Taking Stock
By Marisa de los Santos | November 5, 2019 |
Flickr Creative Commons: ehpien
Last week, I had a new author photo taken. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was the first one in eight years, a drought that has less to do with my wanting readers to think of me as eternally young (or at least eternally mid-forties) than it does with my being innately stiff and antsy and uncomfortable in front of a camera. But a photographer friend took the photos, out of doors, in natural light, and it was a surprisingly not-excruciating experience. When I got the proofs a few days later, I was a little startled, as I am always a little startled, by the difference between the Marisa in the picture and the Marisa I picture, but while my friend let me know that she could soften and blur and retouch as much as I wanted, I found I didn’t want her to after all. I didn’t mind the way I looked; there were things about it I liked. And in any case, I wanted to look like myself. Like myself with makeup on, turned to the right angle, and bathed in honey-colored late afternoon light, but like myself all the same.
I was never an ingenue writer. When I began writing my first novel, Love Walked In, I was thirty-seven, thirty-nine when it launched, but the writer in the new photo is squarely and unmistakably middle-aged, which alarms me. I really don’t mind the age thing in and of itself. In many, many ways, fifty-three is wonderful. Fifty-three is freedom and choices and true friendship and daily interludes of joy. Unlike other eras of my life, I manage to spend the vast majority of my time with people I love.
No, what alarms me about middle age is the sense that, by now, with all those writing years and eight novels (two co-written with my husband) under my belt, I should be seasoned. I should be capable. Not wise, yet, maybe, but surefooted. At the very least, I should be better at both writing and being a writer than I was when I began. So, as corny as it sounds, seeing that author photo caused me to do what I rarely do: pause and take stock. I decided to be methodical about it. Methodical and brutally honest. I got out a notebook. I made lists: Better, Worse, The Same.
Better
To my relief, the “Better” list has actual items on it. Mostly, these items fall under the category of knowing what to leave out. When I write conversations, I am better at not taking the reader by the hand and guiding them. Despite all the anti-adverb common wisdom, I still like them, but I use them more judiciously. Much of the time, instead of saying “wryly,” I make the dialogue convey wryness and trust the reader to get it. I’ve become less afraid of letting people just talk, without stopping to fiddle with their fork or tuck their hair behind their ears or note the skeletal (or lush or new-spring-lemon-lime-frilled) tree outside the window, unless the moment truly calls for fiddling or tucking or noting. I still love figurative language (I think in figurative language; figurative language is my natural habitat), but I am better at knowing when to pare things down, when to speed up the pacing with an austere, noun-verb, noun-verb staccato, and when to pull out the big poetry guns. I am better at moving people around, getting them from one scene to the next without a lot of fuss.
Worse
What’s gotten worse? I am worse, much worse, at entering that pure, locked-in writing space, that inside-a-car-in-the-rain mode in which the real world blurs and fades and it’s all characters and story and sentences on the screen. It’s no longer just a matter of quiet and time and a shut door.
The care and feeding of my writer brain has become complicated.
I have to spend time every day outside, walking under the sun and blue sky, which means winter is hard. I have to silence–for at least a few hours–the big, clamorous world of politics, injustice, climate change, school shootings or at least to box up and put away my reactions to this world: sorrow, outrage, fear, anger. Which means that these years, the ones happening right now, are hard. I need to read certain books and not read others, depending on what I’m writing. I start books and find them either hitting too close to the bone or not close enough, to be boring me with their flat language or intimidating me with their glorious language, and so I put them down. And some days, even when I manage to walk and silence and box up and read exactly the right pages of the right book, I am tired or distracted or restless, and I can’t fully immerse myself in writing. Honestly, this is more often than not the state of affairs, and so I write anyway, in a tense, tenuous, partial, in-between state, because I have to, but it’s hard.
The Same
What’s stayed the same: Writing scares me. I am painstaking, setting down words, one after the other, with enormous care, as if they’re bombs that might go off or fizzle. I want my sentences to convey meaning but also to beat out the proper rhythm, to sing or murmur or slash or sting like sleet. I want to get the vowel sounds pitched perfectly and get the consonants to brush or slam or bump hard against one another. And I want to do it the first time around. Words feel so crucial to me; I am afraid of getting them wrong, even though I can hit a key and delete them. I listen to other people–my children, my husband–write at their computers, composing so quickly and with such assurance, flurry after flurry of clicks, and I vow to write that way next time. With every book, I swear I’ll bang out a draft, fearlessly, and then go back and revise, revise, revise. But I never can, and I think, after all these decades, it’s probably hopeless.
But these things also haven’t changed for this middle-aged writer: what good company words are, old friends; the privilege of spending time in the company of characters and sentences; the joy when a piece of the story gets told, when the music inside my head matches the music on the page; how a character or the plot can surprise me; the gratitude when I realize there is a new idea, more work to do, another book to write.
Do you have time to pause, reflect, and share? How have you changed as a writer?
A New York Times bestselling author and award-winning poet with a PhD in literature and creative writing, Marisa de los Santos lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with her family.
Marisa, I love the “inside-in-a-car-in-the-rain mode”, and I love being in that space. Over the years that hasn’t changed for me, and I hope it never will. What has changed, though, is that I’ve learned how to stop giving away my agency to the world. To the noise, the demands, the clatter. That in-the-zone space you describe is where the work gets done, and for me it is sacred and inviolate. I used to equivocate about this, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more fierce about protecting my workspace, especially the one inside my head that other people can’t see. I’m also kind of done with the categories that society fits us into. Middle aged? Older? Or experienced. Seasoned. Accomplished. Graceful. We get to define ourselves. This is a lovely post!! Thank you.
Thank you, Susan! I agree with you about protecting the work space. Unfortunately, I myself am often the worst culprit when it comes to disrupting it! Working on that . . .
Marisa, I love your honest assessment lists. What’s true is that you have become wiser and deeper. So good. Thank you.
Marisa, so much resonated for me in your essay–after nearly 20 years of this beautiful writing life, I am again returning to those early days when I wrote without censoring. I marvel at how much even the untrained writer knows about story instinctively. We were made for this. I hope to have another 20 years…and yes, the 50s are marvelous!
What a good practice! I’m afraid for me it would not be a matter of “returning” but of breaking new ground. I think accepting my method for what it seems to insist on being is key–but hard! Thank you!
What a wonderful post, Marisa! I adore the way you write, have read all your books and purchased them too, not always the case with me since I haunt my local library. What sticks with me most about what you say is your love of figurative language juxtaposed with your growing awareness of how a little goes a long way. And that maybe your character does not need to fiddle with her hair unless it tells the reader something important. I also admire that you embrace 53, because I embrace 65 and only worry that I will not have enough time to write all I want to. I look forward to your next work and thank you for inspiring me this morning. Can’t wait to buy your next work.
Thank you for your kindness, Annie, and for allowing my books a place on your personal shelf! I’m honored. Wishing you many many years of writing.
I enjoyed your post, Marisa. The photo story caught my interest, because I still use (mostly) as my primary photo one that’s almost a decade old, from a Hawaiian vacation where I’m wearing shades and wore an inadvertent version of a Mona Lisa smile. Mysterious, no? I’m a mystery writer, after all.
Lately I’ve debated investing in a professionally taken photograph, but dammit, people read my books because they like the characters, the settings and the stories. Many comment that they didn’t even realize the books were written by a woman. Would they like my books better if they could see more clearly what I look like?
Like you, I labor over every sentence, trying to find the as-close-to-perfect-as possible choice of word or phrase. I can’t imagine just spitting words out as fast as I can type. Instead, I like to think my novels are sculpted, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word.
Have I changed as a writer? No. But possibly experience has changed my writing. Improved it, I like to think.
Thanks for an interesting and thoughtful post.
I can imagine banging out a draft and then going back and revising and fine-tuning; I love the idea of having something substantive to work with every day, but I do think that at some point your method is probably your method. However,
I did convert to outlining after three novels, so maybe . . . ?
Every part of this post was meaningful. I get the photo thing, and I am certain I have more age on my visage than you do. Your discussion of adverbs, busyness attached to dialogue, and the siren song of figurative language–all of it felt comfortable and real, as if we were exchanging writing worries over a cup of coffee. Wishing you writing moments and no worries about the years as they pile on.
So glad the post resonated with you, Beth. Always lovely to meet a kindred spirit!
I had a similar photo shoot experience. I had a photographer do something less formal and freer than the usual head shots. I had thought I would hate it —- and although I have not seen the results that will be on my new books, I almost found it fun. Almost. I don’t like cameras but I felt like I might look at the images this time and not be so shocked. Perhaps it is comfort with my aging or my gray hair or, to use the words of Frank Bruno, the imagination and subtlety that comes with age. Maybe I am happy. My books have photos from four years ago…. it was time….and in that four years, I’ve grown. I hope it shows…..
I appreciated your piece on many levels. start here. I had a similar photo shoot experience this week. I had a photographer I knew do something less formal and freer than the usual head shots. I had thought I would hate it —- and although I have not seen the results that will be on my new books, I almost found it fun. Almost. I don’t like cameras but I felt like I might look at the images this time and not be so shocked. Perhaps it is comfort with my aging or my gray hair or, to use the words of Frank Bruno, the imagination and subtlety that comes with age. Maybe I am happy. My books have photos from four years ago…. it was time….and in that four years, I’ve grown. I hope it shows…..