..It was a summer of wanting impossible things.
...Javier wore a dry expression on his face, one I now know is common to those children who parent their parents....
...Mixed feelings were confusing feelings, and I didn‘t feel confused except as to why it was so hard for everyone to understand that I existed. Living this way felt like discovering your shoe was nailed to the floor, but only one of them, so that you paced, always, a circle of possibility, defined by the limited imaginations of others.
..And this, of course, is why you should never read for yourself. You can‘t give yourself the impersonal reading you need. It‘s much like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction—to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see. I think few of us know enough about our lives to know our place in them—we can‘t see ourselves as we might a character in a novel, with the same level of detachment and appraisal. We can‘t, in other words, see ourselves as I wanted to that day when I entered the store and bought my cards. We think this means this, and that means that, and in the meantime the true meaning is somewhere else, and the omen lies on the ground, face-down, as good as mute. And the reader is sitting there looking at the cards in front of him, trying to read for himself as his life moves on in ways he can‘t see.
..I can still hear her say it: Put all your deaths, accidents, and diseases up front, at the beginning. Where possible. "Where possible" was often her rejoinder. We were always to keep in mind that it might not be possible to follow rules or guidelines because of what the writing needed.
..The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feelingI felt that day "the consolations of the mask," where you make a place that doesn‘t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn‘t know this then.
...Getting pages back from her was like getting to the dance floor and seeing your favorite black shirt under the nightclub‘s black light, all the hair and dust that was always there but invisible to you, now visible.
..You want vivid writing. How do we get vivid writing? Verbs, first. Precise verbs. All of the action on the page, everything that happens, happens in the verbs. The passive voice needs gerunds to make anything happen. But too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus: running, sitting, speaking, laughing, inginginginging. No. Don‘t do it. The verbs tell a reader whether something happened once or continually, what is in motion, what is at rest. Gerunds are lazy, you don‘t have to make a decision and soon, everything is happening at the same time, pell-mell, chaos. Don‘t do that. Also, bad verb choices mean adverbs. More often than not, you don‘t need them. Did he run quickly or did he sprint? Did he walk slowly or did he stroll or saunter?
..You are the only one of you, she said. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it‘s on Tunis or the trees outside your window, is what matters. Don‘t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything‘s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible.
..Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer‘s experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also radical—no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of "the job." If you‘re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don‘t have to tell the reader how to feel....
..Am I crushing you? he asked.
..No, I said. This was exactly what I had meant. The weight of him pressed me out. I felt covered, safe; something dark in me retreated and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt safe. I was still me—the switch was not flicked, but the terrible feeling haunting me then didn‘t reach me. Which is one of the things that love can feel like. Peter stayed there for some time. He may have fallen asleep at some point. And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can‘t reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself, made me feel the place in me where I attached to the world.
..."You succeed, you celebrate, you stop writing. You don‘t succeed, you despair, you stop writing. Just keep writing. Don‘t let your success or failure stop you. Just keep writing."
...Deborah drew lines around what was invented, and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what we invent, we control, and how what we don‘t, we don‘t—and that it shows. That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and that the problem stems from the way we‘ve already invented so much of what we think we know about ourselves, without admitting it.
..12. You write the novel because you have to write it. You do it because it is easier to do than to not do. You can‘t write a novel you don‘t have to write.
..88. Cheever said of the novel that it should have the direct and concise qualities of a letter. To whom and by whom, I wonder, as I think also of how I feel this is true. I want to argue briefly—it is not a letter from the author to the reader—and then I stop. It is not a letter, just like a letter. This being the kind of question—to whom, from whom—that, if you sat with it, could begin a novel.
...I came up with rules I still live by: always keep your rent low, no matter the city you live in; write for money more than for love, but don‘t forget to write for love; always ask for more money on principle; decide how much money you must make per month and then make more than that as a minimum; revise the sum upward year by year, to match inflation. Do your taxes. Write off everything you can.
..I think writers are often terrifying to normal people—that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system—for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.
...He notes that the root of "drama" is the Greek verb dran, which means "to do" or "to act," and this became one of the most powerful insights for me. Memorable action is always more important to a story—action can even operate the way rhyme and meter do, as a mnemonic device. You remember a story for what people did.
...this was, in a sense, what a novel was: a thought so long it could not be perceived all at once. His assured way of saying that a story "built around a single person is not, as some people think, thereby unified" gave me an understanding of both, and what it meant with regard to his description of the way Homer "constructed the Odyssey, and the Iliad, too, around a single action"—of the grand kind—was for me like watching lightning. A single grand action unifies a story more than a single person, the characters memorable for the parts they play inside it....
...A child‘s anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting her instead to guess my thoughts. That adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it.
..Most people misunderstand the crime of sexual abuse. They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But it isn‘t like someone entering your house and stealing something from you. Instead,
someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you....
...But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I‘d had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end—the word FINE painted on it.
..It‘s Freud, he said. It refers to the Freudian repetition cycle. We repeat something so that we can forget the pain of it. We set out to get it right instead, to fix what went wrong. But we can never fix the past, he said. We then only repeat it.
..In repetition is forgetting.
..Invent something that fits the shape of what you know.
..To do this, use the situations but not the events of your life.
..Invent a character like you, but not you.
..Use the names of neither the willing nor the unwilling. Especially those who will change from willing to unwilling once the novel is published and they understand what they have given you.
..Know that this may be anyone, even you.
..You do this because you must betray this character in the way all writers betray all of their characters, done to reveal the ways they are human.
..To do less than this is only PR.
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