Be Happy

Anna Lefler and I were having one of our freewheeling phone conversations when living emerged as the topic at hand. Lazy summers. Long meals. Deck sitting. Novel mapping. She wondered (out loud) if I'd ever read Barbara Holland's Endangered Pleasures. I confessed (a mumble) that I hadn't. Three days later (count 'em) Holland's book arrived at my door. I heard the box hit the stoop. I thought to myself, Oh no she didn't.

But she had.

Anna had also, this being an entirely separate matter and package altogether, sent along her Summer '09 hit parade CD (Anna knows music; Anna knows mood; I'm not giving away her medley secrets). So that there I was, trying to choose between sitting and reading, and standing and dancing, two things that cannot be done at once. I went for the dancing first (yes, I know you guessed that) and was joined for a spell by my son, who donned his shades and his best Hollister T for the invited-guests-only party.

(If I have not mentioned this before, our tiny house is surrounded by curtaining trees. What happens in this house stays in this house.)

In any case, I also made room for this lovely Endangered Pleasures, an older book with a timeless message. I leave you with this:

Indeed, pleasure may be almost as good for our health as broccoli; chemists tell us that happy people produce endorphins and enkephalins, brain chemicals that improve T-cell production and then enhance immunity to cancer, heart disease, and infections.

Let us then strive to be merry. Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending. Pleasure itself is endangered.

This late addition to the blog: I've posted over at HarperTeen on writing process. Pen or machine? I've lately gone retro.

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On Writing the Last Sentence First/John Irving

I love the New York Times Book Review conversations with authors—Sam Tanenhaus meets a writer meets a camera.

The current subject is John Irving, now nearing the completion of his twelfth book, Last Night in Twisted River.

What I find extraordinary about this conversation is what Irving reveals about his process. He writes, he says, his novel's last sentence first, and that sentence never changes, not even the slightest grammatical bit. Seven months to a year after finding the book's last sentence, Irving writes the novel's first words, and over a long stretch, then—years—the story develops. The beginning of an Irving novel will go through many iterations. The ending will not.

When I think back on the poems, short stories, memoirs, fables, and novels I've cranked my mind around—the things that I have tried, through the years, to write—I cannot think of a single instance in which I had glimpsed the last sentence before arriving right on the doorstep of that very last sentence. Vastly limited in my ability to look ahead in that way, I begin at the beginning, and I feel my way (often blindly) through. Never do I write so much as a pairing of words that goes unchallenged or unchanged (my books endure upwards of two or three dozen edits, and no sentence is spared). Never do I know, as intensely as Irving knows, enough to declare, This is done, solid, fixed in time and typeset.

(If I were to tell you how many iterations each of my blog posts go through, how they endure changes sometimes days after posting, you would ask yourself if my company is worth keeping.)

It works for Irving—this knowing where he's going. It no doubt works for others. But I never know, and I suppose I need this long bath of uncertainty to keep me rising at 4 AM, to keep me sitting here at my glass desk, to keep me hoping. I want to know, in my books and poems (in these blog posts, even), what is going to happen next, and in tiny fractions every day, my brain cedes bits and pieces.

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Unveiling

Jayne Anne Phillips made this essential point during the Q&A that followed her Lark and Termite reading at the Philadelphia Free Library this past Thursday: It is not until a book has been written and once again written that it reveals itself to the author—that the story itself becomes clear. For a long time one is only writing, only following the sound of words, the innuendo of character, the possibility of scenes.

Yesterday my own novel-in-progress revealed itself to me, finally. At last I understood just what is at stake, what must be raised up and made urgent.

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Poetic Beauty

For poetic beauty is a composite of ruthlessness, arrogance, irony, carnal love, imagination and memory, of light and dark, and if we cannot achieve all of these together, our result will be impoverished, precarious, and scarcely alive.

Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
"My Craft," in A Place to Live

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Writerly Process: Special Features

An impromptu gathering at our home last night—two dear friends and our son coming in and out from a party of his own. Late into the night (rather, earlier today), the conversation turned not to books, but to writers and to writer talk.

It was suggested (by one) that the writerly process is too internal to be of any communicable interest. That what goes on inside a writer's head should stay right there, in a writer's head—the poem or the story or the book ideally speaking exclusively for itself. Process talk has inherent wings in the field of design (how did the green swan-footed couch come to sit beside the pink silk lampshade?) or in film (who doesn't luxuriate in the "Mad Men" special features? who doesn't want to know every last thing about that series' how?) or in the kitchen (which spice and how much and what is the chemistry of baking powder?), but not in writing, where the obsession is the writer's alone and the gist, the longing, the choice making, the fears, the megalomania do not make for relatable tales.

I didn't sleep the rest of the night, retracing the contours of this conversation in my head. I considered how long it takes to produce a story, even, that is worthy of another's glance—of all that time in between that is only choice making, only process. I thought of this blog, which is nothing if not process talk—the splintering off of obsessions, the dwelling with them, the fervent hope that what is said will be of some inherent interest.

I thought of you, reading this blog. I thought to say, Thank you. And happy new year.

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Nothing but Ghosts ARCS

Little by little, it happens. An image floats in, a voice makes itself heard, a story evolves and devolves and is thwarted and is found, and an agent says, Keep writing, then an editor steps in, and then questions are raised, and some brilliant someone designs a cover, and, finally (it seems impossible at times, it seems like it won't happen) a book gets made.

But none of it seems real to me until the galleys are in hand—advance readers copies. Today ARCS for Nothing but Ghosts were dropped (I heard the sound, I went running) onto my front porch. Ten of them. Two of which I mailed at once, one of which I drove to the local library, seven of which now sit nearby. Vivian (hipwritermama) said, "Take a photograph, Beth." She said, in other words, Take a moment. Celebrate.

Why am I always afraid to celebrate?

This time I won't be.

A glass of chianti at the ready.

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Process Talk

My dear Seattle-transplanted-to-the-big-apple friend Lisa Bishop (over at HarperTeen) has posted some of my recent musings on process. Here again we meet up with the ever-wise John Steinbeck while bumping up against the ever-churning yours truly.

If you have some time, I hope you'll visit. You'll get to meet Anna Godbersen, Ellen Schreiber, Carol Snow, and Susan Juby while you are there.

http://www.myspace.com/harperteen

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