(Part 2) Once Upon a Block: How I Got Through My Worst Block Ever

Referring to this block as "my worst block ever," I feel I must pause here to emphasize why this block was so bad.  All the reasons why I had to move block this pronto were, in fact, all the reasons it became so inert.  As I stated in my last post, my life would not move forward until I finished this thesis.  I wanted to teach English at a community college, which obviously I wouldn't be doing until I completed my Master's which I would never get before I wrote this thesis.  Also, every semester that I was working on the thesis I had to pay tuition, which meant there was a meter running on this block.

But, the worst part about this block was I wasn't writing a word.  It's not like I was writing a little.  I hadn't written a word since I had hit page 8 about a month earlier. In my mind, I was supposed to be writing every day all day, so every day all day (except for the hours I was waiting on the Tony Bennett-era San Franciscans at the San Remo), I felt guilty and like I was bad, bad, bad.  I could perhaps wring more pity from you by emphasizing again that there was also the break-up, but I don't want to risk that you'll tire of my whining before I've gotten to the turning point of this story, so I will leave that for now.

So there I was home from the bookstore with my newly acquired used copy of Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk  About Their Lives, wasting more precious writing time leafing through it on the sofa, the clicking of the tuition meter whirring away in the background. But within a few minutes--to my surprise-- the cover's black and white pictures of 70's feminists began to have a calming effect.  The women there reminded me of the women who'd been my undergrad professors, women who'd studied, wrote and muscled their way into old-boy academia. Women who had spine-worn copies of The Second Sex on their crowded bookshelves. They were the women I'd gone to with all my Mommy needs when I arrived in college. They'd let me into their shabby offices and listened to me while I gobbled up their office hours with all sorts of rambling talk.  They were women who showed me a glimmer of who I could be in the world. 

And, then I flipped to an essay entitled, "Learning to Work."  I startled with recognition as I read the first paragraph:  A work problem, it stated, "consists of being unable to work, not because of external pressures such as lack of time, but because of internal problems, which can be exacerbated or disguised by external pressures." My eyes darted to the photo of the author, Virginia Valian, on the adjacent page.  It showed the author absorbed in her work, not bothering to look up at the camera, not caring that a city pulsated behind her through a plate glass window. It was clearly an "after" photo. My eyes slid over to the title again: Learning to Work. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way out.

In the opening pages of the essay, Valian sets the scene:  It's Cambridge, 1970, she's done all the course work and now she just needs to write this thesis, but she's doing everything but write.  The circumstances of the block are so hauntingly similar that I feel like these pages have tumbled through time and space and a used bookstore on Judah to bring me out of my paralysis.  Clearly this woman had made it through.  The photo showed calm working. I flipped quickly to the bio in the back: she was now a psychology professor.   I felt something flicker through me: hope.

After analyzing her situation (she uses the work of Masters and Johnson as a guiding example), she decides that she needs to break her work time into measurable and doable units.  She runs through the possibilities of how long she might be able to sit at her desk at a stretch: "Three hours! The very thought gave me an anxiety attack. How about two hours? Two hours! The very thought...One hour?  More reasonable, but still not possible.  Half an hour?  Getting closer but still too much.  Fifteen minutes?  Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes.  Now there was a figure I could imagine.  A nice solid amount of time, an amount of time I knew I could live through every day."

Again, I glanced at the photo. This respectable, working woman--a professor--was admitting to the world that she saw fifteen minutes of work as a stretch she could "live through."  Not everyone was working away calmly.  There were people--at least one person--like me out there.  A person who'd struck a bargain with herself to work for fifteen minutes.  Could I work for fifteen minutes?

I thought maybe I could.

To be continued....

Read Valian's "Learning to Work" essay here:
http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/psych/faculty/valian/docs/1977workingItOut.pdf

Once Upon a Block: How I Got Through My Worst Block Ever

In the post Thou's Name is Block, I wrote about writer's block that originates from a fear of the material: if you're not ready to go there, you'll find yourself washing dishes or checking email rather than writing. And then, beating yourself up later for not writing. All fun stuff.

When people ask me about my writing routine, I get a little squirrelly. I'm off task as often as I'm on. It's hard to prescribe that as a way of life. Some of my off-task time comes from that fear of material stuff, but the worst block I ever experienced was rooted in being in over my head, simply not being prepared for the magnitude of the project I was facing.

After two years of course work for a Masters in English Literature, I was faced with the task of writing a 100-page thesis. Until that point, I'd never written a paper longer than the required 20 pages of our seminar papers. The truth was even those always came in a little short, weighing in at a slender 17 or 18. Like I didn't quite have enough words in me. But it wasn't so much the number of words as playing games with a required number. If a 15 page paper was required, mine would surely be 13.

Now faced with the heft of 100 pages, I choked. It seemed like I wouldn't find my way through and all the work of the last few years would be wasted and I would be waitressing for the rest of my life. The following is the first part (maybe there will be three, but based on what I just said, maybe two) of the story of how I got past this block. I share it not because it makes me look like a total dumbo, but because I think the route I found out could be traveled by others.

Once Upon a Block, Part One:

It’s May 1989 and it feels like things can’t get much worse. My boyfriend broke up with me unexpectedly. Really. They say you see it coming, but I didn’t. Okay, maybe three days before I saw. It was an uncleared plate. I made him this amazing breakfast…a crazy thing a woman should never make for a man unless she’s sure sure sure it’s the real thing. A breakfast that included a fresh fruit salad (which involves chopping), an omelet with fresh herbs and cheese (whisking, chopping, grating) and a half an everything bagel (toasting). He ate half of it—that’s fine—but then he left the unfinished plate on the table, my little table in my tiny studio apartment with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. I saw that uncleared plate and I thought: Oh boy. There’s a problem here.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. For the three weeks before the pending breakup, I’d been stuck on page 8 of my 100 page thesis. I’d spent the last two years doing the coursework for the Masters in English Literature degree, and all that stood between me and the piece of paper now was this teensy, tiny little thesis. Simple enough. Except, except, except. I got to page 8 and I just couldn’t figure out another word to say. For three weeks, I stared at the thing. I took it over to the Tart to Tart café on Irving and gnawed on it over lattes and giant muffins. I took it home and tossed it onto the rug and wrestled with it down there for a while before finally slumping over my desk and trying to get something, anything else out.

This is 1989, so there’s no googling “stuck on thesis” or “thesis block” or “steps to completing thesis.” I turned to the other grad students, who were either similarly stuck (although I must say it didn’t seem to be of the epic sort of proportions of my stuck) or just racing along typing out the pages as if they were being dictated from on high. “Just do it,” my friend Margit said. She was 25 and already owned a condo somewhere near the end of the BART line, which in itself seemed quite beyond comprehension.

“Isn’t that a Nike ad?” I asked, trying to sound cynical rather than scared.

“Yeah,” she said, “But it works. Tell yourself it’s easy.”

Easy. Okay. Easy. I told myself that but myself just answered back that it was easy for Margit. She’d picked a more comprehensible topic. Mine, I knew, was convoluted—a dash of Foucault, a dash of Derrida, a little Structuralism, a pinch of Post-Structuralism, none of which I fully understood. But if the topic was really hard, that meant I was smart. Although not smart enough, I had to admit, to actually write the thesis.

I called my thesis adviser and told her I wanted to meet. “You have some pages?” She said pages in an ominous way, like maybe the word heroin would be used if this were a drug deal and people who bought heroin actually used the word heroin when purchasing.

“Some,” I squeaked out, and left the dog-eared 8 pages in her box, hoping for a miracle. We met the next week at the Ecumenical House across from the University at the Southern edge of the city where the glamor of San Francisco threatens to become a stretch of identical, nameless suburbs.

“Is this a draft?” she asked. “A rough draft?”

I had no idea how to answer that. I was writing a 100 page thesis. If we’re looking at 8 pages of course those are going to be a “draft.” But the way she said draft, almost like a cough, something to be cleared from the throat, I knew a draft must be a very, very bad thing.


She lowered her voice to an ominous whisper. “Don’t ever, ever give me a rough draft again. Do you understand?”

“I’ve been having some problems.” I thought of the boyfriend breakup but veered away from that, knowing that her disgust would only be magnified by that getting-your-head-messed-up-over-a-boy sort of nonsense. “I’ve been having some problems,” I started again, “managing the project. My time, maybe?”

“I can’t help you with that,” she said, threading an arm through a coat sleeve. “My job is to help you with the content. Get some pages done. Finished pages.”

I rode the M train to the N train and finally was home, where I fell onto my sofa and sobbed. The jig was up. I wasn’t going to be able to do this stupid thesis, which meant the last few years, all the money, energy and time that went into getting this degree were wasted. It also meant….what I’d always feared…that I wasn’t smart, wasn’t somehow like other people who completed things, who had One Real Job (I had two jobs—one as a writing tutor, another as a waitress in an Italian restaurant that served a certain blue-haired San Franciscan of the Tony Bennett era that was on the verge of extinction), who won prizes and scholarships and had relationships that lasted.

Eventually, I must have stopped crying. Crying alone is a thankless task. No one’s there to coo over you, tell you it’s going to be okay or take you out to the Lebanese restaurant on 9th when you’re through. You know this when you’re crying; you know that sometime it will end and you’ll be alone facing the void, the transition in between crying and whatever will come next. Maybe a snack or a walk.

Sometime, over the next few days, I was in the used bookstore on Judah where I came across a book that caught my eye: Working it Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work. The cover reeked of that 1970’s feminism that I’d once dabbled in: a collage of black and white photos of women of all races—black women with afros, fresh scrubbed women with no makeup and hair that didn’t require a professional cut. One sported a bun and a pair of dangling earrings, another sat thoughtfully behind a typewriter. I looked inside: 4 dollars. On instinct, I bought it and scurried back to my little apartment.

To be continued...

Thou's Name is Block

I've often said to anyone who will listen that our use of the word "addiction" is far too crude to describe all the myriad ways our restlessness manifests.  And then if they're still listening, I say, it's like trying to build a house with just a hammer.  Similarly, I find the term "writer's block" to be a bit of a catch all for the assorted means and reasons we skid to a stop on the page.

If you want to see ambivalence in action, visit a memoir writing class sometime.  Every fall, my students arrive ready, set, go in the classroom. They've paid the hefty tuition, bought the books, sometimes hired babysitters of left spouses to fend for themselves.  They're tired from a day of high-tech or parenting or doctoring or the busyness that is retired life, but they're determined. They've been wanting to do this for years often, and now here it is: their chance to write.  And they do! The first few weeks are quite often very productive. Many of them are very excited about how much they're writing and how well it's going. But then, for some of them something happens around Week Six.  Before my eyes, I watch the expressions morph from "Here I go!" to "Why am I doing this again?"

I don't always know what's going on (and frankly at least one student will flat out disappear), but I've talked to enough of them and watched my own experience with writing memoir to have a pretty good idea of what happens.  At first--it seems to me--they're writing that story that they came to the class to write--their story--but then as the pages wear on, a darker story beckons, an understory starts to emerge from the lake of memory.  It's a bit of a Loch Ness Monster, this story.  Hard to corral and certainly not something to be shared with friends and family.  It's that knee-level story Frank McCourt and I talked about.  You can veer around it and return to the surface, but once you've seen the face of this story--far more riveting than the one you originally set out to tell, most of the time--it's a bit tricky to let it go.  Part of you wants to follow it.  Where will it lead?  What will you know after you follow it?  And then, there's the sane part of you that has to get up in the morning and resume high-teching or parenting or doctoring. That part is saying, "Hey, what's on the telly?" or "Why don't you go make yourself another cup of tea?"

It's a bit of a make or break time. A time most of us want to call "block," like an iron fence that's suddenly been dropped down from the heavens for no apparent reason. I'm happy to say that most of my students make it through this and somehow keep showing up at the page, doing their best to tell their stories the best they know how.

A Turncoat's Tale: A story told in broad cultural stereotypes

 When a book is about to be published, most likely the author's agent is scurrying about trying to pick up a few foreign rights.  Even books that sell only modestly in the States can sometimes make the author a fair bit of cash because of their appeal to foreign markets.  And, when a book does sell in foreign markets, it is not uncommon to speculate about why it  sold using the most crude type of stereotyping.  When the German rights of How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed sold, I spoke to anyone who would listen in a terrible German accent (I cringe even saying this) how Germans are not afraid to read about hard topics like divorce.  I'll spare you the spectacle I made of myself when the Brazilian rights sold.

And, then there are the countries that don't buy. "Too American, they said," my agent wrote me when the Brits turned down King Size, and then he added, "Whatever that means." That was sweet of him, but I knew exactly what it meant. I'd spent much of my growing up years in Canadian classrooms with portraits of the Queen feeling like I was "Too American."  Moving to Canada at ten at the height of the Watergate scandal, I got an earful on the schoolyard about "Yanks" that I wasn't sure what to do with.  I didn't feel Canadian, but I didn't feel particularly American either.  But growing up in particularly British Canadian neighborhood, I quickly learned how very American I was.  I was too loud, I interrupted, I was boastful, I asked questions about unmentionable things.  I learned over time that my American side--which included the part of me that wanted to talk about myself--was something like Auntie Mame, a sort of showy embarrassment that was best kept under wraps.

After a few years in Canada, I fell in step.  I came to love good manners, strong tea, and national health care (and that love will never die). When I'd spot American tourists in downtown Vancouver, their voices seemed too loud, their cigarette smoke too sweet, and their clothes too gaudy. But yet, I knew too--that they were also my people. I wasn't truly a Canadian--although eventually I'd obtain citizenship--as much as I was a shamed and tamped down American.

The British publisher's comment of "too American" rang in my ears last week as I visited London.  I was thrilled to see vestiges of my Canadian childhood were everywhere--steak and kidney pies, men with proper raincoats and umbrellas, tea biscuits.  But, also, I kept hearing this tone of voice, this hush-hushness that sounded like home. It's absurd to sum up a culture with overheard conversations, but fear of the absurd has never stopped me before, so here goes.  I heard the song of my Canadian youth when a two proper businessmen bowed their heads near and one said, "Let's not mention..." and then he rattled off a long list of unmentionables.  I heard it again in Hyde Park when a suited man began a sentence with a lilting, "On the QT," the weight of the phrase very much placed on the letters QT.

Yes, I thought, with my small satchel of evidence clutched in my paws, there it is.  It's the voice telling me to keep it quiet, keep it proper, keep it down.  And it's the voice that asks in very proper and appalled voice, "Why on earth would you want to write about yourself of all things?" And as American as I am, there's a Canadian part of me that must still answer to that voice.

"Blog, Interrupted" and other pet peeves

All writers have pet peeves.  We generally try not to talk about it because then no one will write us love letters or send us emails.  Some of us cringe at the sight of dangling modifiers or the word "your" where "you're" should be. 

Here are two of mine:  1) Blog Posts that begin with "I'm sorry it's been so long." I always think of a fourteen year old writing "Dear Diary, I am so so so sorry I haven't written since....I've been so so busy what with cheerleading and all and  I didn't tell you--again, so sorry--but John Boy and I split up."

But, then again, blogging is a bit of conditioned response in action.  Ideally, bloggers should post at a certain rate and readers come to count on that. And, if suddenly there are no posts for a while, it's weird and akin to abandonment, which brings me to my next pet peeve demonstrated with the title "Blog, Interrupted."

2) Titles That Are Rip-Offs of Other Titles (and yes, I've done this).  I can only think when Susanna Kaysen thought of the title Girl, Interrupted she ran around her office doing a little Rock the Casbah dance (that's actually my victory song, only sung in moments of extreme triumph). It's a freaking fantastic title. Other rocking titles include: A Streetcar Named Desire, Of Mice and Men, Fear of Flying and The Sound and The Fury.  Of course, we want to steal them, and if it's something inconsequential like a blog title, ok.(I admit my This Milltown Called Denial is a bit derivative, and last week I came this close to naming a post "Of Mice and Milltowns.")  But the other day I saw a book that was titled Faith, Interrupted, and I'm thinking, you wrote a whole book about something as serious and searching as a loss of faith and you can't think of your own title? Whatsa matter with you?

Which brings me to "Blog, Interrupted" (again):  I'm having a blast writing this blog (a little too much fun as thoughts of mill town have been competing with thoughts of the book I'm working on), and I'm taking a break for about ten days.  Next post will be approx. October 4th, which sounds further off than it is.  

Until then!
Theo

This Milltown Called Denial

I guess one of the things that drew me to Tanya is that she talked about the stuff that no one else was saying.  Instead of just enduring the racism of milltown, she called it out.  If she had a problem with someone, she told them. She called herself and Shirley "us colored girls." All this was the opposite of everything I was--not deep down was--but who I was to survive.  I think deep down I was as feisty as Tanya but to be in my family--white, Commonwealthy, Depression era-tight with a recurring theme of loving drink over all else--I had signed up in a silent and unholy pact to be The Good One.  I'm sure more than a few of you are good ones too. Maybe a lot of good ones grow up to write memoirs, which makes us not-so-good anymore, let me tell you.

Being good meant not making connections between things even in my own mind, let alone in snide remarks the way that Tanya could.  That winter my mom and my stepfather were determined to quit smoking and attended a Smoke Enders meetings every Wednesday night. I don't remember making a connection between my sister's cancer and my parents quitting smoking. Every person over the age of 12 in my family smoked and there was a perpetual blue cloud that hovered over the family room.  I never made a connection between whatever drove my family to smoke and to drink and the fact that as soon as my parents drove out of the Spanish-arched carport, I whipped up a batch of brownies, ate them, washed the pan and had everything back in its place by the time my parents returned at 9:30.  If they caught a whiff of warm chocolate when they came in or spotted a splotch of batter on the counter, it was never mentioned.  The weight I put on silently and steadily was our only solid evidence that things were not okay.

It's always a tenuous position to point back to our upbringings for the answers to the question of who we are.  But, it's impossible for me to look at that Winter and not see the root of my desire to write, and also why the type of writing I wanted to do would be so long in the coming.  All the things never mentioned seemed to get stored away in an account, expanding with interest, and finally demanding to be spent.

Yep, that's the one.

Frank, Crank City, and the art of telling the truth

One of the most genuinely fatiguing aspects of teaching memoir in the post-James Frey era is the topic of Telling the Truth in a Memoir. The conversation is inevitable, and, of course, necessary, but it is also tiresome in its absurdity.

Somewhere between the argument that a memoir should read with the veracity of a court report and the David Shields/Vivian Gornick-type argument that the barbed wire fence that runs along the DMZ between fiction and non should be torn down (forgive me, David, for reducing your argument so simply. Vivian, you don't care what I think,I'm sure)and the inmates of the two camps should be allowed to run amok, somewhere in here is the territory where most memoirists live. If the book has the word "memoir" stamped on the back, we don't get to make up characters or say stuff happened that everyone knows didn't. We really don't need to spend class time, air time, or pages of the New York Times talking about the contract between the reader and the writer etc. We are civilized, we know the rules.

And yet--and this is why all the above having been said I myself really wouldn't care if a writer were to have made up a few factual details--the truth that really matters in a story is the truth to which no one can hold us accountable, because it is the truth of the story that only we can know for ourselves and it has nothing to do with did we spend a few days in jail or not.

And this takes me back to that conversation I had with Frank McCourt about how honest is a story. Like I said to Frank in that conversation, there's an honest story we can tell and there's a story we only dare to tell ourselves that tugs at us as we write and whispers, yeah, but what about that?

In "Part Huit," I talked about how the Alienated Youth story of being a debutante (god, how embarrassing) transplanted reluctantly to a milltown was in its essence true but that there was a truer story--it feels truer to me--that I hadn't written, the story of three strangers living together and calling themselves a family. I never sought out not to tell this story. I didn't even know the story was there until I started to write the milltown story. And this is why, I think conversations about the "truth" in memoir are a bit of a diversion from the real story. If we sit around worrying about whether a story's factual details are correct, we don't have to worry about whether we told what it felt like to lie to our parents about who we are or to carefully arrange ourselves in order to hide our depression.

As I've been writing the story of Alienated Youth, I realized that I've skipped over a very important part of the story, not initially because I was trying to hide the truth but because it would have been a distraction in the story I was telling about class differences. But, as the story deepened, I realized that the despair I felt living in this town was caused only in part by being an outsider, and the "real story" couldn't be portrayed without backing up a bit.

A few months before we moved to Mill Town, my 23 year old stepsister was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. From the very beginning, we knew she would die, even though we also knew that she would try every available option before she could die. As sad as I was about my stepsister, the hardest part of this diagnosis was seeing my stepfather miserable. I wanted to turn back time to when he was happy but I couldn't. Barring that, I wanted to do everything I could to show him that I knew how he felt and that I would do what I could to help him.

When the news of the transfer came, my parents realized that it would mean me missing out on what should have been my fun-filled senior year of high school in the city. My mom suggested that maybe I could live with a friend for the year, my parents paying the family room and board. And, briefly the thought thrilled me. I could have the independence that I longed for. But, besides the fact that I loathed the idea of "boarding" with another family, the main reason I wanted to go to Mill Town was to telegraph to my stepfather the message that I was there for him, that he wouldn't lose me.

But, it wasn't long after our move to Mill Town, that I realized how helpless I was over my stepfather's happiness, that being good and doing the right things--my fallback tricks for keeping the world happy--were quite useless where life and death were concerned. So there we were: the three of us in a town where we didn't belong, in a house that wasn't quite right, in a family that wasn't quite one, getting ready for a long rainy winter.