Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro Read Free Book Online

the ritual, of setting up my practice, I will probably overcome the pull of high fashion, or whatever the day’s distraction happens to be. If I light a fire in the fireplace, then the lavender-scented candle; if I get my music set up and unroll my mat; if I put 49
    Dani Shapiro
    the crystals on the floor that have become part of my routine, then the next thing I know, I’m in a sun salutation, and an hour goes by. I’m in lotus position counting my breath. I haven’t waited to be in the mood. I’ve just gone ahead and done it anyway, because that’s what I’ve been doing for years now.
    It’s the same with writing, which is a practice like any other.
    If I waited to be in the mood to write, I’d barely have a chap-book of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don’t know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it’s the very act that is generative.
    The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it. A runner suits up, stretches, begins to run. An inventor trudges down to his workroom, closing the door behind him. A writer sits in her writing space, setting aside the time to be alone with her work. Is she inspired doing it? Very possibly not. Is she distracted, bored, lonely, in need of stimulation? Oh, absolutely, without a doubt it’s hard to sit there. Who wants to sit there?
    Something nags at the edges of her mind. Should she make soup for dinner tonight? She’s on the verge of jumping up from her chair—in which case all will be lost—but wait. Suddenly she remembers: this is her hour (or two, or three). This is her habit, her job, her discipline. Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plié, elevé, battement tendu . She is practicing, 50
    Still Writing
    because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

Big Ideas
    If you’re sitting down to begin something new, your fingers hovering over the keyboard, or pen poised in your hand like a maestro before a symphony orchestra, if you are thinking: I’m going to write a story about race and class in the American South, told in two voices, and one voice will be in the first person, present tense, and the other will be in the third person, past tense, and I will explore themes of longing and regret, oppression and denial, you’re in trouble. These are ideas. They’re the babbling of a writer in the delusional grip of a fantasy that she is in control.
    I’ve learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I’m doing. I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue—
    of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track. When I think I know what I’m doing—when I have a big idea—I tend to start talking about it. First, I might bring it up to my husband: I’m thinking of writing a novel that moves backward in time . Or, having clipped a newspaper article, I think there’s a good story here about the juror who forced a 51
    Dani Shapiro
    mistrial. Instead of sitting with a thought, I release my tension by blabbing about it. No good will come of this. The point is best made by Frederick Nietzsche: “That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” I keep Nietzsche’s words on an index card tacked to a bulletin board above my desk as a reminder, a warning, that it isn’t usually useful to talk about or to over-think what you haven’t yet written. After all, if we write out of the tension of the unexpressed, where does the tension go once we’ve expressed it?
    Let go of every should or shouldn’t running through your mind when you start. Be willing to stand at the base of a new mountain, and with humility and grace, bow to it. Allow yourself to understand that it’s bigger than you, or anything you can possibly imagine.