I used to go to therapy once a week in a building full of therapists. I’d sardine into a tight elevator with other people going to see their therapists and we’d pardon ourselves quietly as we squeezed past each other into long hallways of locked doors. After my therapist opened her door with her half-smile—I was usually late—I sat down on a futon couch apologizing. She wore expensive dark jeans and high boots and exquisite button-down shirts and had so much dark wavy hair flowing down over her shoulders. I was sure that she had more information than me. My plan was to describe a certain decision I’d been struggling with for years, and then sneakily find out what she would do, without having to work through any childhood trauma or anything, and also without her realizing how much more she knew than I did. Easier said than done. Mostly she asked me questions and I’d just freeze. At the end of our second or third session, she asked, “Why don’t you trust yourself?” During my long, awkward silence, she reached down beside her for a 5-Hour Energy drink and without interrupting the compassionate patience and interest she always projected, she opened it and knocked it back and returned the empty bottle to the floor beside her. It took me years, long after I stopped going to that building, to answer that question for myself.

I sat down today to write: how do we learn to trust ourselves as writers?

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I started out with myself (who else?). Andy and I wrote a textbook proposal for a publisher who requested it, and when they turned it down, our advisor said, “It’s a good proposal; you should go out with it.” So we did. This was before email. Before we knew it we had two publishers bidding on it and I was handling the back and forth with advice from my trade agent that didn’t make any sense to follow (something about sealed bids, I think), because this was a textbook not a real book. By the end, the initial bid had tripled, and the editor I declined said to me, “There is something wrong with you,” and slammed down the phone in my ear.

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The core labor of my writing life is the process of coaxing characters into the world of my fiction. It’s a process analogous to a portrait painter working for that crucial moment, as Paul Klee described it, where the free inspiration of the artist must yield to the demands of the thing coming into being: now she looks at me. Edward Snow, in his study of Vermeer, talks of The Girl with the Pearl Earring as capturing its subject at exactly this instant.

In fiction, this is the moment a character becomes alive enough to play her part in telling the story. Imagine Fitzgerald working while waiting patiently for Gatsby, until he appears in that rare smile that “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

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Monday morning, make the lists; divide them by church and state, by job: bookselling, bookmaking, bookteaching. Start with the list for bookselling because it is made of tasks that can be completed, instead of ethereal images, snips of song, effluvia, menu items, instead of Mandy’s problem with POV, Ben’s novel outline he sent you though you did not ask for it. Even though the list for the bookstore is made of tasks that can be completed, add so many of them (order 7 Year Pens, order LePens, order pens from the photos you took from that stationery shop in Asheville where the pens were German and beautiful and still cheap enough you bought one) that the list will lap into next week. Find last week’s list that has lapped into this week and copy it over anew.

This week the fall cookbooks will get their table. The distributed frontlist from Penguin Random House will be ordered. This week there will be enough copies of Coleen Hoover in stock, even as you don’t know how high that number could go. Find your copy of Publisher’s Weekly where you see how many copies each book on the New York Times bestseller list has sold; add up her sales across her five novels. Open your calculator, estimate her royalties. Per week, she earns more than your house is worth. Not what you bought it for five years ago when you sold your last novel; what it’s worth now. There’s no way to care about this, and that is a good lesson to learn.

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Scene 1

During the early days of the pandemic, while we were all glued to our screens, theatre ended. The option of going places was replaced by the necessity of staying put. Attending a play requires a pilgrimage while writing a play (like all writing) requires sitzfleisch: sitting, staying in place. It’s a discipline to cultivate: to sit. If you stay in the same place long enough, notebook in hand, or hand poised over keyboard, you are creating the necessary conditions. However, for a play- wright (not a TV writer or screenwriter, not in the same way), staying put is only the initial part of the experience. The form itself necessitates the involvement

of other people, not only the actors, designers, director, and producers. A play requires a living, breathing audience of listeners, in the same place at the same time, breathing the same possibly noxious air. Your audience needs to make that pilgrimage and then to practice sitzfleisch.

Scene 2

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1.

At the end of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Transcendental Etude” a woman walks away from the argument and jargon in a room to sit alone in a kitchen turning in her lap/bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps. It is a kind of creating that isn’t about virtuosity, but care for the many-lived, unending/forms in which she finds herself. Whenever I steal away to sift through some materials and write I think of this woman. Vision begins to happen in such a life. It’s funny—she’s not even real. She’s fictional, speculative: as if a woman quietly walked away… But she’s there in the kitchen before me; I join her.

2.

The other night someone was explaining to me again that all great writing is done alone, alone, alone, and I thought of a lot of people but especially Ernest Hemingway, because of the new documentary. Hemingway who could not write without a wife, or take a wife without asking her to leave her career out of it, and cut her hair a certain way, and be there in the living room at the end of every writing day to read the tales of combat and bullfights and solitary heroism and encourage him.

3.

I get up and make my bed, because Ada told me once that things go better if you always make your bed. In the shower, I wash up with peppermint castile soap and moisturize with a certain sesame body oil, because two decades ago my first girlfriend did. Now Nicole has the sesame oil in every shower in her house, because of someone she’s never met, by way of me. When I was first learning to write, Nicole and Stephanie and Dawn read all the drafts sometimes many times. Now they don’t always but I still write as if, for them. If there’s a room with a door these days it’s lent by one of them or Emily & Cooper or Svetlana or Trish. The woman from the end of the poem is already there. I sit down to write. Oh, I think, I am so alone.

4.

Self-implication on the page is the holy grail of memoir and the personal essay. As Vivian Gornick puts it, in these forms, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. The inward-turning reflective movements of a musing and/or recollecting mind—even when we don’t explicitly stage the “I” on the page, it’s there in the shaping of scenes and stories out of the raw materials of life, since they didn’t occur as materials at all, just as life. Only when we can see our own frightened or cowardly or self-deceived part, Gornick says, will we be able to create the equivalent, in creative nonfiction, of plot and character development. When it is true, it can be a way the craft trains us to become more honest, more trustworthy, on and even off the page. But another way to put this would be: to stage the I on the page, in a way that moves, you have to become a we, or reckon with how multiple you were already.[1]

5.

It can long solitudes to get to self-implication. Legend has it the man often called the inventor of the essay, and even the first modern man, wrote his first sentences about escaping the city to solitude, to examine himself and his own experience. For two decades, Montaigne would draw his own portrait with his pen. His sentences were long and leisurely, winding and doubling back, his essays full, no detail of his experience left unknown or unreflected on. The slavery of the court is how he described what he’d gotten away from to do it, there in the family castle.[2]

Therefore one of my teachers emphasized we must forget about others when we write, withdraw, that the paradox of the essay and memoir is that the more particular you can get about the details of your own experience, the more narrowly focused, the more universal it will be. A lot of teachers say that.

Who has the time? Across an ocean, two centuries later, Frederick Douglas would begin a memoir by naming the absences of his childhood, the things he wasn’t allowed to know, like the date of his birth, or who his father was. “The white children,” was one of his opening sentences, “could tell their ages.” The sentences short and declarative, the stories compressed and full of blanks.[3]

These are the lineages. Who gets to write like the details speak to all of our lives? Who does the hard labor of representing some group? You don’t write “I” without whispering or shouting a “we” ever, it was the problem and matrix of the essay and the memoir all along. You don’t get freedom from these questions, especially if you feel like you have it.

6.

In the early days of this plague, I heard people who must have been aware of hospitals and medical workers and cashiers and prisons and housing crises and refugee camps say, zooming from their living rooms, now that we all have to stay home.

Though some, finding themselves at home, alone or not, stopped for a while. The old I-we formula under pressure, cracking. The failure of single stories to hold the differentiations in sufferings, and new awarenesses of why and how. Growing to hold the scale of it. But too much argument in the room to think. And the possibility of new virtual solidarities.

7.

Aurora taught me another way: root where your love meets your rage. That’s not what you gently respectfully try to eventually show. That’s where you begin.

8.

The news runs up your screens now shaped into the old story about apocalypse—there’s the separation of people into good and bad, a colossal showdown coming. The argument and jargon in the room tell you stories of crisis designed to get you to imagine the catastrophe’s coming from the future, the fault of those on the other side. The design of the shape of the story is to keep you numb and clicking, and to keep secrets. You stand on postapocalyptic lands, though, and what hurts and kills is sometimes spectacular but more often importantly boring and slow and complicated and unexpressed by the stories you’ve become addicted to, and so much of what we do live for is not as spectacular as heaven. Though we can see some of the secrets, if we walk away from the argument and jargon in the room. Which details of the lives we share with others are the truths left out of the stories of catastrophe? When you walk away from the argument, sit down, and look at your materials, it is not just you there. It’s not your own fascination that tells you what really matters, but attention to your we’s.

9.

Like a lot of people I love the clothing of the designer Harris Reed. They take tulle and satin and suiting, feathers and hoops, and create suits that are dresses and pants that ruffle and float and bell-bottom out extravagantly, blouses both ancient and futuristic, and hats like giant halos to saint those for whom nothing is ever only one thing or another. In design school, when teachers asked who they could possibly be planning to sell to, Reed remembers saying, I hope I don’t know who my customer is, because they shouldn’t exist yet.[4] A way to imagine readers, in the end, as possibility.

[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374528584

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i

[3] https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html

[4] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/27/harris-reeds-gender-fluid-fashion

When I first started working as a ghostwriter, people (and by people I mean only writers) often asked me what it was like or how it was different from writing fiction for… And they often would struggle to finish that sentence. “Myself?” I asked.

I generally told them I didn’t know the answer to that question. Other than writing fiction and the occasional magazine piece, I never wrote academic papers or otherwise put down my views or thoughts about anything important. I never wrote letters to the editor, had a blog, or published a column under my own name. Before I became a ghostwriter, the only part of myself I put into my writing, other than trying to make it as good as I could, was whatever I was trying to unearth about my own experience by camouflaging it through my fiction. I didn’t feel as if I were expressing my own emotions or philosophy directly, but rather funneling it through characters to be absorbed eventually by strangers.

When I started ghostwriting I was lucky—my ‘principal’ had been published so intensely that any subject I was given upon which to write in his voice had a built-in head start. I could immerse myself in his existing ouvre, such as it was, and emerge fairly easily, pen in hand, and work my way through a first draft. My principal would then take a pass, and after a couple rounds it would be finished. I knew my limitations early when my own expressions would come back crossed out and—in most cases—improved, generally by simplifying the language and emphasizing how it might sound aloud.

As I got a bit more adept, these kinds of edits dwindled but they never disappeared. And partly I was pleased by that, as I felt as though anything that came out under a person’s name should bear the marks of that person’s attention, even if fleeting. I tried in some cases to intentionally leave out scenes or anecdotes that I knew the principal would want to include, and was further pleased when I’d see them scrawled in the margins, and more often than not in a way that I would have done differently.

But what I think the writers were asking me during those times I mentioned earlier was something along the lines of, ‘what do you give up when you write as someone else?’ What essential core ego-driven virgin creative spark is muffled when you take your own name off a piece of writing and put someone else’s name on it (provided you’re not just ghosting yourself)? And I think if someone were to ask me that in such a direct way, I’d answer, “very little,” which is the truth—but only my truth, I should point out. I can’t say, at least without hypnosis, perhaps, if the creative process is any different than it might be if I were writing the same piece under my own name. I suspect it’s not.

There is, however, a narrow scenario under which the above doesn’t apply. Once, when I was in my twenties and about to leave my job as a carpenter to study writing in an MFA program, a dear friend asked me if her brother could use a short story of mine, one I didn’t really like or never meant to do anything with, as a submission in a college writing class. Not for publication, but just to get credit for the class, as he wasn’t able to write anything himself. I was outwardly polite, but inwardly aghast. Who would do such a thing? And how could I let something I wrote go out under someone else’s name, even if only a professor or a few bored undergraduates would read it? I certainly did have several dead stories lying around at that time, so it wouldn’t have mattered to my output. But I, again politely, said no.

And I think I would say no today if I were asked to ghostwrite a serious piece of fiction (I’ve worked on thrillers, and those don’t count). I’m a slow, easily distracted, but very personal fiction writer, and there isn’t a story I’ve written that didn’t take something out of me to put into words. If I haven’t personally made every mistake my fictional characters do on the page, I’ve contemplated it, or been in some other way complicit. That’s what it means to write like me, and I wouldn’t consider (nor would I think myself capable) of doing it as someone else. Luckily, nobody has ever asked me to write a story or novel about whatever I wanted, then let them publish it under their name, and I doubt the situation will ever present itself. But I have an answer ready if it does.

THE SUMMER I WAS 19, I lived in Manhattan for the first time in my life. I worked two jobs as I aspired to write my first plays. I was a bellhop at a mid- town hotel and a waiter in a restaurant around the corner.  My weekend shifts at the hotel had me working sixteen hours straight and then going directly to the restaurant at 8 Monday morning. So one day a week I worked 24 hours straight. You’re 19.  You’ll sleep when you’re dead, right?  Plus you figure you might have a story to tell 50 years later. But something better happened on one of those Monday mornings. 34th Street and Broadway is one of the busiest corners in the world. I stopped for a second outside Macy’s, struck by the surge of humanity rising up out of the subway station. It was like a human lava flow.  I found myself focused on their faces.  They were angry. Discouraged. Resigned, Numb. It was the first hour of the first day of the workweek and THAT was already how they felt.

Something clicked in my brain. It was my Scarlet O’Hara moment: –“As God is my witness I’ll never go hungry again?” I vowed to myself I would do everything possible to go through my life doing what made me happy for as long as I could. What made me happy was making people laugh.  Annoying people.  Surprising them.  Maybe challenging a belief or two.  In short…BEING A WRITER. In that moment I made my commitment, despite my untested, unproven abilities, to devote my life to discovering who the writer would be that I might become. Maybe I’d be a child prodigy.  Maybe I’d be the voice of my generation.

There is a huge difference, between writing purely for one’s own pleasure and writing as a profession. Your work becomes a commodity.  People who might pay for your wares consider in the same way a venture capitalist considers a small business proposal.  How do you negotiate the inherent conflict between contributing to the body of literature versus contributing to the Gross National Product?  Do you envision your writing life as your source of adult survival? Or as a respite from your source of adult survival?

I have to ask myself if I had known at the age of twenty, when I made the decision to commit my life to being a writer, that I would not become the voice of  my generation, that my best screenplay would be optioned for twenty successive years by production entities that including two Academy Award winning producers and three film studios but that it would never be made; that it would be included in a book of the Ten Best Unproduced Screenplays in Hollywood but the book would never come out, that I had made a decent living but would not be in the memorium they play at the Oscars, that I would be writing this account from the Hollywood Home for the Nearly Known?  If I had known all that, would I have gone to the trouble?

The answer came to me during a New Year’s Day party at the home of my mentor, Leonard Stern, (who wrote The Honeymooners and Mad Libs) and his wife Gloria. As a waiter I had served drinks to Leonard Bernstein and Bobby Kennedy, had my butt patted by Tennessee Williams, made Ethel Merman laugh so hard she spit out a mouthful of double vodka and diet 7-up. I had been tipped ten dollars for a cup of coffee by Maurice Chevalier, inadvertently short-changed James Earl Jones, and seen a stage and screen star known for her wholesomeness perform a sex act under a table, but on this day I had my first close celebrity encounter without wearing a side towel.

I happened to have been closest to the front door when the bell rang.  George Burns was still a kid at the time, a mere 86 years old. He had just played Oh, God in the movie. He was small and fragile. But there was an actual aura emanating from him. He glowed with a perfect acceptance of everything that was life. After the initial buzz of greetings wore down, I intercepted him as he crossed the room. “George,” I said, “Everyone here says they love you. But I… love you.” He grinned at me and kissed me on the cheek. He asked what I did and I said I was a writer. I braced for him to ask the question that everyone asks writers–what had I written that he had heard of ?  That was not his question. In his sweet gravelly voice he said, “Tell me kid, do you love what you do?”

Nobody had ever asked me that before.

“Yeah,” I said, when I realized that I did. “I do.”

“That’s good,” he said. He patted me on the shoulder, and leaving a sweet comet tail of cigar smoke in his wake, he headed across the room toward several attractive women.

1. Don’t write what you know. Start with what you don’t know, what you don’t understand. Pay attention to what compels you, what bothers and truly fascinates you.

2. Start to write about specific people. They live in a specific place at a specific time. You don’t think about those initial questions any more. You are semi-blind as you go forward. The world of the book takes you over. You write scenes and dialogue and descriptions. You learn how people talk, what diction they use, the cadence of their voices. When you watch something, you notice what they would notice. You surrender to it. You lead a double life, a triple life. Years go by. Words accumulate.

3. You read what you are writing, and you start to connect things. You notice repetitions that surprise you, mysterious recursions and variations on words, ideas, objects. The density excites you; what these connections mean unnerves you. You waver—this isn’t the novel you thought you were writing. You wanted to write a different book. What’s worse is that you know you are not even succeeding at writing this book that you don’t want to write. You ignore yourself. You keep going. How? You go back to the specific time, place, people, language. The more specific it is, the more fearless you are in engaging its odd eccentricity, the more purchase it has on what we understand and recognize as true in our own very different lives. The writer has to trust that we are all strange in our own way, but we remain recognizable humans. The closer you look at something, the more complicated it becomes. You settle for just getting the complication down, framing it, being brave about it. But now it is becoming more difficult. You must remember everything you have written, and you have less and less freedom.

4. The specificity you are attempting extends to the structure and to the sentences. (For example, you notice that for photographs the convention is that we use the present tense; this is called the ongoing present. What does it mean that we write about photos, movies, and stories in the “ongoing present”? Do these things enable us to escape was-ness? Can they really enact an is-ness that is ongoing? Should you invent a new tense? Does the language we apply to memory work? Can you really write about not remembering? Can the language describe it or are there just terms for the indescribable that we agree on? And, hey, what’s with all these qualifiers? Why does she qualify her life? At this point you may find yourself curled in a little heap on the floor. Even the words “an” and “the” seem strange to you.) Somehow, despite your doubts, despite your belief that you are inadequate to the task, you keep going.

5. You become a structural engineer; you make sure that whatever you have put into motion has some logic, some internal order to it. You are cold, ruthless, pedantic even. Particularly if you have deviated at all from invisible mainstream realism, you have to make sure there is legibility, a consistency in your deviations. If you expect the reader to work it out, there has to be an “it” there.

6. Finally, the last phase: you resist. You resist explaining it all away. You resist making the structure too neat or schematic. You resist cleverness and easiness and sentimentality, but mostly you resist the temptation to take out the difficult parts, the weird things that make you feel really uncomfortable and fill you with dread. Those are the best parts! Your novel is troubled and deeply flawed, but it is what it is and don’t mess it up. Stop.

It’s evening and I’m packing for an early morning flight to New York City. Tomorrow I’ll join a large reading focusing on love and hope (something I need more than ever these days), then I’ll host a reading celebrating the work of the writer Rigoberto Gonzalez. I’m used to travel. I can even say I like it. Though, packing always stresses me out. I never know what to wear or what to bring. But I manage to do it because, well, because I have to. Somehow I have to pack, wake up before dawn, and get to where I’m going, and so I do it. This isn’t that unlike writing. It’s hard and you never feel like you’re getting it right, or doing it with finesse, but if you want to get somewhere, you do it anyway. You have to.

When I tell people I’m a writer—a poet at that—they often think of me tucked away in Emily Dickinson’s yellow house strenuously working on putting words together as if my life depended on it. But the truth is, almost 50% of my life is on the road. And because of that I’ve learned to write on the road and I learn to change the way I think of my time. It used to be that I thought of only the time I spend typing on the page as my writing time, now I think it’s all of it. Writing is all of this life. If I’m doing laundry, raking leaves, getting the car fixed, working on a deadline for magazines, or making an avocado sandwich, I’m still writing.

That’s not to say that it’s as important as putting the work in, bowing down to the desk and cranking out drafts, but life is still part of this art. Sometimes I think the travel actually helps with my writing, because I’m constantly allowing myself to be off-kilter, see a new view on the world, a new town, a different plane window. The contemporary writer today is a writer that’s on the move and multitasking. But, even though, all I want to do sometimes is write for hours in my green pajamas and read on the couch until I fall asleep, the travel keeps me engaged with the fact that all of these words serve a purpose. They are connected with real people outside of the walls of my brain and body.

I admit to craving a hermit life and my down time is often spent in glorious isolation eating pistachios, reading and writing, and going a little mad. But the readings and performances and gatherings mean something. Especially now, when the world feels so fractured and brutal, there’s something kind of spectacular about a group of people gathering to hear words, to be changed by them, to want to connect to something outside of themselves. On the road, in cities and small towns around the world, I get the honor of meeting people who aren’t writers, but readers. They come out to hear work and stay to chat not because they’re looking for writing advice, but because they love and buy books like others order and obsess over Netflix movies.

I guess what I saying is, sometimes it’s good to leave the house. Even when life feels really hard and the world feels like it’s something hostile and unwelcoming, it’s good to pack up your things, bring a book for the plane, maybe write a poem on a Delta Airlines cocktail napkin, and go somewhere where people are celebrating words. It’s part of the job as a writer. We get pack what we can on to the page and then pack ourselves into the world.