When I worked as the corporate file coordinator at Morgan Stanley, I picked up a few business tips and truisms. One was that you had to give any new venture at least five years before pulling the plug. I think there is an analogy with writing, though it may be more like ten years. Or twenty. And worse, there may be no plug. I think it’s good to have five year goals. I think it’s good to keep track of progress or lack thereof so that you don’t gaslight yourself about whether or not you’re making progress. It’s very easy to lose track and fail to see the strides you do make.
Do you have a five year plan or what would it be? Mine is losing AND keeping off 20 pounds, learning how to drive stick, and selling a god damn screenplay and then deciding what I really want to do is direct.
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The lights came back on today. Joy. We were only inconvenienced. Nothing more. I keeping thinking about the woman whose two young children were swept away from her when their street flooded. There was so much devastation, many lives lost. But it’s that woman I think of, the biblical scope of her loss. The universal fear: letting go of what we love, having it taken from us. Great waves of loss sweep through our lives. My father. My sister. Then Tom by his own hand. I break this silence with news of the worst sort. Friends, writers, aunts, heroes. You don’t think: this. This storm. This tree twisted off at the trunk as easy as a soda cap. When the lights came on I walked through the house as if I were being led through by a realtor, noting every room for its particular charm. Yes, that molding is lovely, just lovely. In the small library, a reading light cast a halo on the couch, and in its glow a book with a marker somewhere in the middle.
Dear Lost Souls: are you out there, did you wake up, is it dry, are you alright? I’m writing from an internet cafe and feeling the first sun on my face in a while. We still don’t have power, NYC is a mess, but our home was not struck by a two hundred year old tree. Some food is starting to rot. At night, we read by candlelight, very LIttle Women. Then a flashlight guides the way upstairs, and for a moment I am in a movie I’d prefer not to be in. In my dreams last night, Matt Damon was seated next to me on a plane and confided in me that he had kissed a man. Then he asked me what I thought was my best quality. I said, I’m kind. Just now, the sky looks like an El Greco painting. I am on my third Americano. And I’m wondering about all of you love bugs.
Let’s talk about the blank page. Let’s talk about the Shining. Let’s talk about senior year at NYU and my Milton paper. How you can quilt a perfectly fine legal yellow pad from writing the same opening sentence over and over again. I used to have zero tolerance for people who feared the blank page. Why the hell are you a writer, I secretly thought to myself, while nodding empathically. Same thing with writer’s block, which is a version of death by blank page. You don’t know what to say, you don’t know how to say it. Or, you’re afraid to say it. Or, you have no tolerance for your own limitations. Or, you a coward. Full stop. Or you know what you don’t know. And care. Or you think you’re better than the blankness. Or you are unworthy. Or you are not in therapy. Or a page is a mirror is a stone is a flower is a sesame bun. I studied with the great Charles Ludlam, playwright, actor and founder of the Ridiculous Theater. He said that he always wrote a few sentences into the next page of whatever he was working on so he never had to face the blank page. That’s the best advice I ever heard apart from cod liver oil and a pack of Lucky’s.
Would you die if you did not write? Would you brawl, scrawl obscenities on subway walls, would you stink up the room? What would you tell yourself every Sunday when the clothes tumbled out of the dryer that you briefly believed life was good, that making gardens and meals with herbs was good, that driving up to the window at McDonalds and ordering a Blizzard was good. How can possibly live your shitty life, your wonderful life, your tiny notations in a foreign hand. Writers are like you and me: they fight for mother’s silver, they get new tires, they cancel their subscription to Vanity Fair. I felt that way when I was young. Those absurd poems were like a long stick that pulled me from the center of the lake to a wobbly raft. Of course, you hold on. Of course you cover your body. Those notebooks you carried with everywhere and the words that filled them. They way you set yourself apart, above. Sitting at a counter as if you were alone, as if the little show fooled anyone. And when you quit? You didn’t die. DIdn’t dig your own grave. Taps wasn’t heard. The sky didn’t turn purple. The yellow fields didn’t turn to gold.
For the nine millionth time, my mother has given my contact information to one of her friends who knows someone who knows someone who is writing or has written a book. She swears she will never do it again, and then just like most promises it somehow gets broken. The worst, by far, was about the twins, separated at birth, who meet again at a boxing championship. There was the guy with the book about license plates. There was the book about education reform and the memoir of a world traveler!! I’m aways polite, I always say: sure, send it. You never know! And the truth is: you never know. Anything could be something. It can come from anywhere. The real problem is when people who are not writers (meaning they haven’t spent hundreds of hours writing), sit down in front of a screen and believe they can write. And believe what they write should be published. And they know someone who knows someone who knows my mom and she pimps me out, again.
Here’s a new one: I feel good. I still hate myself in that essential artificial log glow way. Yes, the house of cards is a mild breeze away. Yes, the thrum of poetry I used to feel could fill a thimble. Yes, my boots are near collapse, my skin flaking. Do you ever as a writer get a break from fucking yourself in the head. Can you remember dancing in a Quebec disco, your body breaking for the first time. A doctor speaking gently? A pregnant woman on the subway so depressed you could weep for the fabric stretched taut across her body. Now, feel this. Your desk is your temple. Your mind is on fire. Forgiveness rests her gentle hand on your warm forehead. This is your time.
You know it’s time for the Q&A when the author closes the book, takes a sip of water, asks if there are any questions, and then stares into the abyss, known as who the fuck will ask the first question. It’s that awkward silence like before a guy makes a move, the silence after the toast at a dinner party, the silence when your spouse says: I’ve been thinking. The author asks again, his throat papery dry: any questions, no, no questions, surveying the crowd. Well…Then, there it is: a life preserver, a rope ladder, a lit cigarette. You will live. And then another question. And now your shoulders relax and you start fielding questions like Derek. I, for one, can’t ask questions because of having been traumatized by a 10th grade science teacher who said that the phrase “there are no stupid questions” was wrong. Proof: my question.
Betsy Lerner 