Reading the Times last weekend was a curious exercise in juxtapositions.  First, I read an article called “On Top of the Happiness Racket” about Gretchen Rubin’s book, “The Happiness Project.”  Then I turned to the magazine section and found an article by Jonah Lehrer, entitled “Depression’s Upside.” The title of this essay was a quote contained in that article by neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, who interviewed 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history, and found that eighty percent of them met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression.

Well, that comes as no surprise to most writers, or to the people who love and live with them.

There are so many books out these days on attaining happiness, though, that I suspect writers aren’t the only people who could use a little cheering up.

Now, I will admit that I haven’t read Ms. Rubin’s book, nor am I likely to.  I have read the free sample Amazon was kind enough to send to my Kindle, and I will, from reading that sample, agree with the folks who say Ms. Rubin’s got a nice chatty writing style, she’s well read, and from what I’ve seen on her blog, she makes some good suggestions, like “get more sleep” “Bring a sweater” and “Be polite.”  I think she’s quite earnest in her desire to improve what she describes as “midlife malaise,” however, I knew this book wasn’t for me when the book blurb told me she spent “a year test-driving the wisdom of the ages.”  A whole year?  Hmmm… According to her blog, she studied, “Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah.”  Oh dear. Oprah next to Aristotle?  Of course, this sort of framing is tailor-made for the self-help publishing world.  And her story doesn’t, for me, seem particularly inspiring.  She is already happily married (her father-in-law is Robert Rubin, former Treasury secretary, who stepped down last year as an adviser to Citigroup), has great kids,oodles and oodles of money, good familial relationships, good health, great career (one of the books she’s written is called, “Power, Money, Fame, Sex, a user’s guide”)… I’ll quote here from Jan Hoffman, author of the Times article:

You can make the razzy noise yourself

Ms. Rubin flicks away the suggestion that the just-us-folks tone of the book may be a tad disingenuous. “Bob [Robert Rubin] is important to me because he’s my father-in-law, so that’s the way he’s relevant in the book,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to hide it. It just didn’t come up naturally.”

Readers may not realize that she doesn’t live on the generic row of low-rise apartment houses on the cover of the book, suggesting the West Village or Park Slope in Brooklyn. Her triplex is in a neo-Georgian building on the Upper East Side.

And to those who may feel daunted by how she does it all — the charts, the reading, writing, exercising, volunteering, socializing, parenting, scrapbooking and glue-gunning? Relax. She has a sitter and a housecleaner….

…Writing a self-help book with epigrams and advice embraced by thousands is, in Ms. Rubin’s view, certainly work worth doing. She has created her own cottage industry devoted to happiness (and to promoting book sales): the blog, an interactive companion site with a happiness project tool box, a monthly newsletter, weekly resolutions and tips, videos. There is also a starter kit for groups wishing to tackle her project.

Following her advice can take more work than fans bargain for. Diane Owens’s happiness project group meets in the public library of Mount Pleasant, S.C. — 13 members, all women, most widowed or divorced. “At the ‘love’ chapter, people said, ‘This isn’t a good subject for me,’ ” Ms. Owens said. When she asked who had started a resolutions chart, only two members raised their hands.

Okay, enough said.

The truth is I’m perplexed by North America’s dogged pursuit of ‘happiness,’ since the variety of happiness I see people craving is the frothy, brightly-lit, sugary emotion that has little value.  It’s what Eric Wilson describes in his book, “Against Happiness” this way:

Really, what’s lost in all of this? Isn’t it a mark of our American genius that we can now envision a cosmos of total contentment, a universe in which all things that chagrin us, from depression to corpulence, from distance to death, might soon simply fade away?  We have created that which Bradford dreamed and Franklin schemed.  We are smoothing over the rough edges of aging. We are transforming our dirty cities into massive shopping malls. We have even translated war into blips on our television screens. There is no better time to play at living. No wonder almost every American claims to be happy.

In Johnah Leherer’s article on Depression’s Upside, I find more nourishing fare.  Mr. Leherer discusses the recent conversation in psychiatric circles about the benefits of depression, melancholy and rumination (the looping, obsessive thought process that defines depression), and how medication may not, in the long run, be the best bet. He talks about Darwin’s depression which Darwin said allowed him “to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work,” its clarifying force, how it focuses the mind on its most essential problems, and the purpose of suffering.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.

Andy Thomson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, and Paul Andrews, an evolutional psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, think this might be true,  — rumination might have a purpose. Psychiatry “has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods.” What if that weren’t so? The D.S.M. manual, the diagnostic bible for psychiatrists, we are told, does not take stressors such as divorce, profession failure, disillusionment etc., into account when diagnosing depressive disorder (with the exception of bereavement, when we’re given two months to get over it before it becomes clinically troubling).

Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse”), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?”) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?”). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”

Which is not to say that depression is always useful.  Sometimes, I suspect, it’s brain chemistry gone haywire, which is a different case.  But I’m by nature melancholy and I’ve suffered from situational-induced depression more than once, and I agree with Thomson who says, “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful. Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”

Maybe there's a silver lining to depression

I’ve also been medicated for depression.  And for me, it wasn’t useful.  For one thing, it triggered the craving for alcohol again after thirteen years sobriety.  I didn’t drink, thank God, but it was awful.  And the drugs didn’t solve the underlying issues, just numbed them.  A friend who helped me get sober years ago suggest that early sobriety would probably involve some depression, since I’d been self-medicating and not feeling many emotions for years.  She suggested I try to just go through it, sit with it, mine it for meaning.  If I medicated, I just might have to go through it all again later.  This is much the same as what modern research substantiates:

Consider a 2005 paper led by Steven Hollon, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University: he found that people on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued. In contrast, patients given a form of cognitive talk therapy had a relapse rate of 31 percent. And Hollon’s data aren’t unusual: several studies found that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. “The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything,” Thomson says. “In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever.”

Huh. Another interesting tidbit in this article is the evidence from a recent study that found “’expressive writing’” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes.”  Well, we writers have long known that the only way to live with melancholy is to write!

How sad (pun intended) I find it that we’ve created a society (and an industry) around avoiding sadness.  When 30 writers were interviewed by neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen about their mental history, 80% met the criteria for “some form of depression.”  She says, “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down.”  Lehrer says she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering. If you’re on the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

The article concludes by saying, “The challenge, f course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair.  To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness.  A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.”

Perhaps not everyone is meant to be 'happy'

Well, for years I drank too much to get away from the pain, until I couldn’t drink any more.  Then I had to face the pain I’d been running from, and over the fifteen years since, I’ve still had to face crippling pain from time to time.  But I’ve learned there are enormous benefits from wandering in that dark wood, and I’m delighted I wasn’t distracted by a search for the sort of happiness that can be charted with checks and ‘x’s’ on a wall chart.

There are innumerable ways to avoid getting your writing done for the day. Most writers are geniuses at the art of procrastination, and I am no exception.  Here are a few of the techniques I’ve used so far this morning…

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me," C.S. Lewis

I woke up at 6:45 a.m.  Tea.  Can’t think without it.

Call a friend.  He left a message yesterday.  I’m sure it’s important and couldn’t possibly wait until after I’ve done my work. Luckily, he’s an early riser. Lovely commiserating conversation about the creative process.  Doesn’t help a bit.

Laundry.  Well, it has to get done.

Tidy the room.  I’m not one of those people who can work in a messy room. So, spend 20 minutes cleaning up.

I’ve cleaned the room and deserve more tea.

Check my email — this one’s fatal.  For once I start looking at the stuff in my inbox, a good hour will pass without me getting any useful work done at all.  Do I really need to shop for the newest spring bra styles?  Will that tantalizing offer from an on-line bookstore really disappear if I don’t look at it right now?  Hm, a friend has sent a link to an interesting article on Depression’s Upside.  Just my cup of tea, so to speak. And it’s nice and long.

Thinking of procrastination, I go to an old article on Slate.com about this very thing.  They had  a whole issue on procrastination.  How thoughtful of them.  I discover there is even a 12-step program for procrastinators.  That doesn’t take up much time.  I don’t need another 12-step program.

Truman, not writing

However, there’s another article about Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison. That’s better.  That might almost be called research.  Amidst discussion of alcoholism, perfectionism and depression, it says this:  “Neurologist Alice Flaherty attempts a working distinction between procrastination and block—the fearsome Orthrus of the creative process—in her 2004 book The Midnight Disease: The Drive To Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain: “A blocked writer has the discipline to stay at the desk but cannot write. A procrastinator, on the other hand, cannot bring himself to sit down at the desk; yet if something forces him to sit down he may write quite fluently.” Well, that sounds intriguing.  Maybe I have writer’s block.  Or maybe not.  I can write, just not The Book.

Perhaps a walk would help.  Weather’s filthy.  All the better.  Huge waves, biting wind, no one else mad enough to be out. Bracing.  Invigorating.

Half and hour later, I return freezing and wet.  I need a shower.

Clean and warm again, I need more tea.

Perhaps I’ll begin (?) the writing day by reading some poetry.  That should loosen up the creative synapses.  First, over to The Writer’s Almanac, then Poetry Daily. Good, but it makes me want Mary Oliver.  I have her book, Owls and Other Fantasies on my desk.  An owl figures rather prominently in the book I’m working on, after all.  I read, “In the night, when the owl is less than exquisitely swift and perfect, the scream of the rabbit is terrible. But the scream of the owl, which is not of pain and hopelessness and the fear of being plucked out of the world, but of the sheer rollicking glory of the death-bringer, is more terrible still.” Rollicking glory of the death-bringer.  That’s rather good —

Larus marinus

– Oh, look!  A Great Black-Backed Gull hovering outside the window.  I should know that latin name.  I look it up.  (Larus marinus).

Heavens, is that the time? (12:00) Well, it’s tea time again, which is lucky, since I’m feeling a bit drained from all this ‘research.”

When I get back to my desk, I’ll have to write this blog… you know, before I start my ‘real’ writing…  Unless I have lunch first…

DEVOTION by Dani Shapiro

Author Dani Shapiro, author of the novels Black & White and Family History, the bestselling memoir Slow Motion, is coming out with a new memoir, this one about her spiritual journey, called Devotion. Recently she wrote a terrific piece in the LA Times about the difficulties facing writers today. I wish I’d written it myself.  In fact, she says many of the things I’ve been saying in this blog for some time now.  Here it is:

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student working on short stories and flirting with the idea of a novel, I came across an essay that was being passed around my circle of friends. It was titled “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years,” and the author was the legendary editor and founder of New American Review, Ted Solotaroff.

Ten years! In the cold! Solotaroff wondered where all the talented young writers he had known or published when he was first editing New American Review had gone. Only a few had flourished. Some, he speculated, had ended up teaching, publishing occasionally in small journals. But most had just . . . given up. “It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself,” he wrote. “

Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without.”

The writer’s apprenticeship — or perhaps, the writer’s lot — is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. In the 20 years that I’ve been publishing books, I have fared better than most. I sold my first novel while still in graduate school and published six more books, pretty much one every three years, like clockwork. I have made my living as a writer, living off my advances while supplementing my income by teaching and writing for newspapers and magazines.

As smooth as this trajectory might seem, however, my internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can’t do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed — whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review — has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.

Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away.

Dani Shapiro

I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students’ eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don’t do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it’s the truth. They are embarking on a life in which apprenticeship doesn’t mean a cushy summer internship in an air-conditioned office but rather a solitary, poverty-inducing, soul-scorching voyage whose destination is unknown and unknowable.

If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they’d become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.

The instant score

Rereading Solotaroff’s essay, as I did recently, I found that he was writing of a time that now seems quaint, almost innocent. By the 1980s, he bemoaned, the expectations young writers had of their future lives had “been formed by the mass marketing and subsidization of culture and by the creative writing industry. Their career models are not, say, Henry Miller or William Faulkner, but John Irving or Ann Beattie.”

With the exception of Irving, most of the writers referenced by Solotaroff (Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joan Chase, Douglas Unger, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Alan Hewat) would draw blank looks from my students, and the creative writing industry of the mid-1980s now seems like a few mom-and-pop shops scattered on a highway lined with strip malls and mega-stores. Today’s young writers don’t peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller — and did.

The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn’t reward persistence, that doesn’t see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn’t trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry — always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media — has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

I recently had the honor of acting as guest editor for the anthology “Best New American Voices 2010,” the latest volume in a long-running annual series that contains some of the finest writing culled from students in graduate programs and conferences. Joshua Ferris, Nam Le, Julie Orringer and Maile Meloy are just a few of the writers published in previous editions, but now the series is coming to an end. Presumably, it wasn’t selling, and its publisher could no longer justify bringing it out. Important and serious and just plain good books, the kind that require years spent in the trough of false starts and discarded pages — these books need to be written far away from this culture of mega-hits, and yet that culture is so pervasive that one wonders how a young writer is meant to be strong enough to face it down.

The new bottom line

At the risk of sounding like I’m writing from my rocking chair, things were different when I started. My first three books sold, in combination, fewer than 15,000 copies in hardcover. My editor at the time told me there were 4,000 serious readers in America, and if I reached them, I was doing a good job. As naïve as this may sound, it never occurred to me that my modest sales record might one day spell the end of my career. I felt cared for, respected. I continued to be published, and eventually, my sales improved. I wrote a bestselling memoir, appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and published a subsequent novel that found a pretty wide readership. My timing has been good thus far — and lucky.

But in the last several years, I’ve watched friends and colleagues suddenly find themselves without publishers after having brought out many books. Writers now use words like “track” and “mid-list” and “brand” and “platform.” They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff’s essay: “Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.”

The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we’d do it all over again if we had to. And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves. But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding — that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.

Could not have said it better.  Now, I’m off to buy her new book.

Lent begins today, which is, in Christian tradition, the period leading up to Easter and is intended as a time of reflection, of going within to hear the small still voice, and to take stock of who we are, to face ourselves and not be afraid of our imperfections.

On the Explore Faith website I found this:

Rather than viewing Lent as a season of drab and dreary self-examination and sacrifice that waters down its spiritual potency, we might see it as a time offered to us each year simply to sort things out. It can be an intentional period of 40 days that can be used to realign the disorder in our life that keep us out of balance with our own soul and with the God who loves us boundlessly, unconditionally, and eternally. Using Lent to take an honest look at the disarray inside ourselves with an eye to discarding the debris leaves us renewed, with eagerness, enthusiasm, gratitude, and a readiness to offer ourselves to God and to the world.

And in a book I’m reading called, INNER WORK by Jungian Analyst Robert Johnson  on working with the unconscious, I find this:

Shadow moon

Our egos divide the world into positive and negative, good and bad.  Most aspects of our shadows, these qualities that we see as “negative,” would in fact be valuable strengths if we made them conscious.  Characteristics that look immoral, barbaric, or embarrassing to us are the “negative” side of a valuable energy, a capacity we could make sue of.  You will never find anything in the unconscious that will not be useful and good when it is made conscious and brought to the right level.

What part of you will be hidden behind this symbol, the thief?  Perhaps a lively trickster, with all sorts of surprising talents.  Perhaps a juvenile delinquent in you who has never been allowed to grow up and put his heroic urge into something useful and mature.  Perhaps is is Dionysus, who has had to hid out in the unconscious because you have no natural place for his ecstatic and lyrical spirit in the midst of your purposeful life.

For people like me, who choose to stay away from drugs and alcohol one day at a time, it is often suggested we make a moral inventory of ourselves.  Recently I had someone, newly sober, ask what on earth the point of THAT was?  Well, I think the point is that few of us really have a clue about why we do the things we do, or why we can’t seem to do the things we know are good for us and for others.  Some of us (in fact, every honest alcoholic I’ve ever known) has done some things they’re not proud of, and don’t want to admit doing, but which fill them with shame no matter how they try to ignore them. Making a moral inventory of ourselves is a wonderful opportunity to examine feelings of  guilt, resentment, fear, and anger; to examine unthinkable thoughts, attitudes toward sex, opinions of ourselves, as well as an inventory of our assets. In short, like Lent, it’s an opportunity look in our cupboards and see what’s rattling around in there, what we want to keep, what needs repair, and what we might have outgrown, or never needed in the first place.

Heck, when I took my moral inventory, I found out a lot of the stuff in my cupboard didn’t even belong to me; it belonged to my mother, bless her.

"Lit" by Mary Karr

I also just finished reading Mary Karr’s excellent memoir of sobriety, LIT.  In it she recounts a moment when her sobriety adviser suggested she chroncile the resentments chewing her up:

I’ve been looking at myself in therapy off and on since age nineteen, I say.

A lot of therapy is looking through a child’s eyes, she says.  This is looking through an adult’s.

I like that.  Looking through an adult’s eyes. I’m not big on the whole inner child stuff.  My inner child’s a bit of a brat and a whiner, prone to selfishness and tantrums. The Little Princess. Snort.

When Karr finally does make a moral inventory of herself, she shares the stuff she isn’t too pleased about with a Franciscan monk.  When she’s done Brother Francis says,

Leave all that stuff here with me. God wants you to put this stuff down now.  Go wear the world like a loose garment.  And be of good cheer.  If you let God in, He’ll take this shame from you.

Even if you don’t believe in GOD, as in the big old guy with a beard, sorta like Santa Claus, only a Santa Claus who’s occasionally (or frequently) pissed off at you, even if your belief runs to science, or mystery, or even just your very best self, you can switch out the word “God” for one of those, and the advice is still good.  Leave all that stuff here.  The part of you that’s mentally healthy and useful to yourself and others wants you to put it down.  Be grateful for what you’ve got, and never mind what you haven’t got.  If you let humility and wonder and love and service to others guide you, you’ll get rid of unnecessary shame.

Now me, I don’t quibble with words when I can help it.  God’s a good enough word for me.  What I mean when I say God is indescribable anyway, so what does it matter?

Keep it simple.

I’m fascinated by curious juxtapositions, which always get me thinking, and this week presented an intriguing one.  First, and most sadly, J.D. Salinger passed away, a man as famous for hating being famous as he was for writing “The Catcher in the Rye.”  Second, Martin Levin, Books Editor for The Globe and Mail, wrote an article entitled, “You suck, and so does your writing” wherein he bemoans the fact Canadian writers aren’t more brutal (and witty) in their invective against one another.

Thanks for sharing.

Now, I know Martin Levin slightly, and look forward to getting to know him better, and admire him immensely, and I can see how such literary feuds as those between Gore Vidal and most everyone else would sell papers, but I’m not sure more eviscerating reviews are really what either writers or literature needs.  I sympathize with Levin’s wanting to get more eyes glued to the page, but as a writer, I cringe.

Partly I cringe because I fear coming under that sort of attack myself, but also because I’ve seen what it can do to good writers, and I’ve seen how, sometimes, the reviewer’s aim is not to serve literature, but to feed the fire of their own careers on the charred bones of their peers.   The emotional cost to a writer can be scathing, and I’ve known more than one writer to be irrevocably silenced.

Some might say that if you can’t stand the heat, you’ve no business baking pies in the first place.  Possibly.  Then again…it’s far easier to write when one is, at least, not dodging stones.  All writers have horrible, snaggle-toothed critics living in our heads, and I for one don’t need any more.  I’m not saying books shouldn’t be fairly reviewed, but I have yet to find an occasion where snark and cruelty is the best response.

I think, for example, of the peculiar review Walter Kirn wrote for Jeffrey Lent’s book, A Peculiar Grace. There was, alas, no grace in the review, just, lots of verbal pyrotechnics that displayed Kirn’s own abilities to turn a phrase.  It’s stayed with me that review, like one of those trailers for horror movies that pop up on the television without warning and leave me with horrible images seared on my brain.  Or, as my grandmother would say after eating cucumbers…it repeats. (I’m now far less inclined to read Mr. Kirn,and more inclined towards Mr. Lent.  I loved Mr. Lent’s In the Fall, and look forward to reading all his work.) Perhaps I ought to note here that Mr. Lent lives in the Vermont woods.  Yes, exactly.

Martin’s right, of course, when he says, “Writers have always loathed and envied other members of the tribe.”  I could give a few recent, truly nasty examples in Canadian literary circles, but I’m not going to, because exposing people’s bitterness, pettiness, insecurity and general bad behavior doesn’t feel either kind or useful to me.

One of the great challenges of being a writer is dealing with envy – the only one of the seven deadly sins which gives the practitioner no pleasure whatsoever, but is corrosive and clinging – and not dealing with it can be psychosis-inducing.  Salinger loathed fame, in part because of the nastiness of it.  In an article first published in 1963 by Commonweal, (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/salinger-and-his-critics)  by Donald P. Costello, discussing Salinger and his critics, Costello asked why critics were beginning to jilt Mr. Salinger and said, “Perhaps it is partly because a critic finds it as much fun to destroy a reputation as to mold one.”

Thoreau's cabin. A seductive option for the battered writer.

Fun?  Really?  I understand Salinger’s decision to move to the woods completely.  I do it myself from time to time, although thus far I’ve returned after a period of emotional and spiritual recalibration.  Perhaps one day I won’t.

We live in an era where fame, any kind of fame, is admired.  We are seduced into thinking that infamy is as desirable as the respect of one’s peers, and that public recognition is more important that personal integrity.  Do we want to further that?  Although it may be tasty for the moment, experience tells me it has no lasting value, rather, that as I said before, it is corrosive.

Martin Levin himself mentions the notoriously snarky Dale Peck, who said about Rick Moody, “He is the worst writer of his generation.”  Peck was known for this sort of review to the extent his collection was called, “Hatchet Jobs.”  When his novel “What We Lost” came out, literary folks rubbed their hands together, waiting for all those writers he’d slashed to return the favor.  They didn’t.  It was a good book, and people said so.  Dale Peck has since given up such vitriolic reviews.  One can’t help but wonder if the agony of waiting to be hit over the head with a hammer cured him.

I don’t think Canadian writers are too nice.  We have our fair share of nastiness, sure; I just don’t see any reason to encourage it. Timothy Findley, who was a friend and mentor, told me criticism at its best explores how a piece of writing should be approached, whether it achieves its intention, and if not, why not.  As for the rest, if we want our writers to keep going, let’s review books with equal portions of fairness, consideration, insight and respect.  Otherwise, we might just find all the writers follow Salinger’s example and head for the woods, writing only for themselves.  What a loss.

Last night I watched Stephen Colbert skewer fame, God bless him.  Here’s the clip:

Everyone loves me, says Colbert. I am known, therefore I am. My life has meaning because everything I do is important, and known by other people. In heaven, everyone’s a celebrity.

Which is, oddly, my idea of hell.

This week J.D. Salinger died, a man who was the antithesis of the celebrity generation.  In a recent appreciation of Salinger by his long-time friend Lillian Ross, I found the following:

The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them: the destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation. The trouble with all of us, he believed, is that when we were young we never knew anybody who could or would tell us any of the penalties of making it in the world on the usual terms: “I don’t mean just the pretty obvious penalties, I mean the ones that are just about unnoticeable and that do really lasting damage, the kind the world doesn’t even think of as damage.” He talked about how easily writers could become vain, complaining that they got puffed up by the same “authorities” who approved putting monosodium glutamate in baby food.

This morning I stumbled to my computer to find this quote by Paul Brunton waiting for me:  A humble life dedicated to a great purpose, becomes great.

Philosopher and mystic, Paul Brunton

On the back of one of his books, it says this:  Paul Brunton (1898-1981) was a British philosopher, mystic, and traveler. He left a successful journalistic career to live among yogis, mystics, and holy men, and studied a wide variety of Eastern and Western esoteric teachings. With his entire life dedicated to an inward and spiritual quest, Brunton felt charged with the task of communicating his experiences to others and, as the first person to write accounts of what he learned in the East from a Western perspective, his works had a major influence on the spread of Eastern mysticism to the West.

I can’t help but wonder how the quality of literature, music, film, and life in general might not be improved if what we did in our public lives came solely (soul-ly?) from that sense of being ‘charged,’ or as some might name it, ‘answering a call?’  What if people stopped being interested or obsessed by what some person they don’t know is doing with this particular nano-second in their day, and more concerned with living humbly, in service to great purpose?

I wonder.

The anti-fame movement. Encouraged on this blog. You heard it here first. Snort.  (Yes, I do get the irony, people, but I also think God loves a good belly-laugh.)

Thoughts?

Now and then I get emails from writers who are also recovering alcoholics, asking me whether I found it difficult to write once I got sober.

I tell them I did, but then writing’s always difficult.  If it was easy, everyone would be doing it (and although some days it feels like everyone IS writing a book, they really aren’t, and among those who are, few do it well).

They tell me they don’t know if they can write without the drugs or the booze, and fear they’ve lost their creative edge.

I tell them my own experience with those fears, and how the truth is that I never wrote anything worth publishing while I was drinking.  I usually refer them to an essay I wrote for THE LITERARY REVIEW where I talk about my own struggle learning to write without the dubious assistance of mind-altering substances.

I got another one of those emails just this morning, from a woman whose writing I think is terrific.  She was my student for a while and one of those who showed real talent.  Now she’s been sober for a little over a year and she’s starting to feel as though life’s pretty boring without “my fiction worlds to swim around in.”  She assures me she doesn’t want to drink over it, though.  Absolutely, positively, not gonna drink.  Nope.  No drinking.  Really.

I hope not.

For some people – those normal folks who don’t have a drinking problem –  a glass of scotch next to the keyboard may in fact rev up the creative juices a bit.  It might even do that if you ARE an alcoholic.  Briefly.  But if you’ve got the addictive gene it will turn on you.  That’s a promise.  It will wipe out your ability to write.  That is, as Tom Waits once said, “the thistle in the kiss.”

I came across a quote this morning from the Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan.  He said:  ”To bring the sublime into the mundane is the greatest challenge there is.”  The same might also be said about writing.  The same might also be said about sobriety.

Both writing and sobriety are journeys; they are not destinations. I have a friend who took a trip to the Tunisian desert, where he walked for several weeks.  That’s it.  He just walked.  One foot in front of the other across the sands.  He said the first day was sort of exciting. The next day was disappointing.  The third was annoying.  The fourth he wanted to get the hell out of there.  The fifth he thought he’d die.  The seventh he cried. And then something happened.  He began, to metaphorically drop things in the sand behind him.  Things he didn’t need.  The annoyance, the irritation, the desire for something to ‘happen,’ old memories, resentments, desires, the need for control.  It was just him, and the desert – all that space and wind and sky and ever-shifting sand.  He felt no need to arrive anywhere, and lost his sense of having come from somewhere else.  The desert simply was the desert and he was simply there.  He began to notice things he’d never noticed before.  A lizard.  A small desert plant.  A shadow. A rock. A cloud.  A particular shade of blue, or ochre.  Everything came alive and was, he said, holy, worthy of attention and gratitude.

Each day we sit in front of a blank page, each word we follow with another, each moment and mundane detail we honor with our attention, is another step across the desert sands.  This is one of the things writing has taught me.  This is one of the things sobriety has taught me.

It’s been a difficult week.  The Best Beloved and I just got back Montreal where we’d gone for my father-in-law’s funeral.  Morris passed away on January 12th (which is, oddly, also the day on which my adoptive father passed away, back in 1993). My father-in-law, Morris, was a great guy. He owned a department store in Saint Georges de Beauce near Quebec City, a store that was the heart of the region.   He had friends right out of Damon Runyon with names like Joey Onions, Jimmy-the-Book, Big Phil,and Jack-the-Hook, among others. He liked to hang out at the track.  Loved the ponies and, when he went to Florida every winter, loved the greyhounds, too. Sitting in Ben’s Smoked Meat on Boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal at 1:00 a.m., with Morris sipping his 20th cup of coffee that day was like was like walking into a Mordecai Richler novel.  He knew all the insomniacs and gypsy hacks, as Tom Waits might say.  He knew the waiters.  He knew the salesmen. When he and my adopted father first met, they got into a conversation about Rockhead’s Paradise, arguably the best jazz night club Montreal ever saw.   His funeral was packed with people, who all remembered him as a guy who might not have talked much, but who made everyone feel comfortable.  He helped before you had to ask him, and made everyone feel like an equal – from the street cleaner to the business executive.  That’s a rare talent.

His partner, Louisette, told me she came out of the bedroom a few months ago and found Morris crying.  When she asked him what was wrong he said, “Nothing, nothing,” and disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes.  When he came out he simply said, “I’ve had a nice life.”  And that was that.  He may have been a man of few words, but he chose the right ones.

On the day we were leaving a friend of mine, who I’ll call Joe, came to see me at the hotel where we were staying.  I’ve known Joe for probably ten years, and I love him to bits.  He’s kind and thoughtful and smart and funny and creative as hell.  And he, like me, is a recovering alcoholic/addict.  We both got clean and sober about fifteen years ago.  Joe’s been through a rough time the past few years with professional issues and loneliness (which I can’t figure out since he’s all the things I said above, plus gorgeous).  And although things look like they may be turning around, it’s still not easy.  He looks great though, and I said so.

Ah, he said.  Well, I’ve lost some weight.

How’d you do it? I said (since I’ve packed on a few pounds myself).

I started smoking again, he said.

Oh, no!  That’s not a good idea.

No. And I’ve started drinking again, too.

He looked as though he was afraid I might send him to detention.  But the truth was I wasn’t completely stunned.  I saw Joe about a year ago, and he’d been complaining about not liking those meetings in church basements we go to. They brought him down, he said.  I said, You don’t have to like them; if you want to stay sober you just have to go.  He didn’t have a sponsor any more, either, and wasn’t helping other people stay sober.

So, I guess he didn’t want to stay sober.  That’s the bottom line, isn’t it?  He hurt and he didn’t want to hurt anymore and although he said his spiritual life was fine, that he still had a relationship with whatever he understood to be “God,” he didn’t seem to have much serenity.  Somehow he thought taking a drink would stop the hurt.

But as I see it, now he only has something else to worry about.  Will he be able to control his drinking?  Because he is ‘managing’ it, as he puts it. (Frankly My Best Beloved, who doesn’t have this whole addiction thing, has never ‘managed’ a drink in his life.  Doesn’t even think about it.  That’s how non-alcoholics think, which I grant you, from the perspective of a real drunk like me, is BIZARRE.)  Now that he’s started drinking, and admits to having had a joint, is he going to find himself back doing other ‘dry goods’ as well?  If he’s got money problems, where’s the money for booze going to come from?

He says he’s not drinking every day, but there’s booze in the house, and he admits to drinking at least every couple of days.

“I know how this sounds, but it’s not a problem,” he says.

Maybe he’s right.  Maybe he’s the one in a thousand who can drink safely again. I sure hope so. But the fact that he’s willing to experiment with something that once tried to kill him doesn’t seem sane to me.  Sure, maybe after all these years of sobriety I could start drinking like normal people again, but if I can’t, I’ll die a wretched death, or end up in jail, or a mental institution.  That kind of Russian roulette doesn’t interest me.

But watching a friend walk straight into a railroad tunnel, toward that nice bright light, is a horrible feeling.  I feel helpless and frightened and terribly sad.  So, having developed some healthy habits over the past 15 years, as soon as I got back home I went to one of those church basement meetings.  In the meeting they talked about the difference between what we want and what we need.  One man talked about his mum, and how she had endured three terrible bouts with breast cancer.  The last one finally killed her. She hung in there until Christmas day, which was her favorite time of year, and died, at peace, looking up at the Christmas tree.  Like my father-in-law she never complained.   A few weeks before she passed, her son asked her how she was able to bear the pain and the grief – wasn’t she angry, wasn’t she resentful?  A woman filled with faith, she smiled, patted his hand, and said, “I’m fine. This is where God has me right now.”

That got me.  My father-in-law wasn’t religious, but he had that same sort of acceptance, that same sort of gratitude for his life and the circumstances of his present moment, whatever they might be.  Acceptance doesn’t mean we don’t feel grief, or anger or regret, or even agony.  It does mean we just feel it, knowing it to be part of the experience of life.  Part of the human experience, equalizing, inescapable, mysterious.

The next time I am crippled by pain, either physical or emotional, rather than reaching for a drink or a drug to numb the pain, I hope I will remember the words of my father-in-law, and that man’s mother:  “This is where God has me right now.  I’ve had a nice life.”  Acceptance and gratitude – the best medicine.

I wonder how many of you have asked a writer of your acquaintance what you thought was a perfectly harmless question, one intended to show your interest in that person and what they do, only to be rewarded by a mumbled response, possibly a trembling chin, or, horrors, a glower.  You walk away thinking, What’s wrong with these writer people?  Have they no manners? Well, sadly, some of us don’t, but it’s more likely you’ve stumbled upon one of the questions likely to leave us at…well, a loss for words.

I don’t mean to suggest that writers are such fragile flowers that no one should approach us for fear of having us break down in puddles if asked the wrong question.  Really, that hardly ever happens.  But if you do detect a slight twitch, or an inadvertent sigh, perhaps it’s because you’ve asked a perfectly well-meaning, seemingly reasonable question, one that if you asked anyone else wouldn’t be a problem.  However, as writers, alas, we’ve probably been asked that question a thousand times before, and wouldn’t mind at all, if we had a decent answer, but we don’t, and so we mumble and sigh and twitch and go and stand behind the potted palm where it’s safer. It’s embarrassing to stand there with a drink in one hand and a palm frond up the nose.  Uncomfortable for everyone, really.

So, for next time…these are some questions writers dread, in no particular order:

1. How’s the novel coming? Well, probably not very well.  Novels are wild, unwieldy beasts that resist being tamed.  Really, do you want to hear how Faulkner spent twelve hours writing a scene about looking at young girl’s dirty underpants as she climbed a tree?  Probably not, and that was the definitive scene in The Sound and the Fury, so imagine how much less you’ll want to read about that eel-skinning scene I labored over for hours yesterday, only to erase today.  To quote Oscar Wilde, “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma.  In the afternoon I put it back again.”

There is also a story about James Joyce wherein someone came round to see The Great Man as he worked in his Paris garret

“How are you, James?” he said.  “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m terrible.”

“Is it the writing?”

“Of course it’s the feckin’ writing!  It’s always the writing!”

“Can you not write then?  Are you blocked?”

“I’ve written seven words today.”

“Well, James,” said the friend, “for you, actually, that’s not bad.”

“I suppose,” said the Great Man, “but now I’ve got to figure out what order to put them in.”

Thus, it’s a question for which there is no good answer, and we know it.

2. Are you writing? If I am, see 1. above. If ‘m not, you really don’t want to know.  The only thing worse than having writer’s block is talking about it.  Having to listen to such panicked whining is recognized as torture and we wouldn’t dream of inflicting it on you.

3. Has your novel sold? Sad to say, but it’s unlikely.  Publishing is a slaughterhouse these days, and even in the Good Old Days (if ever there were any), almost no one published, and of the minuscule number who did, almost none of those published a second novel.  Having to answer that question over and over again is like rubbing glass in an open wound.  Believe me, if there’s good news, we’ll be telling you.  Heck, we’ll be telling EVERYONE! Most of us write because we can’t stop writing – it’s a sort of mental illness – and thus we do so in spite of the searing disappointments.  Try not to make us talk about it.

4. When’s that new book coming out? Let’s put it this way: if, since the last time we spoke, I’ve finished the manuscript, submitted it to my agent, my agent has read it (which usually takes three months because they are busy, important folks), and loved it just as it is with no changes at all; if the agent has then in turn submitted it to editors and one of them has read it (think another few months or so, or more, since editors are also important, busy folks), and that editor LOVED it, and showed it to the sales force (the important people who really run publishing these days) and the sales force LOVED it just as it is, and made an offer……. even if ALL those things have already happened, it will still be around TWO YEARS before the book will actually come out, due to the editing and production process.  So, if you’ve asked this question once in the past three years, you needn’t ask it again. Also, see 3).

5. I just love the new Dan Brown novel (or Sarah Palin’s memoir), have you read it yet? My condolences, and no.

6. How come I can’t get your books here? And by ‘here’ you probably mean America. This one may not apply to all writers, but it will to a surprising number of us.  Especially if we are, say, from Canada or Britain or Ireland or Scotland or New Zealand or Australia… doubly so if we are from a country where English isn’t the first language (and no jokes about Scotland, please).  Although, with some justification, America views itself as the center of the universe, people do publish in other countries, and getting published in England does not mean a writer will find a publisher in New York, which considers itself (again, with some justification) as the center of the center of the universe.  Without a publishing contract in the US, the book will not be available to the US market.  You could, however, go on the internet and order books from bookstores in the US or Canada or gasp, even Australia.  I do it all the time.

7. Is that story autobiographical? Until my parents are all dead, the answer to that is no.  I’m joking, really Mum, I am.  However, it can be a bit insulting to a writer to have everyone think that a) you really were a junkie porn star homicidal trust fund baby and just kept it a secret, or that b) you haven’t the imagination to MAKE THINGS UP, which is, after all, what fiction writers are supposed to do, mostly. I will paraphrase what W. Somerset Maugham said, though, in that writers are not God, we cannot create out of nothing.  Everything is inspiration and fodder, even cocktail party conversations.

8. Oh, you’re a writer! Have I heard of you?  Do I know your books? I have no idea, but if not please don’t make it sound as if I’ve failed. Might I suggest, if you’re interested, you note one of the titles and buy a book?

9. How big an advance did you get? How many books did you sell? Now really, didn’t your mother ever tell you it was impolite to ask someone what they make for a living?  It will either be shockingly low by your standards, or shockingly high, neither of which is useful information. People in France, where I lived for many years, never ask these sorts of particularly American questions.  They ask instead, “Where can I buy one of your books?” Which is a lovely question, since it implies they are a) interested in your work, and b) interested in supporting your work by actually BUYING a book.

10. What’s the book you’re working on about? Two problems with this question: the first is that if I talk too much about it, I won’t write about it, so I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t want to answer that question.  (Most people are pretty good about that and don’t take offense, but you’d be surprised, perhaps, by how many do.)  The second problem is that I may not know.  I write a story that pops into my head, but I may not know what it’s really about until a long way down the line.  When I was writing The Radiant City, it wasn’t until I was through the first draft, and heard Rev. Ernest Hunt, the Rector at the American Cathedral in Paris, say, “Cynicism is the last refuge of the broken-hearted” that I understood I was writing about precisely that – whether disillusionment, the kind that breaks your heart, like terrorist attacks, or war, or genocide, damns you to a life of cynicism, or if it’s possible to continue to walk through the world with a compassionate heart. (The quote became the epigram of the book.  Thanks Ernie!)

And although it’s not a question, there is one statement that’s almost guaranteed to send a writer scrambling to a safe nest behind the potted palm:  “I’m going to take six months off from my job and write a book.”

Legend has it this statement was made to either William Styron or Margaret Lawrence, depending on who’s telling it, by a heart surgeon at a cocktail party.  As in, “I just loved your book so much, and you’ve inspired me.  I’m going to take six months off from my job and write my own memoir.”  “Really,” replied William/Margaret. “Well, you’ve inspired me as well.  I’m going to take six months off from writing and become a heart surgeon.”

I wouldn’t have the guts to say that, but I admit it, I do think it from time to time. It takes as long to learn to be a good writer as it does to do anything else – play the violin, perhaps, or architecture, or yes, heart surgery.  And just like those things, having just a soupcon of talent doesn’t hurt.

So at this point you might be asking yourself what you CAN ask a writer.  Well, we love talking about books we’ve enjoyed, as well as anything else that inspires us. And as writers we tend to watch the world pretty closely, since you never know when a story worth writing about may pop up, so current affairs are just as interesting to us as to anyone else.  Then too,  if we’re well-brought up, psychologically stable folk (and some of us are), we probably think YOU’RE pretty interesting. You might not want to answer questions about, say, how much you make for a living, and I wouldn’t dream of asking you, but I’d be fascinated to learn, for example, what you believe and how you came to believe it.  I’d like to know how you met your spouse, and what you think about the death penalty, and why; and what you think about censorship, and that story about fly-fishing, and the one about the rescue dog, and what you think it means to be a good person… oh, there’s a world of things out there to talk about, isn’t there?

I will leave you with this video, from the brilliant Family Guy. Poor Brian.  I know how he feels.

Decisions, decision. Or maybe not?

Yesterday I had to make a plot decision in the novel I’m working on.  This is something that happens frequently…all the time, in fact.  Should a character wander off into the woods?  Or should she climb the mountain? Should she open the door?  Should he knock again? Kick it down?  Should he walk away?

Credibility is, of course, an issue.  Knowing young Jane, say, as I do, am I convinced is it in her nature to finally get off the couch and enroll in university, or is she more likely to dream about a bigger life, but never get past the television remote control?  After spending all this time with Joe, do I believe he would finally walk into that AA meeting and get sober, or is he more likely to say to heck with all those freaks and take a long pull from his bottle of Jack, consequences be damned?

If I’m writing about a devout and mentally stable nun, who suddenly, for no reason at all, picks up a butcher knife and starts hacking away at the statue of Christ, well, readers are going to be puzzled, to say the least.  In real life, we may say we never saw it (whatever ‘it’ is) coming, that why so-and-so did such-and-such is a complete mystery, but in fiction, our readers need to see a clue, some hint, a bit of foreshadowing for an action or a plot twist to make sense.

Then again, the paths along which I’ll guide my characters have to do with the themes I’m exploring.  If I’m writing a book exploring how people never seem able to transcend their personality defects, then perhaps Jane stays on the couch, and Joe gets bombed. If I’m writing a book about hope and transformation, then perhaps things go differently.  Or, perhaps it’s a combination of the two.  I might hope my character will get sober, or educate herself, but if the characters I’ve created simply aren’t up to the task, are in fact too crippled by their neuroses and fears, then I either have to go back and create new characters, or I have to write the story as it presents itself, through the characters I’ve created.

That’s where Chekhov’s admonition to writers to properly ask questions, but not to try and answer them comes in.  Sometimes when I get to the end of a short story or a novel the conclusions I draw from the events contained therein are not the ones I thought I’d draw when I started writing.  That’s quite a magical moment — because, through the act of creating a world and the people who inhabit it,  I’ve learned something new.  I think sometimes that’s what drives me to continue writing.

I am fascinated by a concept in quantum physics known as the “many-world” or “multiple universes” or “multiverse” theory — in which there are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them.  Of course, I suspect, being a bear of very little brain, I haven’t the foggiest notion of what scientists like Robert Lanza are REALLY talking about, but I do quite like the concept that all the possible paths I might have walked, had I chosen that path over this one, this door over that, are still continuing, with me on them, more or less happily.

There is, after all, a kind of eternity in that concept.  In a recent blog on death, Lanza says:

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (an old friend) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

I understand this best when I think of my fictional characters.  When I was working on my last novel, in the first draft no one died.  Okay, maybe it wasn’t happily-every-after, but at least everyone made it to the last page still breathing.  Sadly, the draft didn’t quite work.  I resisted it, but every solution pointed to the fact someone had to die, and I knew who — a character of whom I’d grown extremely fond.  I did not want this to happen.  I tried very hard not to let it happen.  I worked for weeks and weeks, trying to find another way to arrive at the place I knew was right for the novel, credible for the plot and the characters; in short, trying to keep him alive.  Finally, I surrendered to the inevitable.  My beloved character met his destiny.

My characters, once I’ve created them, are real to me.  They exist, perhaps not in the sense this table exists, or my Best Beloved exists, but in a garden of my soul, they are alive.  I think about them often, as I would friends-and-relations, some more often, some less, but all are contained within my psyche.  And what happens, then, when I struggle so with a decision for one of them?  Well, I see myriad paths, each one leading to a different conclusion, to a different set of possibilities.  And regardless of which one finally ‘wins’ for the sake of the novel, the others do not cease to be, just as the characters do not cease to exist for me when I put the final period on the sentence. That character who ‘died’ on the page, is still alive, outside of time and space, just as surely as if I had written a different end for him, and perhaps, dare I say, as real to me as others I haven’t ’seen’ for a long time.

When I take a few moments to sit still and look out this window at the horizon where sea meets sky, I cannot help but contemplate what lives there, just out of sight, just beyond the range of my limited vision.  In his excellent book, Eternal Echoes, poet and philosopher John O’Donoghue says,

You know your real life is happening here. Yet your longing for the invisible is never stilled.  There is always some magnet that draws your eyes to the horizon or invites you to explore behind things and seek out the concealed depths.  You know that the real nature of things is hidden deep within them.  When you enter the world, you come to live on the threshold between the visible and the invisible.  This tension infuses your life with longing.  Now you belong fully neither to the visible nor to the invisible. This is precisely what kindles and rekindles all your longing and your hunger to belong.  You are both artist and pilgrim of the threshold.

Pilgrim of the threshold.  I can’t think of a lovelier way to describe a writer.And I do love it when art and science and faith all converge, don’t you?