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Tag Archives: Dani Shapiro

On Creative Writing and Curated Wisdom, Part II

30 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Writing Life

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Dani Shapiro, Fine Arts Work Center, memoir, writing

CuratedWisdomIn August, I traveled to Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the very tip of Cape Cod, to attend a fiction and memoir workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center with my literary idol, Dani Shapiro. It was an intense week of work, discovery, and joy, a week in which I learned many new things and relearned a few others, not the least of which is the importance of keeping a writing journal.

Shapiro, like the most insightful physician you’ve ever encountered, honed in on our individual manuscripts, but only after each of us chimed in with our notes and comments, questions and praise. She always went last, offering keen observations from her vast experience as a writer and teacher, and reading choice excerpts—carefully chosen to apply to the work at hand—from her small notebook, what she calls her book of “curated wisdom.” For example:

Read the rest of this essay on Boomeon …

…and read Part I here.

 

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Yes, I’m Still Writing—and You Can Read Me on Boomeon

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Writing Life

≈ 2 Comments

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Boomeon, Dani Shapiro, memoir, writing

BE-BloggerBadgeI’m pleased to announce that I’m contributing to a nifty website for Baby Boomers, Midlifers, People-of-a-Certain-Age, what have you. Boomeon is a new-ish online community for Baby Boomers and beyond. The site’s marketing director, Natalie Dewhirst, says that Boomeon wanted to create a supportive and safe environment where people can be student and teacher, author and reader, adventurer and observer. Boomeon has created a new section on creativity, and I’m thrilled to write the inaugural essay.

“On Creative Writing and Curated Wisdom” was inspired by my recent stay in Provincetown, where I took a workshop with novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro. Part II of the essay will appear on Boomeon in a couple of weeks. If you want to be sure not to miss it, please visit my profile page and click “Follow” at the bottom.

I hope to see you there! And I’ll still check in here from time to time, although (as you might have noticed) I’m blogging less and writing more. That book’s not going to write itself, now is it?

As always, thank you for your support…and for reading me!

Dani Shapiro's wonderful book, Still Writing, is always near my side.

Dani Shapiro’s wonderful book, Still Writing (far left on my shelf), is always close at hand.

 

 

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Where I’ve Been … Where I’m Going

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Writing Life, Transitions, Travel

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Creative writing, Dani Shapiro, fiction, writing communities

Cleveland Clinic photo by Marci Rich
Cleveland Clinic photo by Marci Rich
The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Mass. Sarah Hersey photo.
The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Mass. Sarah Hersey photo.

It’s been too long, readers. Far too long. And for that I apologize. I never intended to take such an extended hiatus. But life has a way of telling you that things aren’t as they should be. For the past 10 months, Life-With-a-Capital L has literally shoved me down and sat on top of me in an attempt to get my attention. (And I can say literally with complete impunity, because I fell in November, broke a bone in my foot, and it was the end of March before I was in a full and upright position.)

Turns out there was a reason for the delicacy of my metatarsal. I had primary hyperparathyroid disease, rendering me hypercalcemic. Lots of medical jargon, I know. Let me put it more simply: my excellent endocrine surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic removed two-and-one-half of my parathyroid glands during an operation on July 2 because there were tumors on them. (Thankfully, they were benign.) When bad things happen to good parathyroids, all hell breaks loose. Think of those tiny, rice-shaped glands as the traffic cops for the calcium in your body. When they break bad, they blow their little traffic-cop whistles to tell your system it needs more calcium, resulting in a widespread evacuation from your bones and a flood in your bloodstream, wreaking widespread havoc.

The extraordinary result of my surgery was evident in about a week. I soon had more energy than I knew what to do with. My aches and pains subsided. I could sit at my desk and concentrate, which is a good thing, because a writing deadline loomed. Which brings me to where I’m going.

MorgueFile Image

MorgueFile Image

When Life Hands You Lemons, Write.
I began writing in earnest while stuck in bed with my fracture, which seems like an excellent use of my situation. I started what I thought would be a memoir, but at some point during the process my reliable instincts told me that what I was really doing was writing fiction. I was also reading Dani Shapiro’s beautiful and wise memoir about the creative process, Still Writing, at the time. My instincts, like Life, had shoved me down (without breaking anything) and sat on top of me to get my attention. I listened, and then checked to see whether I could find a space in one of her workshops.

Shapiro’s fiction and memoir workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, was the one that I wanted—”Transforming Chaos into Art.” The class was full. I was first on the wait-list.

And then, in March, I got the phone call I was hoping for: a spot opened up for me. I was in! I secured my registration and located a place to stay. And then, in May, I discovered how sick I really was.

For weeks I worried about whether I’d be well enough to travel, and whether I’d have the energy to do the writing I needed to do.

And so, the surgery. And hence, during my recovery, the writing.

You can see why I wasn’t blogging.

I still won’t post as frequently as you’ve become accustomed to, but I hope you’ll understand that I’ve taken on a whale of a project, and I need to keep working away at my manuscript. I will check in when I can.

I leave early Saturday morning for Boston. A bus will take me to Hyannis, where a good friend will pick me up and take me to her home in Harwich for a visit. The next morning, she’ll drive me to Provincetown, at the very tip of Cape Cod. That will be my home for a week. And there, at the beautiful Fine Arts Work Center, I’ll be sitting in a classroom for the first time in 23 years.

Given where I’ve been, I’m looking forward to where I’m going.

 

 

 

 

 

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My Turn as Station Agent on the “My Writing Process” Blog Tour

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Writing Life

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

blogging, creative process, Dani Shapiro, George Saunders, Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, Oberlin College, writing

MorgueFile Image

MorgueFile Image

When we writers aren’t writing, you can often find us thinking (and reading, and … okay, writing) about the writing process. The craft of writing is one that, at least for me, inspires endless and usually pleasurable study. We are, after all, self-reflective creatures; it makes sense that we think about how and why we do what we do—as long as it’s not at the expense of actually working on whatever writing project has embraced us. So when Stephanie Friedman, program director of the Writer’s Studio program at the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies at the University of Chicago, invited me to hitch my car onto the “My Writing Process” whistle-stop blog tour train, I couldn’t say no. Stephanie and I were English majors together at Oberlin, and I’ve long admired her thinking and her writing. Besides, the exercise gives me a chance to further develop my thoughts about the creative process, and how it intertwines with my own work. If you aren’t familiar with Stephanie’s blog, “The Winding Stitch,” it’s well worth a visit. I encourage you to stop over there when you have a chance.

In addition to asking me questions about my writing process, Stephanie asked me to select three writers to carry on this blog tour’s tradition. At the end of my post, I’ll introduce you to the astonishingly gifted young adult novelist—and my good friend— A.B. Westrick; the diversely talented novelist and book critic Ellen Boyers Kwatnoski; and the intrepid and sage blogger and writing coach Jane Gassner.

These are the aspects of writing Stephanie has asked me to explore:

1. What am I working on?

I tend to plead the Margaret Atwood Fifth Amendment on this question, believing, as Atwood does (and here I paraphrase), that to talk too much about one’s writing while in the midst of it is bad luck—like naming your gods. But I don’t think it gives too much away to tell you that since starting The Midlife Second Wife (after spending two decades at a career that had me writing all day, although not for my own purposes) I’ve rediscovered my love for story telling and for creative expression. Besides which, the older I get the more I’m aware that my time here is finite. I have stories to tell, and I feel an urgency to tell them before it’s too late. So in addition to writing this blog, I’ve begun working on a memoir. There. I’ve said it. No mirrors cracked, so I think I’m okay.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I love that Stephanie answered this question by bringing George Saunders into the conversation: “Originality in art means settling into who you actually are.”

Think about that for a moment: settling into who you actually are. Think about the demands of that statement. Here are just a few of them:

  • to acknowledge painful truths;
  • to reflect back what the mirror sees, faithfully;
  • to accept that you are who you are—as a person, as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, as a friend, as a writer, and to accept that you have unique limitations, gifts, and dreams;
  • to respect those gifts and dreams, and to strive, in the most honest way possible, to dig with your bare hands against the rough surface of those limitations until—scratched and raw and possibly bleeding—you discover something that looks like a vein of gold; and
  • to do this repeatedly every time you sit down to write.

So, applying Saunders’ dictum to the memoir genre, the answer is pretty straightforward: my work differs from the work of other memoirists because each life is unique. My work is exactly that: my work. There are as many different memoirs out there as there are coffee blends—the aroma and flavor of each is like no other. In the case of fiction, which I expect to be writing at some point, I have to turn again to Atwood. Asked how autobiographical her novels and stories were, she gave what I thought at the time was the most wonderfully cagey answer, and this, too, is a paraphrase: Everything a writer writes is autobiographical in the sense that it has gone through her own head.

So take that, biographical critics!

3. Why do I write what I do?

The short answer: because I can’t help it. I began my writing life as a poet. That’s how I trained at Oberlin. And while I will always love poetry, and still write it from time to time, it’s become clear to me that I need a bigger canvas for my stories. I should add that studying the craft of poetry has influenced my prose tremendously. (My professor, Stuart Friebert, used to quote Grace Paley to our poetry workshop: “A poem a day keeps the prose doctor away.”)

I’m not sure I do this consciously, but I seem to seek music in a certain combination of words … to find rhythm in a certain sentence. I can’t play an instrument to save my life, but I’ve always had an ear for the English language. It’s a good thing, too, because my math skills are horrible. What I’m learning now, as I write longform narrative, is that although I might have the nouns right, and the flow of a sentence, and the visual image, the proof will be in the pudding’s structure. How do I stitch paragraph to paragraph, section to section, chapter to chapter, to form an artful, pleasing whole?

As for subject matter, nearly all of the early poems I wrote at Oberlin dealt with loss in some way or other; I need to write the book I’m working on now because I clearly have not found resolution for the losses in my life. A host of questions prick at me,  sticking like burrs to a sweater. I have to pick them off, one by one, and try to answer them.

I mentioned Grace Paley. In August 2014, I’ll be taking Dani Shapiro’s “Transforming Chaos Into Art: A Workshop in Fiction and Memoir” at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Shapiro studied with Paley at Sarah Lawrence, so there’s a bit of nice, footnoted symmetry in my desire to study with her. In Shapiro’s own beautiful memoir, Slow Motion, she offers the best definition of why we write that I’ve come across in a long while:

I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that transcends my own experience. I can organize the noise in my head into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

There’s a lot of chaos from my childhood that I need to make sense of. In telling part of my story (and it is only a part) I’m also trying to reconstruct a life that’s not my own. As I work and research (I’m reading my father’s World War II letters to his parents), I’m finding that the story I’m striving to tell could be, possibly, more his than mine. I think that’s why some memoirists tend to write more than one memoir in a lifetime. As Shapiro has noted:

The memoirist looks through a single window in a house full of windows. After all, we can’t look out of all the windows at once, can we?  We choose a view. We pick a story to tell.

4. How does my writing process work?

Soon after waking in the morning, I’ll have a mug of hot lemon water and my first cup of coffee, thanks to my endlessly supportive husband. Sitting up in bed, still in a hazy sort of dream state, I’ll begin reading something inspirational to my writing. For example, I’ve just finished Shapiro’s exquisite Still Writing, in which she quotes from the late poet Jane Kenyon’s advice for writers. I think this is important, because a writer who isn’t reading is like a person who isn’t breathing:

Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. [emphasis added].

So I’ll read a bit of something for which I have a strong affinity. I think we all need literary mentors, and right now, Dani Shapiro is mine. It’s not long before what I’ve read will snag a loose thread of something in my memory, or inspire an idea that I feel compelled to pursue.

I’ll put the book aside, pull out my iPad, and begin following my idea, pulling at the thread, writing while it unravels into something that ends up, newly-fashioned, in my Evernote app. I keep at this as long as I can … as long as I feel I’ve pulled and stitched as much as I can … as long as my energy lasts. I then email the note to myself so it’s on my computer, waiting for me when I settle at my desk, with my third cup of coffee, to begin work.

This is how I’m working these days, and it seems to be a good method for me.

I don’t want to say much more than this right now…time to invoke the Atwood Fifth Amendment, because once started, I could truly go on and on. And that’s not good for the work.

It’s time for the train to pull out of the station, so I’ll announce, in my best conductor’s voice, the three writers you’ll want to look for at the next stop:

A.B. Westrick
A.B. Westrick
is the author of Brotherhood (Viking/Penguin 2013), an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and winner of the National Council for the Social Studies Notable Trade Book Award. She has been a teacher, paralegal, literacy volunteer, administrator, and coach for teams from Odyssey of the Mind to the Reading Olympics. A graduate of Stanford University and Yale Divinity School, Westrick earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She and her family live near Richmond, Virginia.
http://abwestrick.com/

Ellen Boyers Kwatnoski
Ellen Boyers Kwatnoski
has completed a novel, Still Life with Aftershocks, which was one of 50 semi-finalists (out of 5,000 entrants) in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. She writes book reviews for The Washington Independent Review of Books and belongs to James River Writers, Backspace, the Virginia Writers Club, and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She was a judge in the 2012 Maryland Writers’ Association “Great Beginnings” novel contest.

Ellen loves to tell stories that communicate the deepest human emotions while never drowning the reader in them. What interests her most is the tension between the uncertainty and pain of life and its everyday pleasures, triumphs, and absurdity. She enjoys exploring the intersection of the visual arts and literature, often drawing inspiration from Washington’s trove of museums, galleries, and gardens. She blogs about art, design, natural wonders, and dance.
http://ellenkwatnoski.com/blog/

Jane Gassner
The founder and editor of MidLifeBloggers, one of the first sites to focus on the midlife/boomer cohort, Jane Gassner has plied her craft as a writer in just about every situation that calls for putting words on paper or screen. She has earned her living as a magazine feature writer, a documentary producer, a scholarly writer, a business writer, a print editor, a radio reporter, and a non-fiction book writer. She has not earned a penny for it, but she is also experienced at film and television scriptwriting. (She lives in Los Angeles, and that’s what you do when you’re a writer in LA).

Jane has taught writing in both college classrooms and independent writing groups to writers of every level, from beginning to published. That experience, along with her graduate-level education in English literature and psychology, provide the basis for the client-oriented coaching and editing service she offers as part of the MidLifeBloggers Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a book focusing on that service, entitled Writing As Process & The Process of Writing: The Psychodynamics of Writing for Writers.
http://midlifebloggers.com

Look for their thoughts on the writing process on Monday, March 31st.

Now go and write something.

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A Short History of Connecting the Dots

07 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Cultured Life, The Writing Life, Transitions

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Alzheimer's, Chance, Dani Shapiro, Destiny, Fate, Linda Lavin, Michael Maren, writing

Embed from Getty Images

“Only Connect.”
                 —E.M. Forster

One of my favorite childhood pastimes was playing connect-the-dots. I took great pleasure in guiding my pencil from one numbered dot to the next to find out what would reveal itself to me on the page.

Writing is like that. So is life.

And this is a true story.

About two years ago, I was in Manhattan for a conference. It was Sunday, the last day, my travel day home, but after 72 hours in the airless rooms of the New York Hilton, my friend Nancy and I decided we’d escape and treat ourselves to brunch at Sarabeth’s. Being outside felt wonderful, despite the sticky August humidity. As we walked along Avenue of the Americas to the restaurant on Central Park South, I felt the exhilaration I always feel whenever I’m in the city: the rush of traffic, the clusters of strangers moving with and against me on the broad sidewalks, the glint of granite and marble and glass in the summer sunlight. All of this combines to make me feel as though I’m part of something important and larger than myself. The experience also, strangely, makes me feel grounded and secure; at the same time, I’m aware that at any moment, something unusual might happen that could change my course.

That morning, something did.

Nancy and I reached the restaurant and positioned ourselves to join the short queue that had formed outside the door. Out of the corner of my eye, two people emerged, one of them familiar to me. “Linda Lavin,” I said softly to Nancy. And then, for emphasis, to register my out-of-towner’s surprise at seeing a Famous Person, and to make sure Nancy heard me, I repeated, a bit loudly: “It’s Linda Lavin!” Not only Nancy heard me; so did Ms. Lavin, who looked over at me, probably thinking, tourists!

Thus engaged, I said the only thing I could say to justify my rube-like behavior: “We love you!” Linda Lavin smiled. She was wearing a baseball cap, which looked adorable on her, and she continued on her way.

You might think the story ends there, but it doesn’t.

Nancy and I enjoyed a delicious brunch, walked back to our hotel, picked up our baggage from the concierge and parted amidst the foot traffic of a sweltering day—she to hail a taxi for the airport, me to catch a cab to Penn Station.

Settled in Amtrak’s Quiet Car, heading south to Virginia on the Northeast Regional Line, I picked up my iPhone and sent out a tweet that went something like this:

“Spotted Linda Lavin outside Sarabeth’s in NYC…don’t you just love her?”

A moment passed, possibly two, and then, to my surprise, someone with the handle “mmaren” retweeted my tweet.

“Why would somone retweet this?” I wondered. And “who is “mmaren?” I clicked on his Twitter profile, and then on the hyperlink to his website.

A journalist. A filmmaker—something about a film in production. Husband of writer Dani Shapiro. I filed all this away, and tweeted out my thanks to him for the retweet. (For those who might be reading this hundreds of years into the future, tweeting is how people met one another in the early 21st century, without really meeting each other.)

Back and forth we tweeted, during which Mr. Maren followed me. Here’s a brief exchange:

Marci Rich ‏@Midlife2Wife 5 Aug 2012
To @mmaren. Thanks for the lovely follow. Eager to learn more about your film.

Michael Maren ‏@mmaren 5 Aug 2012
@Midlife2Wife Well, it stars the lovely and insanely talented Linda Lavin… info here on FB http://on.fb.me/HI3pY7 

Marci Rich ‏@Midlife2Wife 5 Aug 2012
@mmaren thanks for the link. I’ll definitely take a look. My mom had Alzheimer’s. Part I of her story is on my blog. Will share w/u soon.

I have since followed the development of Maren’s film, A Short History of Decay, with great interest, and I’m eager to see it. Throughout the past year, select film festivals have screened it, and Paladin is releasing it in April 2014. If you’d like to know more about it, here’s an interview, from the Hamptons International Film Festival, with Maren and two of the film’s actors:

I wrote at the beginning of this essay that my Linda Lavin sighting on that humid Sunday morning in 2012 set me on a different course; it was, in fact, a course strewn with dots that I connected, one after the other: my tweet about seeing her led to Michael Maren’s retweet, and my awareness of his film about Alzheimer’s—a topic of great interest to me. Our resulting exchanges led me to seek out more information about the writings of his wife, Dani Shapiro, whom at the time I had not read.

Now, after reading two of her novels; one of her memoirs, Slow Motion; and having nearly finished her newest book, the astonishing Still Writing (which I’m recommending to every writer I know), I have made a discovery. In Shapiro’s work I have found a kindred spirit and a literary soul-mate—as I read her I feel as though I’m filling pages of connect-the-dot workbooks, each one studded with epiphanies.

Here’s one of them: I would like to study with her. I’m at work on a manuscript, and in need of a mentor and guide. I find myself at the end of that long cluster of dots that emerged in Manhattan nearly two years ago, to this spot: I am first on the wait-list for Shapiro’s workshop in fiction and memoir at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

I hope and pray I get in. Maybe, if I happen to see Linda Lavin somewhere in the Cleveland area, where I’m living now, I can take that as a good sign.

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The Seven Senses of Writing

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in The Writing Life

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

A.B. Westrick, All About Eve, Creative writing, Dani Shapiro, Dennis Schmitz, discipline, intuition

©iStock.com/Franck-Boston

©iStock.com/Franck-Boston

Sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. I counted five, right? Five senses which govern our experience of the world, and lead us—luxuriously, deliciously, gloriously—through life.

We often talk of a sixth sense, the guide that alerts us to danger or deception, leads us to opportunity or outcome. This intuition of ours is also a governor, every bit as vital as our biological sensors.

Each of these six senses is essential to the writing process. But I suggest that a seventh sense is required for any sort of sustained activity which would yield a viable, worthy result—whether a sonata, a sonnet, or a work of sculpture. I’m talking about the sense of discipline. And because I’m not a composer or a musician but an artist of a different sort—a writer—this essay is about the seven senses of writing.

One could argue that honesty is a sense, but it’s not. It’s a virtue. And since honesty is important in one’s writing I must admit to stumbling upon this theory by accident, and by extension, through my sense of intuition. Yes, Freud. I know. There are no accidents.

Here’s my non-accident: I was commenting on a Facebook post about ways to overcome writer’s’ block, quoting a friend’s advice to burrow deeply into each of the five senses to get out of a jam. In the aptly titled (for me) “7 Things I’ve Learned so Far,” A.B. Westrick offers this help in an essay on WritersDigest.com:

When I’m stuck, instead of walking away from a manuscript, I’ll try to move more deeply into it. I’ll identify the odors in my character’s life… the textures… the sounds… air stirring in an overhead duct… a mosquito feasting on an ankle… dogs barking in the distance… etc. I’ll give my character something to eat, then I’ll savor the taste. I’ll notice the angle of light, the quality of air, the temperature of skin. I’ll write down everything my character experiences through the five senses. Then I’ll consider my character’s desires in that particular moment… and I’ll relish them… and see what emerges. I don’t necessarily insert all of those details into the scene, but the exercise of identifying them loosens me up, getting me unstuck. Sometimes insights emerge. Sometimes the character takes the story in a new direction.

Great stuff, right? Except, when I hastily offered my comment, I referred to “the seven senses,” a mistake that would embarrass any fourth-grader. But I’m trusting my instincts here, because there are no accidents. Here’s another way of looking at it: Years ago, when I was in college, the poet Dennis Schmitz, whose work I had been studying in a Guest Writer course, visited our campus and spoke to us about stream of consciousness, using an anecdote to illustrate his point. A student, addressing a class about the topic, wrote this on the board by mistake:

STEAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The bonus lesson? Trust the mistakes you make. As a journalist ought to “follow the money,” creative writers ought to follow the accidents. You never know where they will lead. Power your writing by the steam of your own consciousness, or—if you’re a stickler for precision, by the steam of your subconscious. I think you get the idea.

Contemplating my steam-of-consciousness counting error led me to conclude that there really must be seven senses to engage in the pursuit of art, or else why would I have said so? There are no accidents.

The common core of five senses is a given, the kernels within the writer’s golden rule. “Show, don’t tell.”

In Still Writing, Dani Shapiro’s elegant primer/memoir, she reminds us that in order to feel the “essential humanness” of a character,

we must have access to his body. This is one of the simplest ways to bring a character to life on the page, and yet we so easily forget. If we inhabit his body as he walks down the path, things will happen in the writing: the bumblebee, the honeysuckle, the fortune cookie. His musings will be associated, connected to the corporeal present. After all, what else is there? We see, smell, taste, hear, and touch. The senses are gateways to our inner lives. [Emphasis added.]

This common core of five senses is, therefore, critical to generating the steam we need to keep writing, the steam to find our way deep into the story.

Our sixth sense, intuition, is closely linked to our sense of sound. We must listen to the whispering, often unintelligible sounds of our instincts—in life and on the page. We think we want to write one thing, but a force keeps nudging us away in another direction, towards what we must write, until we find ourselves lost in an idea that demands exploration, a plot twist that takes our character to a place not mapped on any outline.

“Something told you to do as I say, didn’t it?” That’s the stunningly misanthropic and arrogant theater critic Addison DeWitt talking to the young actress Eve Carrington in the classic film that is all about her. He’s teaching her about the value of her own intuition, right before exposing her deceptions. Here’s more of the scene from Joseph Mankiewicz’s brilliant screenplay, All About Eve:

EVE

Then if you won’t get out, I’ll
have you thrown out.

She goes to the phone.

ADDISON

Don’t pick it up! Don’t even put your hand on it…

She doesn’t. Her back is to him. Addison smiles.

ADDISON

Something told you to do as I say,
didn’t it? That instinct is worth
millions, you can’t buy it, cherish it,
Eve. When that alarm goes off,
go to your battle stations…

The sixth sense, the intuitive sense, is as important to actors and liars as it is to writers.

And what of the seventh sense—discipline—that I identified at the start of this essay?  You can have instincts as sharply honed as your sensory equipment, but without discipline, nothing gets done.

I know this all too well. I’ve wanted to write ever since I was a child and set up a TV tray as a desk, with a rose in a bud vase for inspiration. (I wish I could remember where I ever got that clichéd notion!) But a lack of discipline has kept me from achieving the career I could have had. It’s true in my daily life, as well. For example, I dislike exercise, dislike anything that demands I get up out of the cozy bed at an ungodly hour and move around. (I’m always pleased, and a little smug, on those mornings when I get over myself and just get out there and walk the three miles.) And about that cake: It’s so delicious. I shouldn’t have any more, but I’ll just cut this little corner. And all the while my lack of physical discipline is evident when I look into the mirror.

And so it is with writing. I should get started, but first I’ll just read the headlines in the Times, or check my email or Facebook. As soon as I do any of these things, I’m a goner. There’s no chance of getting back to that hazy state of awakening, that anteroom where what you’ve dreamed the night before is within reach, and you can unlock its logic in the early light of day and create something, seemingly, out of thin air.

Dani Shapiro calls this “riding the wave … learning to withstand those wild surges [of energy] because everything we need to know, everything valuable, is contained within them.” Her book shamed me into my relatively new habit of not looking at e-mail or checking the Internet before sitting down to write, and of staying put in my chair once I’ve started. Performing any of the tasks of daily life—and there are so many of them—before you’ve put the time in at your desk will send you tumbling down the rabbit hole. These things are important and must get done, but not at the expense of writing. Put in the writing time first. The laundry and the marketing and the errands will be your reward. That, and finished work.

Take this essay you’re reading. This morning, as soon as I woke up, I opened the Evernote app on my iPad. I’ve taken to writing first thing, in bed, in this manner. My husband brings me my hot lemon water and my first cup of coffee, otherwise I’d never be able to lift my head, and then I begin writing. When I feel as though I’ve gotten down what I have to get down, I e-mail the “note” to myself so it’s waiting on my computer when I’m ready to work at my desk, after breakfast.

I did not suddenly cultivate this type of discipline by looking up at the calendar and realizing I turn 58 this year with a scant body of work to show for it. No, enforced immobility is what brought me this far. I broke my foot in November, and I’m still in a cast. The days and weeks and months in which I could not easily move about to dodge the writing—walk the dog! do the laundry! drive to Blackbird Bakery for some chocolate chip cookies!—have been a gift. I’ve formed reading and writing habits these last few months that I suspect will remain with me for the rest of my life.

Not that it would have been easy to do this before. From the time I was 16 and for most of my adult life, I’ve worked, and I spent most of my working life at a job where I had to write every day. I’ll never forget telling the writer Diane Vreuls about the new job I got in Oberlin’s Office of Communications so many years ago. “It’s important to pay the bills,” she said, “but a writer should really avoid having a job writing.”

It wasn’t long before I realized what she was talking about.

You’d think that writing daily—and getting paid for it!—would be a good thing, but it’s not the same kind of writing that requires you to be solitary and dig deeply until the words come, to create something that approximates art. Not to mention the fact that writing for pay can leave you exhausted, with little energy to switch gears and face the blank computer screen at home.

No, it’s taken a couple of major life changes for me to get to the place I’m at today, a place where I can go into my writing office and work. For more than two years, I’ve written a blog—a kind of exploratory enterprise that has led me to realize that I can do the sort of writing I need and want to do. And I’ve slouched toward some sort of discipline in doing it. After the foot fracture, the slouching became hobbling, but I’m getting there.

I’ve spent most of the day on this essay—from the moment I awakened until now, as I type this, 2:53 PM. That’s what discipline is. I might stumble here and there, but I’m here now, and like the title of Shapiro’s book, I’m “still writing.”

(One more thing. When I took a short break earlier, I found a video by Ira Glass that speaks beautifully to the idea of discipline, of “doing one thing over and over and over.” I think you’ll love it.)

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