I have been getting better at letting there be silence in my day. At waiting, when I can’t think of what to say, or I can’t muster the will to do it. I haven’t ever really learned how to moodle, how to just sit there until some silverfish of an idea flickers by, get still enough that all the silverfish come out, and hold my breath, and watch them, and see what shapes they make. My unhelpful voice says what if no fish ever come out? Isn’t that lazy? Isn’t that an incredible waste of time? You need to prove your commitment to writing by making words. But maybe, something that I haven’t really thought of before, maybe writing is both an effort and a not effort. Maybe there is waiting, and poking around, and wondering, and then working really fast, and hard, for a concentrated time.
John Updike observes that everybody, even the most prolific poet he knows, considers being blocked as a regular part of the cycle of writing. Somebody else said they can only write for two or three hours when they are incubating ideas. Even Stephen King said he always has two stories going– one of them his real project, which he does in the morning, and the other one his “toy train”, which he fiddles with in the afternoon, trying to see if it will ever become something he wants to commit to.
More recently I try not to hurry myself, to let myself be patient, to cultivate the silence out of which some idea might slip, silver fish, and hover long enough for me to notice it.
What am I scared of. Everything, it seems, but especially starting. And the deadline, having to get it done in a certain amount of time. And competition, the idea that there are writers everywhere, working for the same goals, writers with better confidence, long claws, and talent. My own hesitation scares me, the fact that I linger so long at the door, afraid to go in, that by the time I make up my mind the party is over, everyone has gone home.
Finally saw Cinderella—a predictable, paint-by-numbers story, but, far worse, an annihilating message for girls. When the movie ended, the whole theater cheered. I couldn’t understand why women weren’t gathered outside, waving protest posters. My friend said it was about time somebody made a movie that celebrates old-fashioned values. She managed my anger politely, as if I had incontinence. Offering a way out, she suggested that perhaps I disliked the movie because I’m a writer, and I could see the hidden ways the story doesn’t work. But it did work, I wanted to say. The audience cheered.
My friend wondered what could be wrong with liking Cinderella. In the current version, Cinderella is courageous and kind. I’m still trying to answer that question: what is wrong with liking it? I don’t want to write about Cinderella, because I don’t want to stir the embers of my unhappiness, not unless I find an argument that slams the movie back into its seat and shuts it up, the way AO Scott can silence a bad movie with one of his perfect reviews: yes, that’s right, that’s what’s wrong.
We all want love, girls and boys. The most powerful human drives are love and work, connection and purpose. We are moved by stories about identity, like Rocky, and Chariots of Fire, and the Fugitive, stories of mastery and competence and achievement. We are also moved by love stories—Maurice, My Beautiful Laundrette, Kiss of the Spiderwoman—stories where two souls meet and become more than the sum of their parts.
Maybe the problem is that some books and movies offer love (to girls) as a substitute for identity, and/or as if it can forge identity. Which is like foot-binding. In boy movies– Imitation Game, Guardians of the Galaxy— love is a by-product. You learn how to slay the dragon, which might as a by-product make you attractive to some young woman, but your goal is to save the universe. In girl movies the goal is the guy. And the best way to get the guy, it turns out, is to be pretty and kind.
When my daughter says, “I shouldn’t have asked him out, I should have waited until he asked me, because if he were actually interested he would have asked,” I want to scream. Never mind the fact that we’re not talking about a soccer game, or an essay she’s trying to write. If you teach yourself to wait, you set yourself up for a lifetime of waiting. Girls wait. Boys choose. That’s what’s wrong with Cinderella: the story can’t begin until the prince settles his gaze.
When I say Cinderella is bad for girls, people look at me with suspicion, tinged with hostility. Are you saying you want Cinderella to be mean? As if those are the only two alternatives: meek or mean. If Cinderella were a boy, she would organize those mice into a squadron. They’d make a mouse tower and pick the lock, slip down to the stepmother’s room and tie her hair to the bedposts. Then Cinder, boy, would roar down the stairs with ash on his face like war paint, head into the kingdom and free every person chained to a pot in the kitchen. He would raise an army and overthrow the king, who has too much power in the first place.
I read Barbara Kingsolver, a book she has written with her family about living off the land, moving to a farm where she and her family plan to eat only what they can carry away from the field for a year. I am shocked by her beautiful language. I hold my breath, reading about drought starved saguaro cactuses, prickly and thin as runway models, amazed at how adroitly she turns her phrases, how easily she sweeps the page with poetry, as if it were nothing, like watching a portrait artist sketch her model, making, with two quick indifferent strokes, a whole person, and then getting on to her real work, her hard work, which is finding the person’s soul. Meanwhile, I am agape. Did you just do that? Did you just flick your wrist and a whole person was suddenly there on the canvas?
For Barbara Kingsolver, the poetry is not the point, the point is the point, and poetry is something she uses to get there. Kingsolver must enjoy the poetry, but she’s busy trying to get her message across, trying to find her meaning, trying to wrestle with her big question: what does it mean to live close to the land, how do we change when we don’t do it?