they are missing out if they never got to go to a war. I am glad they want to go out and see the world but many great writers never traveled far from where they were born. Shakespeare, Turgenev, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, the list goes on and on.

  At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do. That may be a gift not everyone has.

  Decons

  I HAVE BEEN WATCHING the deconstructionists in the English department and I’ve decided it’s an occupational hazard. They study and teach the same short stories or novels over and over again until they begin to obsess about them. They need to add to them, explain them, pull them apart and carry the pieces around and show them to each other. They have conferences in Lyon, France, and pull apart Eudora Welty’s stories, conferences in Oxford, Mississippi, and sit in panels to dissect Faulkner’s novels.

  They can’t leave it alone. Instead of calling all their fellow Welty lovers together and saying, listen, I’m going to read you something wonderful and reading The Ponder Heart or “The Wide Net” or “A Worn Path” out loud, leaving their listeners full of beauty and mystery and music, they start talking about Uncle Daniel’s dysfunctional family or why Doc lived all alone in the country. Come on. It used to make me mad when I was not near academia and only had to watch this sad silliness from afar. Now it makes me sad because some of the people who are doing it are the nicest, most hardworking people in English departments in universities that I love.

  Every one of them is a frustrated writer who can’t get up the will or whatever it is that lets real writers stay up all night making up stories and poems. They usually are people who wanted to write and gave it up in the face of greater talents. They are good people. They don’t waste the rest of their lives in jealousy. They hook up with some writer or group of writers they like to read and become experts on something that doesn’t need expert help.

  All you need to do is read The Ponder Heart, for God’s sake. All you need to do is read “The Equilibrists” or “Bells for J
ohn Whiteside’s Daughter” or “Directive” or “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”

  If you want to write something go back to your real desire and write a short story or poem of your own. I would like to sentence every deconstructionist I know to write ten short stories, twenty poems, and a novel. By the time they were finished they would know the secret. The work of art is its own true thing. It is finished. It is sealed. It came from the artist but not of the artist. Once it is fully imagined it no longer belongs to the psyche that brought it into being. It exists to witness to the mystery of all human experience. It is a study in existence.

  The good thing about deconstructionism is that it will remain an acquired taste among a few people who come from the set of good people who keep literature alive by teaching it. God bless them every one. Every time I hear them start deconstructing something it reminds me to get out the book and read the real thing. I do that and am healed from whatever wrecking hammer they had put in my brain.

  What next in a finite world? “We’re walking along in the changing time,” as old Doc said in “The Wide Net.” “Everything just before it changes seems to be made of gold.”

  Learning to Teach

  THERE IS NOTHING in the world more satisfying than giving advice and having someone take it. There is nothing that gives me more pleasure than introducing students to pieces of literature that I love, stories and novels and poems that are as much a part of my life as my childhood memories. At Vanderbilt I learned to love Shakespeare. At Millsaps College I was introduced to modern poetry by Doctor George Boyd and to William Faulkner by Eudora Welty.

  How could I live without “Petition” by W. H. Auden? (“Publish each healer that in city lives/Or country houses at the end of drives;/… look shining at/New styles of architecture, a change of heart.”) How could I live without Go Down, Moses? Or The Town, The Hamlet, and The Mansion?

  I feel a “holy hush of ancient sacrifice,” as Wallace Stevens wrote in “Sunday Morning,” when I offer these works of genius to my students. Faulkner speaks to them as he did to me. Many of them are from the rural South. He says to them as he said to me, you are not alone, this is our common heritage, we are driven and beautiful, we plot and fall in love and strive for goodness, we trust our kin and are haunted and sustained by the past, we die and new people take our places in the sun.

  I would like to think that I am teaching but really I am just passing the baton. I give them books to read and every week I have them write for thirty minutes about what they have read. It’s not a test, just an open-book, in-class writing assignment with a list of ideas and questions I give them. They write dazzling answers to the questions. They make moral judgments and chastise themselves for being judgmental, they see their own grandmothers in Ursula Buendia and tell their own family histories in answer to Faulkner’s stories.

  I had worried that reading was going out of style in the United States. I was wrong. Over and over students tell me they “can’t wait to get out of school so I’ll have time to read.” All I am doing is opening some doors. I am dazzled and honored to get to do it.

  The War with the Squirrels

  AT SEVEN THIS MORNING I spoke to my oldest son on the telephone. It has been forty-seven years since they rolled me into an operating room and cut me open and lifted him from my body. Now he is in Copenhagen, Denmark, with his second wife and their three children and I almost never get to see him or hold him in my arms or touch his face and hair. Motherhood is a strange and powerful thing. I grew this man inside my womb and sent him out into the world. He has given me eight grandchildren, immortality for another hundred years. It seems a great gift. I know how to receive gifts. I am good at being grateful.

  I am writing this on a legal pad with a pencil one of my granddaughters brought me from the championships at Wimbledon in the year 2002. She is five years old and is always giving me pencils because she knows I am a writer.

  It is fall. This is the time of year when I play a constant and demanding game with the squirrels who live near my hickory trees. Squirrels are addicted to the smell and taste of hickory nuts. They will pass up shelled pecans to crack open the hard green shells of immature hickory nuts. They like to sharpen their teeth on the shells and as soon as the nuts get scarce they begin to chew on the trim of my house. My house is made of California redwood. They have done thousands of dollars worth of damage to the trim over the years. I have spent another thousand having them trapped and taken away by an old fish-and-game man who is an ace at trapping animals. He takes them off in his truck and turns them loose in the woods near a pecan grove.

  Lately I am trying another, more exciting, less expensive track with my squirrel problem. I go out on my porch five or six times a day and pick up all the hickory nuts near the house and throw them out into the yard to a stand of cherry trees. I am trying to trick the squirrels into thinking that cherry trees are the nirvana of hickory smell and taste, not my house and porch. Sometimes I hire a twelve-year-old Little League pitcher who lives next door to do the throwing. He is able to pitch the nuts all the way to the vacant lot behind my house where there are maple and oak trees. I do not know if any of this is working but it’s a lot of fun to watch John Tucker McCormick throw the nuts so far. I remember when he was inside his mother’s stomach and I was helping choose a name for him.

  Now he is so tall and strong he could probably throw those hickory nuts a mile if he really tried.

  What a wonderful world. I love it here.

  OCTOBER 2003

  What They Write About

  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 learnin
g 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.