Sit for a While

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

I came home from my writing group feeling jazzed.  After struggling with a story revision, I’d decided to show the group twenty-five pages of new nonfiction. They loved it and told me, “This is what you should be writing.” Questions, too, but in general a big thumbs-up. I wanted to read everyone’s comments, but it was late, and I decided I’d look at the comments in the morning.

I woke early, started oatmeal, prayed, drank a cup of coffee. I pulled out the marked-up pages, placed them on the table.  Then, back in the kitchen, while slicing a banana onto my oatmeal, I thought of a line for the story revision. The narrator needs to do something icky, and I hadn’t figured out quite what. I’d jotted down ideas but hadn’t written any out.  Until I did – forced myself to write, word by word, what made me uneasy – I wouldn’t get anywhere. I’d keep circling, hovering, like a plane in holding pattern over the runway, not yet cleared for landing.

I am my own air-traffic control, I reminded myself. I can clear myself for landing at any time. So, back at the desk, I called up the revision.  I wrote a few words.  OK, time to read what my group wrote.

No.  Stay.  Finish the scene.

Any writer knows the pull of distractions.  Tile grout never looks as fascinating as when it provides relief from a tricky paragraph, a stuck-in-molasses scene.  Who hasn’t stepped away from the desk to scrub the tub or clean out the vegetable drawer in the refrigerator?

In her book Imaginative Writing, which I use in my Craft of Writing class, Janet Burroway quotes Ron Carlson.  Stay in the room.  He’s right, of course, but even within the room we can engage in an internal debate about what is (or should be) calling to us.  What do we call a distraction from one piece of writing to another?   When we’ve got four or five unfinished projects at once, and we zip from one to other — not so much like a plane circling but like a dragonfly alighting on one lily pad after another?

At some point, of course, I have to choose the revision or the nonfiction and stick with it.  Maybe now is just a peripatetic phase, a time when my unconscious – working overtime at the enormity of other changes in my life – needs a break from being harnessed into any one focus.  Or maybe I’m just good at rationalizing a blip in productivity, at edging away from commitment to the page when I’m making a commitment to another person in marriage.

A few months ago, my fiancé and I met after my afternoon class. “Want to sit?” he asked, gesturing toward a bench in the sunshine, near an old oak on the Berkeley campus.

“Sure,” I said, thinking, For a minute.  Then we need to choose a movie, plan our evening, figure out dinner. 

He had in mind a different kind of sitting. Staying, really, for longer than I ever would have done so alone. We watched a feisty terrier disobey his owner. We felt the sun on our skin. I lay with my head on his lap. We held hands. For thirty, forty minutes. Then we got up, walked down Telegraph Avenue past the jewelry vendors, the head shops, the tie-dyed onesies for sale. We went into Moe’s and browsed books, then crossed the street to Caffè Med, where we drank latte and talked about alcoholism, addiction, depression.

Downer? Not at all.  Sitting on the bench and strolling down Telegraph Avenue opened into confidences, intimacy, discovery.  We’d have found our way around to the topic at some point, sure, but for me the takeaway lesson came in staying in the moment.

And that morning with the story revision and the comments dueling for my attention?  I kept writing the scene, every few moments glancing over at the pile of marked-up manuscripts from the previous night’s group.  Had sneaking time away from what I’d intended to do freed me up in the revision?  Or had I just woken with a good idea whose time was ripe?  I want to know the answer because I want to find the magic trick.

When really, I’ve known it all along.  It may not be magic, but it usually works.  Stay put.  Sit for a while.  Follow the hunch.

Just as soon as I call the caterer.

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Lucky Thirteen?

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

I just came home from an eight-grade graduation, that of the oldest daughter of one of my best friends.  Caroline is a poised thirteen-year-old, funny and wry and down-to-earth, studious and good-humored.  She presents light years away from how I remember feeling at her age – awkward, self-conscious, exposed.  Every moment of adolescence, as I recall it, seemed a moment of skin-crawling exposure to harsh and glaring light.  A photo, taken of my mother and me on the day of my middle-school graduation, captures this perfectly.  I’m wearing a Gunne Sax peasant dress with bell sleeves, my hair straight and straw-like, my face red from some skin treatment I’d been rubbing on in hopes of removing every blemish before the big day.  I’m squinting into the sun, smiling.  It’s a small smile, an awkward smile, a please-get-this-over-with smile.  Everything about the picture screams to me how much I wanted to hide, to get in the shade, to escape attention.  My mother, next to me in early-70s batik (complete with headscarf), looks relaxed, even drowsy.  (And no, it wasn’t from what you might suspect given the era and the batik.)  She, at forty-three that day, was comfortable in her skin; I, at thirteen, was decidedly not.

Mary Pipher and Carol Gilligan and many others have written about adolescent girls, about what happens between age eight or nine and high school.  Formerly confident, funny, quirky, good-at-math girls become what they think society wants them to be – quiet, deferential, reserved, not getting better grades than the boys.  All too often, girls pack their real selves away while they go on a journey of self-discovery.

I’m not here to further that discussion.  Not that it doesn’t interest me, but it’s been done.  No, I’m writing this because I can’t stop thinking about something Caroline’s school priest said during his remarks at the graduation.  He spoke in the context of the gospel reading, in which Jesus leaves disciples with the message to love one another.  You don’t have to be Christian to take to heart the message of the integrity within each of us.  We tell stories, the priest said, and we listen to them.  What matters is which stories we choose to tell and hear.  As much as we can, he told this morning’s graduates, we need to choose the stories that allow us to be our best selves.  The stories in which we’ve acted out of love and caring and generosity of spirit.  The stories in which we’ve felt most alive.

I wish I’d heard that message at age thirteen.  I had the support and praise of my parents and teachers, but, like many of the girls Gilligan and Pipher write about, I had gone underground by then.  I thought it was cool to be aloof and dispassionate, so I tucked my enthusiasms away – so far away it took time to find them again.  The girl who once wrote plays and directed (rather bossily, as I recall) her classmates in acting them out, who shared her make-believe with any grown-up within earshot, who didn’t particularly care what people thought, had become shy and full of insecurity.  I still wrote, but I hid what I wrote, and I tried to make my stories conform to what I thought was cool.  Having a boyfriend, or Chunky platforms, or the right lip gloss.  It took almost twenty years for me to find the real stories, those that had lurked quietly in storage all along.

Even before attending Caroline’s graduation this morning, I’d been thinking about adolescence.  I’ve hit a block in my writing life, and there’s nothing like writer’s block to bring on the uncomfortable feeling of being under the spotlight.  But you know what?  In some way, much as I chafe at it, I need that awkwardness, that exposure.

I’m not under any illusions that Caroline – or any of her classmates – has sailed through without a gawky moment.  I still feel uncomfortable sometimes – who doesn’t?  I still tell myself the negative stories, listen to the harsh voice, fall sway to the critic and judge – just as Caroline and her classmates will.  But I’ll always remember what I heard this morning.  Almost thirty years later than I’d like to have heard it, but you know what?  I was still listening.

 

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Sounds of Silence

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

A little over a year ago, I picked up A Book of Silence.  The title intrigued me, as did the premise: writer Sara Maitland traveled into silence of the most extreme kind.  She leased a remote cottage on the isle of Skye and lived there alone.  In the tradition of the early desert fathers, she traveled into the Sinai desert to sit in solitude for days (and a few nights).  She forced herself alone into scary dark forests.  She found moments of fear and anxiety as well as great joy and elation.  She encountered a kind of porousness of self that opened her up to the world around her.

As I read the book, I found myself more and more intrigued.  Her solitary life sounded so pure, peaceful, quiet, contemplative.   And yet…

Alone with my thoughts:  how glorious!  Alone with my thoughts:  what a nightmare!  And never mind that I’m nowhere near ready to take off alone for the wilderness.  I get nervous on Mt Tam when I lose sight of the trail I’m supposed to follow.  I’ve experienced the rich restorative wellspring of meditative silence, and I’ve had centering prayer lead me faster and faster on the hamster wheel of anxiety.

Right about now, though, perfect silence sounds glorious.  Maybe it’s because, new to social media, I’ve felt so inundated with coding, widgets, jpg uploading and who has (or hasn’t) Friended me, that I’d love to hop on the express train to the Sinai right about now.  My desk is covered in piles, and I’m stuck on a story revision that doesn’t want to budge.  I wear noise-canceling headphones and turn off the phone, but this is nothing like the silence Maitland writes about, the silence that blurs boundaries and brings her an exhilarating sense of porousness.

But here’s the thing:  As Mailtand tells it, the further she dropped into “the permeable self” available in silence, the less she wrote.  She’d sought out silence, in part, as a way to write more fiction.  But once in it, she didn’t write a word.

So often, we create what we think will be the ideal conditions for the muse, and the muse goes elsewhere.  What then?  Once, on a four-week residency at Ragdale, I brought along a draft of my novel.  I read it through, made notes, and stared out the window.  The words, while far from perfect, felt impenetrable, stuck in cement.  The thing didn’t want revising.  I despaired. I drank too much coffee.  I lusted after the guy in the studio next door.  Then, I wrote a poem about my lust and a short story based on “How to Write” aphorisms.  Things like “Show, Don’t Tell” and “If a gun hangs on the wall in Act I, it must go off by Act III.”  The story took off, the poem stayed in a file, the residency was salvaged, the novel stayed broken.

Maitland took a different tack.  In best Romantic tradition, she searched for silence that would “sharpen memory and lead to stories.” This silence wouldn’t be about letting go of the self but about finding and expressing the self in a more authentic way, about individual experience and emotional authenticity. This Wordsworthian notion of self would never have occurred to the earliest desert fathers, who sought not self but God.

Maitland’s linkage of “the strictly boundaried self” – a post-Enlightenment notion – with the creative process struck me.  Yes, story-making involves expressing the self.  But story-making also, at its most exciting, has lifted me out of self.  We tell stories to make emotional sense of our lives. But our stories can hold us back, too.  Writing demands other points of view, demands empathy, demands a narrator with some emotional distance on her own life.

How we get there may be as different, as individual, as the kinds of silence available to us.  Maybe the best thing I can do is go for a hike on Tam today, think about my characters.  But first, let me get this post up.

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Our Books, Our Selves?

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

A few years ago, after giving a reading, I invited questions. My friend Bonnie raised her hand. “You’re so private,” she said. “But you write so personally! You’re so open in your book!” She smiled, her voice affectionate, and yet in her question I heard astonishment and a twinge of hurt, as though I’d confided more in the blank page than I had in her.

And I had.

As a child, I found in writing not so much a friendly audience – which posited the Other – as a welcome reprieve from the Other. We lived in a neighborhood of kids and dogs, tricycles and backyards, and I loved to stay indoors, in my room, making up my own worlds. The integrity of those worlds – their very existence – depended on my being alone. Sure, I played make-believe with others, my best friend and I devising elaborate stories that we’d “send” to one another by leaving each installment in the roots of a tree across from her house. Sharing brought fun and often praise, but also danger and betrayal. Connection, sure, but connection fraught with risk.

Over time, friendships – such as Bonnie’s – provided safe havens more than obstacle courses, but my tendency to hold back remained, often hurting those I love. And even though my work was getting published, and thereby read by the Other, I continued to find freedom and even imperative in writing down what I couldn’t say – even to people I’d known for thirty years. So, when Bonnie read my book, she could read only a few pages at a time.

“It’s too intense,” she said. “Emotionally, it’s hard for me to read.”

Reading about my losses, I knew, reminded her of her own. But that wasn’t all. Bonnie knew, for example, of my battle with depression – she’d witnessed it – but she hadn’t known until she read my book that for days I didn’t go into my kitchen because I was afraid of the knives.

Over the years, I’ve dated men who’ve read my work. One fellow asked me, over tacos, how Dylan was doing, and I almost choked on my guacamole. How did he know my nephew’s name?  He’d read my book. The rest of the date, I avoided eye contact, creeped out that he knew intimate details of my life when I couldn’t even pronounce his last name.

With others, I felt a kind of greasy, exhibitionist pleasure in knowing they’d read my words, followed the logic of my syntax, witnessed the drama of my past. I got to reveal without having to do any revealing – the book did it for me.

When I fell in love with my fiancé, I handed him a copy.  He thanked me, and put it aside. “I want to read it, but I want to get to know you first, through you.”

A week or two later, a mutual friend asked him, “So, have you read her book?”

Later that night, as he reported this to me, I nodded. Then I saw from his face that he and I had interpreted the question differently. To me, it seemed natural, even innocuous. To him, it felt more loaded, suggestive – as though our mutual friend were hinting at deep, dark secrets buried in the pages. Don’t get too serious until you’ve read that book.  The friend’s question, like Bonnie’s comment at the bookstore, implied the ways in which my book revealed more than I did.

“I’m nervous to read it,” he admitted. I knew why: the details of a past relationship, passionate but doomed.

“That’s only one chapter,” I said, and added, not very reassuringly, “there’s nothing in there you don’t know about.”  I decided to unmask the bogeyman. I read aloud the first chapter. “It’s really good,” he said, and we turned off the light.  Weeks turned to months, and the book sat untouched by the bed. One day, I realized that I’d made a surprising discovery: I no longer needed him to read my book.

The taco guy had helped me to see that someone’s having read my words doesn’t mean he knows me. And it tells me nothing about him. Sure, the book reveals a lot – but with my fiancé, I’ve done that myself, the old-fashioned way, step by step, just as he has revealed himself to me.  Much more intimate, much riskier.

And now that we’re getting married, I’ve put the book back on his bedside pile.

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My good friend Jane

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

We all have friends like her.  You know the ones.  Months, years go by, and when you see them again, it’s as if no time has passed.  Kim, whom I met thirteen years ago at a writers’ colony.  Sarah, with whom I used to work in New York City.  Jane, who never ages.

Maybe you know Jane, too.  She lives inside well-worn pages, and recently, again on the screen.  She’s strong and gentle, direct and candid.  She’s the kind of woman you treasure as a friend, the kind of woman you want to be.  She overcame a brutal childhood and enormous disappointment in love, but when she found her happy ending, you felt not cheated by a Hollywood ending or envious or incredulous but bone-deep contentment.

I met Jane Eyre on a Maui beach when I was fourteen.  A family vacation.  My brother body-surfed and skateboarded; my parents sat on the beach for an hour or two, then went inside to play cribbage and make lunch.  I stayed on the beach all day with a tube of Bain de Soleil and a book, checking my watch every 15 minutes to turn on the towel and ensure an even tan.

I read an early Danielle Steele novel that week – I think it was called The Promise – and Jane Eyre.  That combination, right there, tells you a lot about who I was at fourteen (and perhaps who I still am).  Drawn to romance, both high-brow and low-, Gothic and mass-market; trying to figure out how to be in the world.  Not just as Lindsey the person but as Lindsey the woman my body was turning me into.  Tanning in a bikini had something to do with fitting in, as did reading a popular novel.  But my sensibility had always leaned more to windswept moors than to sunny beaches, more to feeling on the fringes than to fitting in, so I’d brought along Jane Eyre too.

The basic story in each book is the same: Poor girl meets wealthy guy.  They fall in love.  Complications ensue, due to guy’s family.  They are separated.  They continue in love. They find their way back to each other.  A template for romantic daydreams, for fantasies of love conquering obstacles, for happy-ever-after.

On the beach that week, I finished off the Steele in a few hours, skimming for sex scenes (of which there weren’t nearly enough), and felt let-down by the happy ending.  The fantasy was fulfilled, but it felt foreign from my own sense of the possible.  However even my tan, I’d never be gorgeous like Steele’s heroine.  And then I turned to Jane.

“Do you think that because I am poor, and plain, I am soulless and heartless?”

Her question comes toward the end of chapter 23, but Jane’s been standing up for herself since page 1.  That week at the beach, she gave me a new way of seeing the possible.  (And no sex scenes necessary.)  Romantic, dramatic, pushed to narrative extreme, yes – but what lofty glory in the speech she makes to Rochester, so full of passion and longing and truth!  She gets her man not by her physical attributes but by her soul, her being, her integrity. When they are separated, it’s not by a manipulative mother-in-law-to-be (as in Steele’s plot), but by human flaw, human fallibility, human weakness.

It breaks her heart, but Jane leaves her man.  She has to.  She lives a less full life, but not an empty one.  She’s lonely but intact.  So when she does go back to him, and finds him blind as a consequence of the afore-mentioned human weakness, she is still Jane.  That’s one reason, I think, the ending feels so right and earned and, despite the Gothic plot, real.

And when I closed the book, one day on the beach many years ago, and every time since, she still is.

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