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

You’re not sure of the path. You’re not even sure where the next step will take you. When you begin, whisper to yourself: I don’t know.

Getting to Work
    I have written seven books, and still I have to remind myself that this is what I do, this is my vocation, this is what puts food on the table and pays the mortgage. It’s not a hobby, 52
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    or something I spend my days doing for the sheer joy of it.
    It’s not—as some people like to think, as if writers are home crafting cute animals out of Play-Doh— so much fun! If I had a regular job (or what my writer friends and I have long referred to as job-jobs), I’d have a boss. Maybe multiple bosses.
    There would be meetings, conference calls, expectations, a day shaped for me, rather than by me.
    We writers shape our own days. We sit at our desks in our pajamas. We putter around empty houses, watering plants, making stews in the slow cooker, staring out the window, and we call it “working.” We close our doors when our husbands or wives or kids are downstairs watching TV. Shhh! I’m working! And at the same time, often we don’t have anything to show for it. We have no guarantee that what we’re doing will amount to anything resembling art.
    Every day, when I wake up, when my bare feet hit the cold wood of my bedroom floor and I begin the process—
    scrambling the eggs, pouring the juice, packing the sand-wiches, locating sneakers, yelling “bye, drive carefully” as my husband and son head off—I try to remember that to sit down and write is a gift. That if I do not seize this day, it will be lost.
    I think of writers I admire who are no longer living. I’m aware that the simple fact of being here creates a kind of responsibility, even a moral one, to get to work.
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    Dani Shapiro

Audience of One
    Who do we write for? Our friends, enemies, ex-lovers? Our families? The vast reading public? Ourselves? I find that the more people are in my head when I write, the less I am able to accomplish. It can get very busy in there. It can start to feel like a crowded subway during rush hour, no one meeting each other’s eyes, just waiting for the doors to open. So I try to heed the advice of Kurt Vonnegut, who once said that he wrote for an audience of one.
    This audience of one doesn’t have to be a person you know.
    She doesn’t even need to be alive and on the planet. Vonnegut wrote for his sister, who had died years earlier. It’s not about sharing the work, but about creating a connection. The wire that stretches from writer to reader is singular. The writer creates in solitude, and the reader reads in solitude. Each is unknown to the other but, nonetheless, an intimate relationship is forged. We don’t stop in the middle of Madame Bovary and think of all the other readers throughout history who have fallen under its spell, any more than we stop in the midst of lovemaking to think of the lovers who have come before us.
    Our absorption in a great book demands that we think only of 54
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    ourselves and of the author to whom we are, at that moment, bound. We flip to the back inside flap and, if there is a photograph of the author, we examine it for clues. Are his eyes sad?
    Why is she looking away? What’s behind that half-smile? And we imagine—whether consciously or not—that the author has been writing directly to us.
    I write to one specific reader at a time. My audience of one, over the years, has changed. In the beginning, it was my dead father. I longed to reach out to him, through time and space, to have him know the woman I was becoming. Then, sometimes, it was my mother. Each sentence I wrote felt like a plea.
    Please understand me. Later, it became my husband—it still is.
    And now, my audience of one is also my son, in the hopes that someday, he will find his mother in the pages of her books.

Smith Corona
    Behind the closed door to her office, my mother typed. Most nights, I fell asleep to the thunderous clacking of