A former roommate of mine used to accuse me of talking like Yoda - when I would do it, she would quip: “Joda speaks!” The first words that came into my mind as I thought about beginning this entry were: “Away from this a while, I’ve been,” and hence came the Joda-memory. I have been away a while - wrestling, as writers so often do, with my own demons. The writing process is odd - unique to each individual, often unique to each project. This time, I have the entire story I have been working on in my head - beginning, middle, and ending. It’s a piece I began years ago, wrote more than 400 pages, and then put it away because I’d realized that I’d gone off in the wrong direction, away from the truth of the story. Recently, it’s returned in the person of the main character’s son, and I have been struggling to get close to him, to feel him flesh out, because it’s clear to me he is central to that truth for this story. It has been, and remains, a difficult battle. More difficult than any story I’ve written since my first published novel - which tells me that it’s worth the battle, that there is something important here.
I’ve tried all the tricks I know - everything I’ve walked writing students through, every strategy discussed in seminars in grad school, every trick ever published in any book, and there have been no late-night revelations, no 3 a.m. breakthroughs. Progress has been slow, though there has been progress.
Last night, a short series of words came to me as I was driving home from the store, and, when I got home, I sat down with my old Olympic typewriter and a stack of reclaimed paper from work - printed on one side, blank on the other - and began typing. Several pages later, I was inches closer to a real understanding of this young man, and the battles, secrets, and betrayals that have shaped his life. That part is wonderful - unlike those 3 a.m. breakthroughs, the deep night revelations, his is a slow growth in the story, a careful, considered unfolding of events. I am learning to respect him.
But what really hit me this time, as I sat back last night, warm tea in hand, and read through the pages that I’d written, was the truth and necessity of the transient, the temporary. I haven’t been able to write a word of this story on my computer - everything I’ve written so far has been either by hand or on that old Olympic. If I were to write on my computer, there is a sense of permanence in the words electronically saved - even if the computer crashes, somewhere that file is held in the Cloud - permanent, fixed.
When I write by hand, (or on the Olympic), those pages are as transient as a puff of smoke - once crumpled or torn or burned - the words are gone, saved nowhere, existing nowhere but in memory. Since so much of this story is about the transient nature of life and loyalty across the generations of a family, that seemed appropriate. It’s freeing.
I am sitting here remembering clips from old films of a writer at his desk, ripping the paper from the typewriter, crumpling it and tossing it away - across the room, into a trashbin, into the fire - pages essentially, fundamentally gone - and then beginning again. For this story, that sense of purging and renewal is central not only to the story, but to the nature of these characters, so of course I have chosen a temporary, destructible medium to write for them. And, as it turns out, for me.
I heard a story once, possibly apocryphal, that Amy Tan once came home to find her house burned to the ground, her nearly-finished manuscript with it. She had to begin again, from word one, to rebuild it, and said ever after that it was this purge and rebuild that made The Joy Luck Club so strong. I don’t know if this is true, but the sense of purge-and-rebuild speaks to me. I can rip pages from the typewriter, or from under my pen, and demolish them - whether they sang or were awful, I can let them go, and take a step toward the story’s truth without them behind me. I face each page like my characters face each day - with the past burned away behind us, and only one direction left to go.
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