On Writing: The Butterfly of the Moment

             I've never read anything by Vita Sackville-West, although I should, if only because I keep one of her more famous quotes on the wall of my classroom. “It is necessary to write,” wrote Vita, “if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment.”

Vita's days were scarcely empty. She won the Hawthornden Prize twice, wrote novels, poems, translations and biographies, and was happily married for some forty years while indulging in affairs with the likes of Virginia Woolf and Hilda Matheson. She witnessed many fascinating moments in her time and wrote about many of them, both in her fiction and in her long correspondence with literary luminaries of her day. Vita let few butterflies fly by unexamined.

Books for Writers: "Reading Like a Writer"

On the 270^th page of Francine Prose's 2006 bestseller Reading Like a Writer there begins a list, apparently compiled by Prose, of “Books to Be Read Immediately.” When I first read Prose's book, which I purchased a couple of years ago as a three-for-the-price-of-two deal at Barnes & Noble (along with Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor and my third copy of Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'), I used a red pen to mark off the ones I already had under my belt.

When I tallied the results, I discovered I had read a mere 12 out of Prose's 100 or so must-read books. This month, after reading Prose's book again, I turned to her list and made, perhaps, four more red marks.

Several questions came to mind then: Why did Prose include so many translated works on her list when she so stresses the importance of careful, “slow reading” of the writer's own words? Why does she believe King Lear is more important to read than, say, Hamlet? If Prose finds Catcher in the Rye less worthy than Franny and Zooey, why do we keep inflicting hapless Holden on our school children? Perhaps, most important to me and my intellectual relationship with Prose: How many red marks would she be able to make if I gave her my own list of “Books to Be Read Immediately”?

On Writing: A Room of My Own

All of the comforts of home, plus Francine Prose.

A one-room (with loft) lovely in the Vermont woods.

     “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Virginia Woolf said.
     I do not dispute Woolf's claim but I contend it would be easier for anyone to write if he or she were at least independently lower-middle class and had a climate-controlled study in which to squirrel away. Mark Twain had an octagonal, detached studio his in-laws built for him on a hill above their house. Henry Thoreau had his rustic cabin. George Bernard Shaw had a writing hut that could be turned to follow the movement of the sun. These gentlemen were not independently wealthy per se, but they were able to support themselves with their word work.
     I'm several years (or lifetimes) away from being able to quit the day job, but I'm doing OK with the room.

     My wife and I recently rented an off-the grid cabin in Vermont. It's a one-room with loft deal: outhouse, spring water, no Internet, no cell service, with Franklin fireplace. We rented it for the months of July and August, although, with our schedules, we'll likely only be up there for a few long weekends. It seems like the perfect “room of (his) own.” No pesky phone calls, no sounds other than the rushing stream below and twittering birds. No e-mail to check. I got some solid work done there over the Fourth of July weekend, although it was a little weird writing with my spouse in the room. (In a one-room-cabin situation, there are not many places to go.) The cabin is good, then, but not perfect for the family man I have become.

     I've done writing in busy newsrooms, in the back of a speeding SUV on dirt roads in El Salvador, in tents, in computer labs … However, I write fiction best in one of two places: at my desk in my school classroom (around 4 p.m., after the students are long gone) or in my “study” at home. The study has a desk I cannibalized from a combination window seat/bookcase I built a few years back. It has a battered office chair my mother in-law gave me, a computer sans Internet connection (basically a dedicated word processor that plays solitaire), a stereo, books and lots of geegaws. The door does not lock, but it does shut. Occasionally, the family respects the closed door, but the cats never do. 

My home office.

     Wooded cabin, after-school classroom, study … the common element seems to be the ability to wall the world out long enough to hear the voices within. In my back-of-the-Jeep days I was writing journalism; I needed to hear the outside world because it was informing what I was producing. I needed the hustle, the rhythm of chaos. Writing fiction, I seem to need more peace. (Case in point: There is a jackhammer operator outside my house right now who is clearly not respecting my creative process.) 

     So, yes, Virginia, I have a room. I got mine, writers; how's yours?

On Writing: The Speed of Write

The first time I interviewed mystery author Robert B. Parker, maybe 12 years ago, he told me he wrote eight pages a day, every day.

“Maybe it takes me two hours, maybe it takes me all day,” he said. “Either way, I don't get up until I have eight pages.”

The last time I interviewed Parker, when he came to Manchester to be honored by the city's library about five years ago, he gotten that number up to 10 pages a day. Same plan: get up, walk the dogs, eat breakfast, then ass to chair as long as it took. Once he hit 10 pages, Parker hit the gym.