Tag: Rules

Posted on by Shelley

I’m beginning to see (after thirty years) that learning how to write is like learning how to put your baby to sleep, or keep your marriage happy, something that can’t be accomplished by following rules, even though the rules calm us down and help us stay in the maelstrom.

Let’s stay with that baby. People become rabid on the topic of how to get the baby to sleep, largely because it’s the first unpredicted moment of parenting– this force of nature, drilling itself relentlessly into the quiet hours of your night, depriving you of peace daily, hourly, until you are bleary and bloodshot and possibly psychotic, and you begin to understand that you are going to have to do this same thing for eighteen years unless you get the baby under control. So you read the books, and the books say, warningly, never touch the baby, or it will never learn to stop crying. Or: sleep with the baby, or it will grow up socially impaired. Or: whatever you do, don’t give the baby mixed messages, because then it will cry and be socially impaired. Each book layers a thin skin of hope over a cold kernel of certainty: you will not be able to follow any of these instructions. You are one big walking mixed message, a mixed message billboard. Your baby is going to grow up demanding, psychotic and omnipotent, while you go slowly insane. One day during this dark period of my life I read, like a voice in the wilderness, a person who said, here’s our rule: chef’s surprise. What we do with our baby on any given night depends on our mood, the baby’s mood, and how things go. In other words, there are no rules. There are ways. And you can try all of them without fear.

This is also true for writing. One day you will think, this is the best way, and the next day it will fail. Or, you might be like Trollope and wake up every single day for the rest of your life and do the same thing, without wavering, like one of those self-winding watches. When I first started writing I interviewed two famous writers because I was so desperate to figure out how it worked. I wasn’t interested in story, or metaphor, or character. I wanted to know, literally, what writers do every day. What kind of clothes you wear, where you sit, how you pay your bills and what happens when your mother calls asking you to meet the UPS guy at her house because you don’t have a job. They gave me two completely different answers. Lanford Wilson chased butterflies around his lush garden, ate pints of ice cream for dinner and wrote plays in wild twenty-day stretches. Richard Nelson woke up, put on a suit and tie, left his apartment and came back in after buying a cup of coffee on the corner, as if he were going to an office. You need to find your way. Try not to be intimidated by the guy who chases butterflies, if that’s not your thing, and don’t put on a suit if it drains you of hope. Some of the ways are pretty straightforward: nothing will happen if you don’t make words on a regular basis. Maybe a gush of words several times a year, or daily words, maybe ten words or ten thousand. The only truth is, if you never write, nothing can happen. Try to write words. And you should probably read some words that other people have written.

People who give advice make life appear pristine: march steadily from the imagined outcome to the successful outcome. So I imagine a pristine solution: write every day for three hours without fail. Then I fail. And then, mercifully, somebody says “people always say they write every day, but nobody does.” I try to remind myself: do my best.

Posted on by Shelley

What Rules Of Writing scare me today?

You can’t write without joy.

You will never succeed if you don’t believe you’ll succeed.

If you want the universe to help you, you have to tell the universe you have already gotten the help you need.

You will never write well if writing feels like a chore.

You can’t start writing until you know what you want to say.

You need to outline.

Outlining will kill the book.

Which makes me wonder why so few people say this:

You have a story. Write, and you will find it.

Posted on by Shelley

I have this new chair. Actually, it’s an old chair I just had reupholstered for the third time in twenty five years, hoping I will finally like it. At the moment, people in my family are treating its new incarnation with restraint— it’s fine. I might not have chosen it. Not for me. The pattern seemed ordained when I saw it—a bold choice, a choice for life. Wearing it, my chair would declare itself: I have imagination, I have a sense of humor, I will not hide from the world, I refuse to be polite. Now that it’s in my house, I consider it, cringing—is it too loud? Will people think it’s weird?

When Kathe was five, she fell in love with a lavishly patterned gold coat. My mother, who had taken Kathe on the shopping trip, fought with her in the dressing room. That is a horrible coat. I won’t buy it for you. It makes you look like trash. Kathe dug in. She loved the coat. But the fight undid them both. Kathe, eyes watering, my mother resolute. Kathe had never heard such words before– you look like trash. We gave her the coat for her birthday, but it hung in her closet until she outgrew it, never worn.

I worry about my chair—do you look like trash? Will people disapprove of your exuberance, be offended by your noisy swirls? I creep around it, afraid I have made a terrible mistake, one I will have to live with for the next ten years. And then I remember Austin Kleon, who says, in a hundred different ways, don’t be ashamed of who you are. Put the book down if you don’t like it. Borrow from artists you admire, walk away from work that drains you. Two quotes in his latest newsletter, from Borges and another writer, both saying that you should only read what you love, and set aside the rest. Because we don’t have much time.

Two nights ago, the night before this exuberant, unapologetic chair arrived, I flopped into bed, script finished, and told Danny I love telling stories. I don’t really care about making art, or leaving a legacy. I just want to entertain people. I deeply admire writers who make art. And I often get confused by that admiration, think I should have loftier ambitions.

Maybe I need to climb into my joyful, ugly chair, and write.

Posted on by Shelley

I read A Room of One’s Own, and it was incredibly comforting. Woolf talked about how the psychology of women and the history of women and the social and political place of women in our culture works against becoming a writer. Even though she wrote it 85 years ago and the circumstances of women have improved, I was comforted. Because I saw, in her descriptions, my own vacillations, and hesitations, and built-in sense of failure. Who am I to write something? What in the world do I have to say? Why should anybody listen to me?

Her friendly, brilliant, funny mind, cutting to the quick of the horror without becoming dramatic, or lugubrious, or enraged, just deftly laying it out, reminding us of Shakespeare’s sister, and the Beadle who keeps you off the grass and locks the library doors, with an anthropologist’s detached fascination, a humorist’s eye for irony, so you can bear to read it, you feel almost uplifted by it: of course men can write, because they are in a warm study, eating pudding and drinking port, while we chew tough prunes and drink cheap wine.

Woolf said no wonder women haven’t written. Maybe in a hundred years we will have women writers, because women will have gotten permission to do lots of things– vote, have money, run their own business, get divorced. As she predicted, the subjugation of women has been coming to an end, and more women are writing. But still. There are no men in mother’s groups. Men don’t volunteer at school. And the women who work successfully sometimes seem like mutations, unexpectedly full of themselves, unexpectedly driven, or self-absorbed, or focused. They are different from most women, who still, in spite of everything, do the shopping and make dinner and keep track of doctor’s appointments and socks, choose no work at all but instead volunteer, or wait to work, half-time, when the kids are in school.

Success breeds enthusiasm, and practice breeds success. That is the feedback loop, the mysterious spinning top that, once you hop on, just keeps turning: you work, you have success, success makes you feel energetic and enthusiastic, so you work, which brings success, which makes you feel energetic and enthusiastic. The secret question: how do you get that top spinning? When you are a boy, men run along beside you, helping you build momentum, giving you a push, encouragement. Institutions do it if your father or your uncle won’t, schools and banks and professional sports teams; history will inspire you, or the newspaper, filled with men building things, making and changing rules. For a girl, even today, after so much time, those influences are not robust. Maybe your mother stayed home, and her life was spent organizing the kitchen cabinets. She can say, you are such a hard worker, I saw your movie, I’m so impressed, but she can’t tell you how to do it, and she’s a little baffled, even bored, by your struggle. She has other engagements. She has dinner to cook, laundry, she wants to play bridge. And the institutions– well, so much history still belongs to men and so many books, so when you write what that you think about they say, “that’s a kitchen play,” or a “kitchen poem,” which is to say, not serious. Muddled. Parochial. Private. You can fuck the professor, and grade his papers, but you don’t get invited to his poker parties, and nobody sits you down and says look, if you want to be a writer, here’s how to do it. You yourself are paralyzed by politeness, wanting to be nice. You linger at the door, waiting for an opportunity to sit down and talk, waiting for somebody to invite you in. All that time they spent playing the piano, or playing soccer, you spent getting tan, painting yourself with baby oil and lying on the hot grass out back, buying the dress (blue with rhinestone straps, and silver shoes to match) that you would write the poem about, the poem about the boy who broke up with you, the poem that won a prize, one year before the Harvard professor told you that you wrote kitchen poems and kept you out of his class.

Woolf says the whole world of women is different, the things we value, the way we talk to each other, the way we think and what we think about. So it’s not as simple as having the Beadle unlock the library and stepping inside, sitting down at the table and joining the conversation. What we find there will seem alien, both because we have been raised in the kitchen, and because our thinking about the world is different. Either because of our genes, or because of the things we learned in the kitchen, taking care of children and men.