Hold the Cube
Hello Friends.
Right about now I would have been getting ready to go to Mass MoCA for a short residency. It was intended to jumpstart my next novel, to make that first sprint. I’ve managed to do that in some ways, best I can. This is not a silver lining. I really would rather be in the Berkshires with no one to clean up after or cook for but myself, working at odd hours, isolated for entirely different reasons. But that aside, I have begun the early work of writing this next book. For me this literally means typing up my handwritten notes, some of which are scenes, and some of which are questions and thematic note taking gathered over the past few years. I use Scrivener, which is a writing app, and that first commitment to typed words, even though I know it’s so so far from what the book will hopefully be, always feels like a large and terrifying leap. When I opened up the file for the first time, naming it but nothing else, I got up from my desk and walked around my living room (which my writing desk is in the middle of, more or less) for over 10 minutes. Was I really going to do this? More so, was I really going to do this knowing I’d do it badly? But how else?
I wish there was a better and less trodden metaphor here, but when I was pregnant with my first child and reading various books on pregnancy, trying to imagine how I’d get through labor, I read in one that “the only way out is through.” I believe this book was the very popular Hypnobirthing. I also believe this is the same book in which there was an exercise in which you were instructed to hold an ice cube in your palm and let it melt in your grip for as long as you could. Try it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. So much is.
When I work with coaching clients, particularly on novels, I find myself talking a lot about the long faith of a big writing project. The only thing that we get better at is writers, truly, is building a memory for the cycle of feelings we experience on a larger project. When you love it, when you hate it, when you just don’t really know. When it disappoints you and confounds you and gets you excited all over again. But, much like childbirth, it will feel different, more or less bearable in unexpected ways, person to person and project to project. If you give birth more than once, you’ll find new pockets of things you didn’t know or couldn’t predict as you repeat the process.
There was also a part for me, during both my labors, that I decided, oh, no, I just won’t go through with it. Ha. Of course I couldn’t do that then, though somehow, each time, my brain thought I could? And with a book you can absolutely cut and run. You don’t have to deliver a damn thing. You can back out, pretend it never happened. There is no registry, no expectant family members, no baby actually on its way. But I don’t. I keep the faith that this steaming mess will become something. The thing is, babies and children are less shaped by us than we like to imagine. They grow and learn and develop with their own instincts to survive and thrive. Books, though, require tending. Faith. Is it a strange time to be at such a faithful place in my work? I don’t think so. And maybe this is why I have been able, most days, to keep working. Because writing books takes about forever. It requires me to imagine that distant time when the world will be so different and my book, which is currently 30,000 words that are weak approximations of the big ideas I want them to be, will be done. I’m no scientist but I can say with high confidence that the world will seem recognizable to us long before this book comes out. There will be years to draft and years to revise and then the acquisition and publication process, its own set of years. All the while the world will tumble and change and we will just hang on with whatever is left. The only way out is through.
Reading, Thinking, Feeling
Reading books has been hard for me lately, but in our house we’ve been watching and enjoying the latest seasons of La Casa del Papel/Money Heist (save yourself; turn off the dubbing), the Elena Ferrante adaptation, Better Things (top five favorite shows maybe…ever?), and Run, which is new. I would watch Merritt Wever eat a bowl of cereal. She’s perfect. We also watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which was as tense and sexy and gorgeous as everyone says it is. We have been awash in subtitles, which is great for having no choice but to put down your phone.
I’ve been worrying about the ruins that are forming while we wait, the community and economic devastation to New York that I can’t see because it’s beyond my walking radius. Places like this. Coogan’s is across the street from my daughter’s school. The last time I was there was last fall after a reading at Word Up Books. I had an ice cream sundae and a mini split of champagne and WHAM! was playing through the speakers in the bathroom. I didn’t know it was a send off, but it was an apt one. It reminds me of my favorite New York City essay, which will absolutely be a double heart-splitter come September 11th, when I usually re-read it.
Where to Find Me
I’ll be reading from my novel for the first time ever for THE ANTIBODY reading series alongside Jennifer Rosner (The Yellow Bird Sings), and essayist Audrey Olivero. It will be followed by discussion moderated by our host Brian Gresko. Tuesday, April 28th at 8pm. You can register via Zoom, so you can ask questions and I can see your face, or you can watch it as it live streams on YouTube if you don’t want to hear the word ZOOM ever again.
The other day I was on a customer service chat trying to sort out a return and the representative’s last message to me after the usual corporate sign off was “Stay safe,” which crossed with my message to her which was “Stay well.” Stay safe, stay well.
Talk soon,
Danielle