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Get Me Out of Here

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Flickr Creative Commons: Tim Geers

If there’s a Church of Emotional Truth in Writing, I’m a founding member. “Write the truest version” is my mantra, and I’ve written novels exploring fear and loss and shame and passion and love and I’ve written essays on the importance of vulnerability in writing. Yet as I struggled with the start of a new novel recently, I realized that I don’t really want to write my emotional truth right now, because I am in a dark and difficult place, as many of us are. All I really want is to be somewhere, anywhere, else. Give me an escape.

Since mid-March, I have watched the entire Lord of the Rings extended edition movies all the way through (twice!). I’ve seen all three seasons of the British sitcom Miranda (also twice). I’ve read ten or more novels (who can keep track of anything these days?) that have taken me from 1960s Louisiana (Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half) to Narnia (yes, I re-read C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) to mid-20th-century New York (Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn).

But here’s the thing: escape has not dulled my need to create. “To make art is to wake up in a state of craving, a craving to discharge resentment, rage…And the making of art has a curative effect. A tension you are under disappears, dramatically.” (A comment by visual artist Louise Bourgeois, as quoted by writer Jamie Attenberg in one of her #1000wordsofsummer blogs).

And it’s true. I may long to immerse myself in the respite of other eras and other worlds, but I still have to live right now in this one. And as writers we have the ability to escape into the worlds we create and what’s more, to bring others with us. Writer Ursula K. LeGuin wrote (echoing a remark by Tolkien), “…fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

So I am escaping, but I’m also creating. I’m writing poetry, a new discipline for me. I’m working on the opening pages of a novel that has elements of magical realism, a new genre for me. I’m cooking more frequently which, believe me, is an act of creation. All those things transport me someplace else. Is there value in escape? I believe so, for these reasons: [Read more…]

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When All Else Fails: Do Something Different

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“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I don’t know about you, but writing fiction is not coming easy for me these … [Read more...]

Fueling Your Writing With Feeling

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After a month of social distancing and the uprooting of almost everything that was routine in my life, I’m having a lot of feelings about this whole situation. I miss hugging my friends—heck, I miss seeing my friends. I miss the casual banter with the lettuce lady at the farmer’s market and the camaraderie of my workout buddies and running to the store on a whim to pick up the bread I forgot to buy earlier. My palms are peeling from all the hand-washing and I have dreams about Clorox wipes. My … [Read more...]

Answers to Questions About Writing

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Because my life is completely entangled with writing—I’ve written three novels, hundreds of articles and essays, and I teach creative writing to kids—I get a lot of questions about writing from students, friends, friends of friends, third cousins of former neighbors, and strangers. So here are some of the questions I get asked most often and a few I’ve never been asked but wish I had (with answers to them all): How did you get your first novel published? Several key factors helped me get my … [Read more...]

The Worst-Case Scenario

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This past fall, I went backpacking for four days in the Canadian wilderness with a good friend.  It will be an adventure, I told myself as we planned the trip, when I read online about the “rugged,” “challenging,” “demanding” trail. It’s good to get outside your comfort zone. The trail included “steep climbs,” and “boulder hopping.” I’m tough; I can push myself. It didn’t occur to me to question whether pushing myself was a worthwhile goal; it was what I always did. What happened was that I … [Read more...]

The Books That Get People Talking

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I’m a writer but I’m also a reader, and every 4-6 weeks my book groups (I’m in two) meet to talk about what we’ve read. Some of the discussions are brief—a cursory talk about the book, then a diversion into discussing our kids, our careers, our dogs, our aging parents, the Washington Nationals (I live near D.C.), world politics, and the many delectable treats to be found at Trader Joe’s. Other discussions can go on, literally, for hours as we debate the pros and cons and ins and outs of a book … [Read more...]

The Values of Good Fiction

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Many years ago, the magazine I worked for decided to do a special issue on “Values,” and we chose a handful of key values and interviewed people who exemplified those values. Chris Fields, the firefighter who tenderly carried the baby killed in the Oklahoma City bombing out of the rubble, talked about COMPASSION; Cal Ripken, Jr. (who broke Lou Gehrig's record for most consecutive baseball games played) talked about PERSEVERANCE; Mary Fisher, an artist (and later activist) who contracted AIDS … [Read more...]

Be Careful, or You’ll End Up in My Novel

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So here’s my dirty little secret about writing fiction: Most of my characters begin with a real person. And before friends and acquaintances start thumbing through my novels, wondering if they should be outraged, let me emphasize that the key word here is “begin.” And let me also suggest that you may want to give it a try if you haven’t already. Plenty of authors “steal” from real life—Harper Lee based To Kill a Mockingbird’s Dill Harris on Truman Capote; Harry Potter’s Severus Snape was a … [Read more...]

The Flip Side

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Recently I was talking to a friend about her mother’s death. Losing a parent—especially the only parent you had left—sends the world spinning off its axis. It can feel like a free-fall into grief. “But it’s also liberating,” my friend said. “Is that an awful thing to say?” The answer is no, because it’s true. While parent/child relationships are often complicated (my God, what would we all write about if human relationships were straightforward and easy?), the death of a parent brings enormous … [Read more...]

Parenting Advice, Elevator Pitches, and the Essential Heart of Story

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When my daughters were little I used to read all kinds of books and magazines filled with parenting advice, looking for the nugget of wisdom that would help me be the best possible parent. One day, I found it: “Don’t forget to smile at your kids.” Well, that’s obvious, you think. But it isn’t. In those days I was working full time, raising two toddlers, and helping support my husband through a PhD. I played stuffed animal games while plotting grocery lists in my head, and bustled them into … [Read more...]

Navigating Families in Fiction

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On Thanksgiving Day, I was standing in my kitchen, chopping celery and contemplating the timing for dinner, when Joni Mitchell’s song “The River” came on and all of a sudden my eyes filled and I felt such a sense of loss I could hardly stand it. I missed my father, who LOVED the holidays and has been dead for seven years; I missed my mother, whose distinctive laugh has been the soundtrack to all my holidays but who is now too infirm to leave her home; I missed my daughter, who lives 3,000 miles … [Read more...]

It Takes a Village

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Last week in the creative writing workshop I teach, one of the students shared her latest short story with the group. None of these kids—ages 13-17—know each other outside our class. They all attend different schools. One is an outgoing 6’5” 17-year-old rower who loves fantasy fiction; another is a shy and brilliant 14-year-old who writes realistic fiction about the terrors of high school. Anyway, we all read Riya’s story and one of the students immediately said, “I love this. This story is just … [Read more...]

The Books That Change Lives: Why the Books We Read When We’re Young Stick With Us Forever

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What book changed your life? As tempting as it is to give a lofty, literary answer, the truth (for me, at least) is probably A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read over and over and over, or C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which upset me so much (the shaving of the lion’s mane) that I cried all afternoon and threw the book out the window because it distressed me too much to even have it in the house (a lesson in the power of story). Last week I interviewed writer Anne Lamott … [Read more...]

Am I a Real Writer?

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So here’s the thing: I’m not writing fiction right now. I haven’t written fiction for a solid 18 months, maybe longer. My last novel was published in 2013, the culmination of a writing streak that produced three novels in five years, all of which were agonized over and rewritten and edited and re-edited and shopped around and published and reviewed and read. I started and shelved two different novels over the course of three years after my last one came out and then, dear reader, I stopped … [Read more...]