A good article in today's NY Times about John Updike and his work habits. Writers love to read this stuff, because admit it or not (and Updike did not during his lifetime), we need tools beyond imagination and ordinary industry to get work done. These can include procrastination (when Susan Orlean recently tweeted that if she didn't have a book due, her closets would never get cleaned, I tweeted back that she should see my awesome new spice drawer), and facts gathered by others (rarely the same people twice), and talisman, in Updike's case, a saved Planters Peanut Bar wrapper. The scene he needed the wrapper for had long been written, but I can imagine why he kept it. It had once been useful, it felt callous to throw it away. I sometimes come across boxes of things I've saved, floppy disks and a hummingbird's nest and quotes written on scraps of paper, by me, because at the moment of writing, I'd hoped the words held some sort of key. If they did, I have forgotten, or finished the project, or abandoned it, or collected the knowledge. And while I tend to throw things out (so often my husband now insists I run things past him, because as a matter of fact he had wanted to keep those stereo cables/that knife sharpener), I've come to think that anything saved, if only for a little while, has been put to use.
I once had a budding writer tell me, she didn't like to rewrite. I knew she did not yet know what she was talking about. Writing is all revising. The adored and difficult act of bringing up a giant clump of raw work, yes, it is needed; I would get little worth doing done without it. But it is the honing that is the key. Here is some of Updike's, from Rabbit at Rest:
This past weekend, we decided to clean out and organize the basement, with the idea that we would turn this ghastly small back room, where there is an un-working toilet and dozens of boxes stacked chockablock, into a wine cellar. I got to work. I hauled out everything. I marveled at the junk we at one point thought worth saving -- ugly blankets, uglier jackets, shabby suitcases -- and hauled it to the curb. I found my daughter Tafv's baby photo albums, which had been missing for a year and somehow got stuck in there. I came across big boxes of her old stuffed animals, and smaller ones of all the art and writing she'd done in grade school, in high school. I neatened it all. I vacuumed broken concrete from the floor. I vacuumed spider webs from the walls. Din thought the space too dank for wine, and there was the light coming from the small dirty broken window, and general grossness of what I think of as the Blair Witch room. I reorganized. I put the Christmas ornaments in one area, the fans in another, Din's pile of empty boxes for stereo components in the east corner, and the boxes holding Tafv's stuff in the west. The piles were orderly and still. I sat on the un-working toilet and looked at Tafv, here reduced to boxes, and wondered how the most important person in my life had been relegated to the furthest away and most lonely corner of the house. I wept for ten minutes. I had already planned to bring the photos upstairs, but now, too, I carried the art, the writing, to put in her bedroom. As I came up from the basement, my phone was ringing. It was Tafv, wanting to know what was wrong, why was I crying? I told her and she said, but you are always with me; I am always with you; you are still the most important person to me, and I know all this is true, but the time... I want to write, how does this happen? But I know how it happens. Time passes. I lay on my bed and looked at the photos, and at day two of Tafv's life, at one year; at three years, the look of completeness on my face as I look at her is always the same.
There has been a lot of crying lately, for missing my child and the crossed line in time that her leaving represents; crying when people write to tell me, the book I am writing increases their pain, when my intent is so much to do the opposite; crying because of a slight lethargy: is it nearly fall? And what have we done, and not done?
I woke up this morning and felt it was the first day of summer. There was that clear sun early in the morning, and a softness to the air. I put on a dress. I kidded with Mary and Natalie, our beautiful twenty-year-old baristas, that I am was going to start lying my age. Natalie wanted to know, first, how old I actually am, and did I want to take a float-trip down the river with all the girl baristas? Yes.
So it is summer, and I am going to reread and read the Rabbit series. Care to join me?
