Writer's Block

Where it is hot and dry, the ants begin to move at night.

In the July morning of this year in my life they have found something cool and refreshing in the metal case of my laptop computer, marching with purpose up the legs of the wooden table, across the unfinished birch grain and up, up, onto the black metal case, marching across the control key, the caps lock, the A and Q keys, strumming their own stories by the dozens.

I know how they feel. Last week I drove to the coast near Fort Bragg to escape the relentless, pounding three-digit heat, lazing in the 60-degree ocean breeze, stumbling quite by accident into a sleepy tribe of sea lionesses and their cubs who blended gray and mottled across the rocks and seaweed. Driving home again on roads choked by July Fourth traffic, the temperature gauge in the car rocking upward again into the 90s, I bit my tongue against declarations of rage against the sun, society, so many oversized and gluttonous trucks and campers trailing their appended smaller cars, migrating into volleys of shimmering air. And today, hot and parched, the ants are writing their own story.

To say they have nothing to share is nonsense. My first and best writing mentor, James Hall, would have us pack up our notebooks and drive off the campus in the hills of Santa Cruz into town to find stories. He told me to take a basket of dirty clothes to the laundromat on Mission Street. The assignment: watch someone schlepping their dirties in and out of the machines and create a line of dialogue that told their story. Then, we had to return home and write a short fiction that deserved the nugget of dialogue. The only rule: we were not to mention the laundromat.

There are few gems in the hundreds of books on writing, but they are precious and include John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, Henry James' The Art of the Novel, Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, Rust Hill's Writing in General and The Short Story in Particular, and Leon Surmelian's Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness. Of the last, I have James Hall's personal copy, bequeathed to me when I graduated the writing program.

None of these tells you what to do when you experience writer's block because, if you're a writer, there is no such thing. There are days when the prose comes easily. And there are the others when it feels like hell to lay down a poorly made phrase. Writing takes a lot of writing, and writers are self-limiting by a lack of imagination, by sloth, by immersion in crippling pop culture and the deluge of distractions and poor taste. Mostly sloth.

Here's the only trick that has worked every time I feel disconnected from the page: I read. I read it all and it tickles the crevice in the brain dedicated to calling out rhythms of language. James Hall had us read across the genres. We'd read a pop novel like Hotel, or a crime piece from Elmore Leonard, a Zane Grey western--all along with the customary Joyce, Melville, and Crane.

When I taught fiction at the University of Illinois, my upscale Chicagoan students resented having to read outside of contemporary short stories. Some hated reading entirely, which was surprising for a classroom of students who elected to enroll in fiction writing classes. Some saw the class as a pottery workshop or some other "quick-A" experience they could complete without compromising their frat parties, akin to a classroom version of the window of a bank or credit union where you'd drive through, swipe a credit card, and drove off with cash--or caché.

And in this first week of July, having taken a month off from my daily writing, it felt like begging for my life to lay out a few lines of prose. So I picked up Willa Cather's My Antonia last night and fell into the comfort of honest language.

The ants, you know, produce music as they walk--an effect created by rubbing of thorax parts to their rhythm of march. It's called stridulation.

One of my teachers, novelist Wright Morris once wrote:

"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West of the 98th Meridian–where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t–towns, like weeds, spring up when it rains, dry up when it stops. But in a dry climate the husk of the plant remains. The stranger might find, as if preserved in amber, something of the green life that was once lived there, and the ghosts of men who have gone on to a better place. The withered towns are empty, but not uninhabited. Faces sometimes peer out from the broken windows, or whisper from the sagging balconies, as if this place–now that it is dead–has come to life. As if empty it is forever occupied."

And so, like those tireless ants, I have begun again to march across the keys if only to breathe life into my life, to open out the broken windows and sing my dreams.

Openers

I was in a bar once--oh, in fact many times--but once I was sitting at the Esquire Lounge, making notes for a new short story on a napkin when a woman I did not know put her head on my shoulder. I noticed her sitting beside me and had shuffled my stool to avoid her cigarette. I had yet to develop an allergy to liquor, but as I had a bad case of asthma I was determined not to suffer her smoke.

So, this woman, as tall-tale openers usually go, just leaned over, put her head on my shoulder, and began reading aloud my plot line. "Hanamoto," the notes began, "works in a flower shop in the suburbs of Osaka and is troubled by the sounds of heavy screwing coming through his apartment walls late at night. In fact, the sounds blast through his wall by-day too, almost all the time, and are made by a red-headed American woman and her Japanese boyfriend. The florist, in his 70s, has survived the war, watched as the Yanks occupied his country, and now resents this girl and her profligate ways."

The notes sounded a little off-key read by this stranger in the bar in the middle of the Illinois winter, a February so cold that you had to pour scalding water on the door of your car to get the locks moving in the morning. And this woman, reading boozily aloud made the story sound more of a cheap comedy than the serious fiction I was planning. Maybe it was a comedy.

I asked if she could put out her cigarette. The ash had grown to almost an inch on the end and it tumbled off into my beer.

"Where do you get your ideas?" she asked.

* * *

In the summer in a very humid June in Virginia, I waited outside the baseball stadium to buy a ticket for the Triple-A class team of the New York Mets, the Tidewater Tides. The sun grilled you like a flatfish and the stadium, located adjacent to the zoo and airport, was built on recovered swamp-land, swarming at mid-day with gnats and mosquitoes.

I had come to watch the rehabilitation assignment of pitcher Doc Gooden, an amazing fireballer who had suffered tendinitis and had been sent from New York to Norfolk to work his way back into shape. The word got out in the Norfolk papers that Gooden would make a start, so the line began forming around the stadium at eight, and I had been out there from the start to snag a good seat. I had my yellow legal pad, a few ballpoint pens tucked into my shirt pocket, a sandwich from home, and a copy of Graham Green's Another Mexico in my backpack for inspiration.

The previous winter I had traveled to the Yucatan with Dr. Z, my zesty companion from graduate school, and we had celebrated Christmas in the homes of friends in Merida. It was an amazing eve, wandering the neighborhoods where Mexicans had opened their doors, set out meals of puc-chuc, turkey in black mole, egg tacos with pumpkin seeds, and cochinita pibil. In some instances, the family was out visiting neighbors, so you helped yourself and ate with whomever else had come inside, then wandered the streets, house-to-house, paying respects and dining into the night.

I wanted to write a short story about an American couple, lost in the jungle outside Piste, near the Mayan ruins of Chitchen Itza. I sat cross-legged on the concrete, outside the stadium in a precious square of shade, writing a few words about the village of Piste where in the cooling dusk families sat around smoking coils of mosquito repellent and cooked tortillas over an open fire.

Every few moments a jet roared into the pale Virginia sky and broke my concentration. I was writing about mosquito coils and swatting the real ones that were lighting on me. Sweat beaded up on my forearms and trickled down to the yellow pad, spotting light blue where I had been writing.

The American couple was truly lost. The husband sat in the jungle wondering if his wife was having more than the one affair he suspected. She had been writing postcards all morning at their hotel before they took the bus to the ruins. And now they had been separated in the jungle and he couldn't help but think she had wandered away deliberately.

I could hear the whirring gnats and the afterblast of a jet that had landed behind me, and then the ticket window opened with a whack and I got my ticket to watch Gooden toss four innings in the blistering Norfolk sun, giving up three hits and fanning two. No walks. I never finished the story about the couple in Mexico.

* * *

I was renting a cottage in the woods outside Colfax, on a meadow at 2,000 feet with a brook and tall pines. We were so far from town that you couldn't get internet service, save by a satellite hookup that was spotty at best. But my desk looked out a sliding glass window on a broad field, with a narrow bridge over the creek, and a single Japanese maple that had blushed brilliant red in the snap of fall weather.

In the pane of the software window I was typing a story about the pony express. I had always wanted to try my hand at a Western, and the road leading to our property spun under the heavy forest, down into a dirt track that snaked its way to the north fork of the American River. Called Yankee Jim's Road, it dropped suddenly over 2,000 feet to the river, where a rusted forest service bridge spanned the whirlpools and flowing current. At the north side of the crossing, you could still walk into the small cave that had been carved into the cliff face to provide shelter for the pony express and, later, the Wells Fargo stagecoach that crossed the American en-route to Folsom and, further down in the valley, Sacramento.

I spent the morning working on a description of the chenille brocade dress with detachable sleeves worn by a woman that worked in the Auburn cafe. Panners were coming in for late breakfast, some with bound sacks of gold dust they had taken from the Bear River.

Then my friend Derek came over from Forest Hill, driving the stage route in his white Japanese pickup truck to sit on my porch and yak about recovery. I had to save the story in the software and get up to greet him. And he was barely in the place, when another knock came at the door.

It was my neighbor's daughter, weeping, barely able to tell me that a local kid came speeding around Yankee Jim's and hit a fawn. I went out to the drive and neighbor Grace had the baby wrapped in a bloody blanket. The fawn struggled to get free, but both its rear legs had been snapped in the impact. The kid had shrugged, looked at the deer where it lay in the road, and drove off elsewhere.

I nested the deer in my arms and sat on the edge of the drive, trying to keep it from struggling while Grace called the sheriff. The deer cried out. I had no notion that deer made any sound at all. The family--two does and six fawns--were always in the meadow in the dusk, grazing on the wildflowers and grass. I had come to recognize the twins, including the spotted fawn that now rolled its eyes and moaned, its head covered with ticks.

Grace came down the steps in tears. The sheriff, she said, couldn't come for an hour. But there was a vet in Colfax and the office was still open.

I put a wet washcloth to the fawn's mouth, praying, assuring it that her misery would soon be over. And we drove to town along Yankee Jim's in the Toyota, crammed into the front seat, the doe squirming on my lap in its blanket.

We had only been there a few minutes when the vet came back into the waiting room to say she had put down the fawn. Its legs could not be repaired and it would have been easy prey on the side of the road. The vet had been crying.

"Most people just leave them lying there," she said.

We drove home in silence, and then I went into the cabin, washed up, and sat down to talk recovery with Derek. I had forgotten about the woman in the Victorian dress and the apron she was wrapping tightly about her pinched waist as she eyed the gruffy sourdoughs that had trod their muddy boots into her fine cafe.

A Simple No Would Do

Over the years I've had my writer's share of rejection slips. If you're unfamiliar with the process of sending out your writing without having an invitation or agent, it's quite simple: You put your manuscript in a manila folder, add a tasteful cover letter that suggests you know something about the publication, add return postage, and wait for two or three months. When I was in graduate school, the writers would compare rejection slips, boasting of ones that indicated near misses, showing off the ones that came back written, apparently, by a human being.

There were several kinds of slips: simple printed form letters, usually sent as postcards; printed letter-size rejections; quick notes from an editor and signed in ink suggesting that they actually read what you sent; and, if you were lucky, an extended missive with critical remarks about the writing along with reasons why it was declined. My favorite slip came from a little-known university literary journal that had boxes for the editor to check, with witty remarks such as "feet smell", "dog peed on it", or "thanks for the paper cut."

Writers have thin skins, especially this one, and I once was told by an author, since deceased, that I'd never make it if I took umbrage with being kicked around a little. Besides, he said, you could send the same story to the same magazine on different days, using different typewriters, and one would sell while the other drew rejections. If your envelope was opened after a hearty staff lunch, they probably fell asleep reading it. If it landed on a Monday morning, the staff may well be hung over.

To show I have no hard feelings, I'm going to present a selection of my more successful failures from the cornucopia of slips from my over-the-transom submissions.

"Dear Ms. Hyman. As before, I admire the writing, which is energetic and stylish. The story, however, doesn't add up to very much, and we'll have to pass. Please try us again." -- The Atlantic.

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"I'm sorry our tastes here are so particular and that I can't take any of these pieces, but the work is vital, energetic and accomplished, and I'd say you're just about to take off with publications. Please stay in touch, I'd be glad to read more." -- Esquire.

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"The writing style itself was excellent but the pace of the story was just too slow. You do have a lot of talent. Sooner or later, it's going to break your way." -- The Missouri Review.

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(Printed on a stock reply card) "We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it." The Editors, The New Yorker (signature and note at the bottom: Sorry, and thanks.")

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"Sorry that your novel chapter was not for us. Obviously flashbacks can work well in a novel, but to have so many in the first chapter is a little disconcerting. Thanks for the look." -- Playboy.

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"This story came very close. I sent it through four blind readings and while two readers (new persons here) didn't recommend it, our senior fiction editor loved it." -- Prairie Schooner.

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and....then....

"We loved 'Oh, Burning Power...' and want very much to publish it. Please assure us it's available, so we can go to the printer. Many thanks for the story." Paul Lyons, Carolina Quarterly.

But wait for the punchline. The story that the Carolina Quarterly loved and published was written in a single sitting, in a bar, as a satire of the kind of short, hyper-real fiction of the late 1980s that I loathed, and included the use of a character modeled to poke fun at people who loved the genre.

Not long after that, I stopped submitting fiction to the magazines. I won't say I'm bitter, because I'm not. These are rejection slips to die for. But I'm sensitive, and the dead fiction writer who lectured me was right. That a writer should have such little tolerance for caprice, the green fuse that flowers all creative life, is an unlovely thing.

The Birth of a School

The fall in Tuscaloosa seemed an odd amalgam of earthly effects: the leaves burned with color and curled to crackling on the ground. The late afternoons felt like New England with a refreshing breeze, while the sun in its mid-day arc leaned down on the dry, baked ground so that you thought that summer with its humid swelter might go on forever.

We gathered in Morgan Hall for orientation into the graduate writing program, sizing each other up as we sat in neat rows of student desks, tuning our ear to the spoken tongues from New York and Chicago and the small towns of Dixie, wondering what our peers would sound like on paper.

The poets were an odd lot, easily given to maudlin sentiment, while fiction writers fell by turn to the mimicry of suburban prose, the K-Mart fiction of drunks, hypochondriacs, used-car salesmen, and adulterous wives that populated the fictional worlds of Ray Carver, Anne Tyler, Bobbie Ann Mason, or John Updike. I had read too much of it all, with its facile repetitions of brand names and parking-lot angst. And the poets, with their gnashing and wailing about poor dead John Berryman (a suicide) or the sad Montana taverns of Richard Hugo just seemed a bit over the top for me. I trusted neither.

That year, too, the writing world was reveling in what later came to be called "Sudden Fiction", works several paragraphs in length that mapped the immediate launch of a skyrocket without the fuel and oxygen sufficient to sustain your interest. They once might have been called "tone poems", but to me they were examples of Fiction Lite. It was like leaving town under the cover of darkness after selling snake oil to the locals.

That fall -- and perhaps always -- our writing faculty believed in the shorthand of drinking and adultery, and they led by example. In my first semester, I knew of at least four professors who were walking a sloppy line. One writer was sleeping with a current student and another wooed a married departmental secretary. A literature professor had a casting couch in his office and students delighted in speculating who was attending his darkened seminars.

That fall as we crowded into the seminar rooms of the writers' workshop, our fiction teachers championed two themes regarding our stories: the avarice of puerile prose and the requisite pearl of literary verisimilitude.

Let's examine each, shall we?

puerile
French or Latin; French puéril, from Latin puerilis, from puer boy, child; akin to Sanskrit putra son, child and perhaps to Greek pais boy, child; 1 : juvenile 2 : childish , silly

Don Hendrie, or Red Don as we called him, could make you cry in front of the workshop. He had a crimson beard and spatulate thumbs. He would do anything for you as a writer. But his face flushed raw and you could see him building up to an outburst when he found a line you wrote that was objectionable; he jabbed at it with his finger, then slammed his palm on the table and stammered. He called your writing "puerile".

Hendrie was sleeping with one of his students--a dark foreigner who would goad him during workshop and once remarked quite proudly that while he trashed her prose in the small classroom with the large table, he'd call out her name in religious fervor in their bedroom later that night.

verisimilitude
from Latin verisimilis; 1 : having the appearance of truth : probable 2 : depicting realism

Meanwhile, our other fiction professor, A--, was all about the baroque possibilities of language, was soft-spoken, and insisted that while the prose might reflect the complicated observations of the emotionally charged mind, it should bear verisimilitude on the page. He was wooing a fabulously stunning English Department secretary (whom he later married). But her divorce wasn't quite final and so A-- fearing that the ex was stalking him -- brought a loaded pistol to workshop in the briefcase which bore our stories for discussion. He asked the men in the fiction workshop to surround him with our bodies as we escorted him to his car in the parking lot. Got verisimilitude?

On one afternoon, after school let out, I was privileged to see both workshop expressions brought to bear at once in a convincing way. Hendrie asked me if I could help out in a delicate matter. As I was brand new to the school and invested in presenting a helpful, eager facade, I agreed.

I climbed into A--'s pickup truck and we drove out in the fall light to the secretary's former residence where A-- was to help her remove some possessions before her ex returned. Hendrie held a loaded shotgun as he guarded the driveway against demons. And when we had spirited the marital artifacts into the pickup, Hendrie put the shotgun into his Honda, and I climbed in for a drive to the tavern. A-- went his own way, having squired the last of Helen's finery to his personal Troy.

It was nauseating and delicious at the same time, for that night a fresh genre--Sudden Nonfiction--was born pink and screaming into the deep heart of Dixie.

Us He Devours

A few months ago I received an email from a former student who had been in my fiction writing class at the University of Illinois. It began, "You may not remember me, for I was an unremarkable writer." When kindness drops into your laptop after years have passed, it's a remarkable gift. I only taught for a few years and probably had no more than 1,2o0 students. Not many. And I left the profession feeling that I was not good enough, that I had not published much, and while I had been a good lecturer, I was something of a fraud. The email wiped the last notion clear, and I cried with gratitude.

At the beginning, up on the hill in Santa Cruz, I studied writing with James B. Hall. He preferred to be called JB. Born in Midland, Ohio, he served in the Africa campaign during WW2. A wry, inventive writer and brilliant scholar, Hall was one of the first to attend the legendary Iowa Writers Workshops in the late 40s, and spoke of his classmate Flannery O'Connor. He authored a half dozen novels, five books of short fiction, a book on craft, and several books of poetry before passing this year in his home in Portland.

He had started the writing programs in Oregon (where he mentored Ken Kesey), at Irvine, and Santa Cruz. He gave Ray Carver a faculty spot for a semester when Carver was struggling with alcohol and beginning to publish his tales of mean suburbia in The New Yorker. Hall liked me from the start, possibly because I was older than most students, returning to school for a second bachelor's in my 30s, or because I had a newspaperman's experience, which had served many fledgling authors. I was insecure among the youngsters, and more insecure trying to speak the rarefied language of literary studies. So, I hid out in JB's office, where he never minded when I showed up or how long I stayed.

Once, when a young freshman came to visit, he nodded for me to remain seated. The visitor told JB she wanted to study writing, that she loved writing. I could see the twinkle in his eye. He asked her about her favorite authors. She told him that she loved James Joyce most of all.

"Can you tell me the opening lines of Portrait of the Artist?" JB asked. She could not. He looked over at me.

I said, "Once upon a time, and a very good time it was..."

Hall smiled. Then waved his hand dismissively. Visit over.

He could be brutal. He uttered outrageously bizarre or unnecessary things. He called my Japanese lover "baby doll". We were riding in his Volvo wagon on a way to a reading once, an open bottle of wine on the seat, when he spun an illegal U-Turn. "Hall's Law," he said.

Once he was in your corner, he was there for keeps. I had never read literature with a discerning eye before and had two years to learn as much as the four-year students. Hall would look over my short stories, pen in hand, and announce: "I can make this bleed anywhere." Or, he might say, "It's good, except for the whole thing."

I found one of his novels in a college office and stole it. It was out of print. When I took it to him for signature, he asked where the hell I had found it. Stupidly I said I discovered it at a local garage sale. He had that look in his eye, but wrote in it: "For Gabby, who has drive, initiative, and that other thing going for him."

At the end, I was to sit for an oral exam with three professors who would grill me on the 20 books of prose, poetry, and drama on my list. The idea was that you'd answer most of the questions. As the hour ended, one of the professors asked me the origin of Faulkner's title for The Sound and the Fury, and I said, "Macbeth, Act Five, Scene Five." With that, it was done.

I was to wait out in the hall while they deliberated, but it wasn't long. When I came in, I saw tears in JB's eyes. He informed me that I had earned high honors.

In February of 1991, I was living in the woods in Washington State. I had been to rehab, was trudging through a rough patch of things, and from the blue came a letter from JB. He had moved to Oregon after retiring from Santa Cruz, for there was better healthcare in Portland to assist his ailing wife. I wrote back, explaining my departure from academe, my struggles, my hopes.

A week later an envelope arrived from JB with money inside.

We wrote occasionally over the ensuing years, but our letters eventually tailed off. My mistake. After receiving the email from my former student, I was searching for JB's address when I came upon his obituary.

I have found that kindness begets kindness--but I had to have my teachers. And I need frequent reminding, for I often default into selfishness. What I know for sure is that my unremarkable writing student grew to become a remarkable woman. And perhaps JB thought the same of me, the lost orphaned lamb redeemed.

Hence, this message out of the blue is for you, JB--even though it bleeds everywhere. I hope you get it.