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| My writing shack. It's every bit as scrappy as it looks. So is what gets written in it. |
Some days, writing a novel gets ugly. Like
the day I drop the computer on my foot.
I’ve been complaining. Why me? I didn’t ask for a story to
tell. And why this particular story, which demands that I rewrite history in
the most ludicrously inaccurate way possible? Couldn’t this idea have picked on
someone else, someone who could actually handle the challenge?
Or, with apologies to Scrooge: “why do stories walk the
earth, and why do they come to me?”
So I am being, ahem, a bear to my whole family when my
laptop slides off the coffee table and crashes directly onto my foot.
And of course I have backed up nothing I’ve written in the
past... week? Month? How long exactly has it been? At that moment, I’m not even
sure.
Lesson learned. I am happy when the computer turns out to be
fine, and even consider it a small price to pay when my foot swells up to twice
its normal size.
I attribute this incident only partly to my habit of
stacking my laptop on top of books on top of papers in the middle of the living
room. Mostly, it’s a rebuke from the universe. It must be one I still need:
even now, months later, my foot gets twinges. Especially in yoga class, where
every posture seems to involve sitting on it.
The writer Elizabeth Gilbert understands the creative
process in a mystical way that I would never believe if I hadn’t experienced it
myself.
“Ideas have no material body, but they do have
consciousness, and they most certainly have will,” she writes in her new book, Big Magic.
(See a review of Big Magic here, and a fascinating -- and somewhat creepy -- Radiolab interview with Gilbert here.)
Sometimes, an idea will begin to haunt you. What you do next
is up to you. You can talk to it, find out what it wants. Or you can snarl at
it, in which case it might just change its mind and go away.
Here are your gifts, says the universe. An impossible story.
An autistic daughter. Not because you can handle them (you can’t), but because
they are for you. They will torture you, and also enrich you immeasurably.
Figure it out.
When I sit on my foot in yoga class these days, I have a
little conversation with Alec Guinness – the Alec Guinness from the last scene
of Doctor Zhivago.
This story may not go anywhere, I tell him. I may destroy it
simply by trying to cut it down to size. Or I may work on it for another year
and still not get an agent. Or I may get an agent and still not get a
publisher.
He smiles his Alec Guinness smile at me. “Ah,” he says. “Then
it’s a gift.”
(Whatever you think of Doctor Zhivago, you probably need to watch Alec Guinness do this again.)
