For some writers, it's a character. For others, it's place. And for still others, it's plot, or a snippet of dialogue. What's our way into the story? When do we have enough to begin? If we're climbing a mountain, we need something to grab on to. We wedge our foot into a crevice in the rock and pull ourselves up. We are feeling our way in the dark.
We have nothing to go by, but still, we must begin. It requires chutzpah-the Yiddish word for that ineffable combination of courage and hubris-to put down one word, then another, perhaps even accumulate a couple of flimsy pages, so few that they don't even form the smallest of piles, and call it the beginning of a novel. Or memoir. Or story. Or anything, really, other than a couple of flimsy pages.
When I'm between books, I feel as if I will never have another story to tell. The last book has wiped me out, has taken everything from me, everything I understand and feel and know and remember, and…that's it. There's nothing left. A low-level depression sets in. The world hides its gifts from me. It has taken me years to realize that this feeling, the one of the well being empty, is as it should be. It means I've spent everything. And so I must begin again.
I wait.
I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was "not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life." Colette's words, along with those of a few others, have migrated from one of my notebooks to another for over twenty years now. It's wisdom I need to remember-wisdom that is so easy to forget.
A number of years ago, I was in the midst of this waiting, and was growing impatient, despondent. This time, I was convinced, was different. This time, I really had nothing. The well was never going to fill up again. This kind of thinking usually leads me to ruminate about applying to medical school, and then I rapidly come to the conclusion that I'm too old, and can't even help my son with sixth grade math. I had the faintest hint of a new idea, but it was not something that felt alive inside of me. I felt no spark, saw no shimmer. The idea-and I knew enough to beware of free-floating ideas-had to do with a daughter who was estranged from her mother. The mother still lived in the small rural town, in the same house where the daughter had been raised, and now she was dying, so the daughter was forced to return to the place of her childhood.
Yeah, I know. Sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it? A variation on a theme of books we've all read. The daughter wasn't clear to me. The town was abstract, and I didn't even feel like writing a novel set in a small town. I had just done that. I had no sense of the nature of the estrangement. I went on like this for months-doing nothing, until one day, I was driving to New York City with my husband. It's nearly a two-hour drive from our house to the city, one which we do often. Michael was driving and I was looking out the window at the blur of the familiar landscape, when suddenly the entire novel came to me in a rush.
The story didn't take place in a small town, I realized. The mother lived in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side. In fact, she lived in the Apthorp, a building at Seventy-ninth Street and Broadway. On the twelfth floor. In a rent-stabilized apartment that she had bought when the building went condo. Her name was Ruth Dunne. She was a famous photographer who had taken provocative photographs of her daughter as a child. For years, I had been fascinated by Sally Mann, well-known for a series of controversial photographs of her children. I had wondered what had happened to the children, particularly the oldest daughter-what must it have been like to be her mother's muse?-but Sally Mann had never shimmered for me before, nor had the Apthorp, a building I had walked by countless times. But suddenly, here it all was. The mother, the daughter, the estrangement.
That was it. I had it-the toehold-my way to begin climbing the mountain. My novel, Black & White, presented itself to me during that car ride as if it had been waiting behind a curtain. Why that particular car ride on that particular day? Who knows. The easy silence between my husband and me. The familiar route. The overcast sky. It was the first time in my writing life that place had come first in defining a new piece of work. The moment I understood that the action took place in the Apthorp, the characters began to reveal themselves to me. Your way in will not always be the same. There are no rules, and you cannot force it, but you can show up every day and practice the art of waiting.
