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Bonus Material
• Main Page • A Letter from Kaye • Additional Essay by Kaye • Interview • Extended Bio • Read an Excerpt • Kaye’s Web Site Get Your Copy
available at
Also by Kaye Gibbons |
Don't Try This at Home
by Kaye Gibbons I can drive a car, but that doesn't mean I can rebuild an engine. I know how to get medical care for my daughters when they need it, but that doesn't mean I can remove their tonsils. Cutting on the lights doesn't make me capable of wiring a house. It's generally accepted that there's a wide practical and artistic distance between listening to the radio and making a song, watching a film and creating one, but even though there's a similar gap between reading a book and writing one, I'm continually amazed by people who tell me that they're planning to write a novel. Some of these people ask that I listen to their ideas and then sign on to ghost write, as though all I'll have to do is knock out the writing part, making us both fabulously well-to-do. Recently, a lady at a book festival raised her hand to ask, "How many metaphors do I put in a literary novel? I've already put in six, but my husband told me that's too many." A man at this same audience asked, "How important is reading to your writing process?" What followed was a plague of questions about my "process," a term that disrupts so my mental traction that I have to ask people to define what they mean, slowly. These folks seem to have a great deal of information about the processes of other writers, dead and alive, but I can sense their anticipation that I might be the one with the key that unlocks the mysteries of how to get a book published and into Oprah's hands. I have learned that if there are ten writers at a conference, the other nine will be also asked to reveal their processes, which leads me to wonder if the collectors of this information spend their Sunday evenings going over pages and pages of notes, until they have some order or method they plan to use when they start writing again, bright and early Monday morning. It's understandable but frustrating to be asked to pull aside the curtain for people who do not want to know about the carnage involved in producing a novel. But at least it gives writers the opportunity to say something about that carnage, about the kind of combat we go through to get from here to there, from one blank page to three hundred full ones. We want someone to listen to us or we wouldn't be writing to broadcast our voices to begin with, but when writers gather in the bar at the close of a conference day, we often bemoan how far perceptions of what we do is from our own individual realities and how much interest there is in writing as opposed to, as Flannery O'Connor said it, writing well. Then, we invariably move on to talking about writers who aren't there. Flannery O'Connor's "habit of being" honors the kind of literary life I appreciate, the kind that unapologetically combines the sublime and the mundane. She was real. Her peacocks were real. They were also immortals strutting around their Georgia yard, fed and watered by an artist who was probably contemplating the nature of good and evil with them around her feet. But some writers help perpetuate the myth that writers lead elite and privileged existences that keeps us removed from the banal struggles of everyday life, that we all have someone hired to wash, dry, iron, fold, cook, and clean, as well as a hotshot New York publisher to pay for it. I don't want my readers or anybody else seeing me clean the refrigerator in the middle of the night. It wouldn't be a good idea to have anyone witness me talking to myself, scrubbing rot and gagging at the vegetable drawer, thinking about Umberto Eco. I get on a roll, thinking, "He isn't doing this right now. I bet he's lounging on the West Bank, still grooving on the fact that his mother named him Umberto. John Updike isn't doing this either. Neither is Susan Sontag. She's asleep in her loft, feeling real secure with the intellectual stripe in her hair. It says so much. It proves she's cerebral. She could stop writing and live off her hair. I bet she has a maid. I KNOW she does. And Umberto also has an amanuensis. I KNOW he does." I'm sorry but I tend to nurse grudges against writers I can't visualize at a washing machine or at Wal-Mart, mingling their desire to know the meaning of it all with their need to know if double-roll Charmin is worth the added expense. So, I understand how my readers have accumulated this ideal of the writerly life with its neat boundaries and orderly processes. They don't see the grunge or the bone-throbbing effects of severe sleep deprivation or the worry that an editor is going to criticize a chapter I spent eighty hours revising just as brutishly as she did the last time five times. In turn, I have a hard time seeing John Updike having a hard time, though I know he must have suffered along the way. A creation like Rabbit isn't born of easy, reliable processes, and truthful beauty comes only after a writer has opened himself up to all kinds of dangers and made peace with absorbing some damage. I've long believed that if writers showed up at these literary events as dirty and caffeine-addled as we get during the final seventy-two hours of a novel's completion, rather than like we do by the time the book's out and we're showered, rested, dressed in our best picture-taking clothes, most of the advice-seekers would understand that writing is a drain on the system, and they'd run from us. One day I need to report onstage in last-revision condition and ask the questions they need to ask themselves, 1. Are you willing to deny what the community perceives as normal and live embracing intense experience, emotions, and ideas, loving deeply, hating deeply, forsaking mediocrity, preferring complete failure to mere competency? 2. Can you eliminate people and things that suck the creative energy out of you? 3. Are you prepared to go around distracted every waking moment and endure characterizations, gossip about…of yourself as abnormal or flaky when the truth is that you have too much on your mind to think about local social aspirations and another human being's business? 4. Are you prepared to stop calling yourself a writer if you put down a Patrick O'Brien novel because all those seafaring details grate on your nerves and you dislike having to look things up? 7. Are you ready to delete phrasing that feels comfortably familiar to you? Can you live afraid of clichés? 8. Can you survive for long stretches of time with no income? 9. Can you forego parties, lunches with friends, etc., because you believe everything will fall apart if you're forced to stop and start another paragraph? 10. Does your family "get" that what you do isn't a job, it's your life's work? Do you feel buffeted by their compassionate comprehension? If so, are you willing to give them everything in return in gratitude for their letting you write in the privacy of your own home, in their company? 11. Do you realize that writing fiction isn't an escape from reality but a harassing, dangerous, damaging journey into the real story of your meaning in the world? 12. Do you realize that every book you write will be a confession of love, hate, despair and hope, greed, sympathetic good will, fear, and sheer joy? 13. While you're locked away, dirty and edgy, criticizing your sorry inability to say what you're dying to express, can you simultaneously sustain a sort of heightened, almost eroticized self-assurance that you're doing something nobody else could possibly do, and then can you sleep covered in pages for an hour or two, wake up, and then read with enough impartial judgment to allow you to throw it all away and start over? 14. Can you find two good words in two thousand? When I get to the end of this litany, I look up, expecting to see maybe one potential novelist, a proper sadomasochist, left sitting, but everyone in the audience is still there. When I ask why nobody's run, they all speak at once and say, first of all, I didn't actually cover the topic of my process, not specifically, so they wanted to wait around for me to get to that, and also, they didn't think my questions actually applied to them, not specifically. They want me to say what part of the book I think up first and whether my process is like that of this other writer who said she always outlines or more like this other writer who says he never does. They want to know what it'll feel like when Oprah calls. The lady with the metaphor problem isn't any better off than she was when I started, and she's on the verge of leading a mutiny, gathering all these people who came looking for something they could use and got no advice on process, no agent or editor's direct number, nothing but a bunch of made-up sounding complaining from a woman who's gotten herself up like a tramp today for some reason nobody can explain. They heard me say I'm battered and worn because I've been holed up for three weeks, fighting to pull the universe together in one resplendent final scene, and it was a murderous ordeal, but I can hear them thinking that it's not exactly news to them that writing a novel is hard work, otherwise so many people wouldn't spend so much time and hard-earned money going to listen to people like me share a few clues about how to avoid it. Wanting to rescue something of their day, I ask if it would be reasonable for someone who wants to be a chef to watch cooking shows and expect to learn enough to open a restaurant. They're irritated now, and as they stand to leave, I hear several say they're surprised I can write at all, and as I walk out behind them, the metaphor lady taps me on the shoulder to say how depressed she is that I've left her to figure this stuff out for herself and she hopes I never know what it's like to suffer anxieties about how many symbols and metaphors you're supposed to stick in a literary book. All I can do is say, "Okay, you win. The answer is one symbol per page. Two per page is wrong." She needed a concrete answer. People do. But people are inherently good, and not even the most tired and ruthless writer wishes a reader harm, so I also tell her to be careful writing, to write with the proper ventilation to avoid becoming overwhelmed by awe of language and joy, and unless she wants to look as stunned in the face as I do a great deal of the time because I've just recalled some random outstanding image of Baby Levaster in The Tennis Handsome or how Gabriel Garcia Marquez said the smell of bitter almonds reminded the doctor of unrequited love, then maybe she should consider another career, something less extreme, something nicer she can practice in the privacy of her own home. She doesn't want another career. She wants to write, she says, and now that she's finally pulled the symbol secret out of me, she'll have a book deal in no time. I don't doubt it. I never do. Book and essay texts copyright © 2005 by Kaye Gibbons. Photo credits: (sky and fields) © Thomas Wiewandt; Visions of America/Corbis,(house and trees) © Paul A. Souders/Corbis. Used with permission. All rights reserved. |
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