Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 139 of 216 · 20 per page

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  In order to have this sense of inevitability, the climax of your story will probably only reveal itself to you slowly and over time. You may think that you know what this moment contains—and it makes sense to aim for something—but I recommend that you not fix too hard on what it will be. Fix instead on who your people are and how they feel toward one another, what they say, how they smell, whom they fear. Let your human beings follow the music they hear, and let it take them where it will. Then you may discover, when you get close enough to peer into the opening, as if into a scenic Easter egg, that your characters had something in mind all along that was brighter and much more meaningful than what you wanted to impose on them. So aim but not too hard, and when you finally see the climax forming in front of you, then you can race toward it. Lastly: I heard Alice Adams give a lecture on the short story once, one aspect of which made the writing students in her audience so excited that I have passed it along to my students ever since. (Most of the time I give her credit.) She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean? A formula can be a great way to get started. And it feels so great finally to dive into the water; maybe you splash around and flail for a while, but at least you’re in.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Y en el peor de los casos, mi padre nunca me daría la espalda. Todo estará bien. Podría no estarlo ahora, pero lo estará. Sonrío un poco, casi convencida. Mirando abajo, a la superficie azul del agua y la luz blanca iluminando el limpio fondo de la piscina, siento una repentina urgencia de probarla. Puedo hacerlo. Todo estará bien. Y respiro profundo, cierro mis ojos, y salto, empujándome del borde y dentro del agua. Salen burbujas por montones de mi boca cuando suelto el aire y me hundo hasta el fondo de la piscina. Mi cabello flota a mi alrededor, el agua acaricia mi cuero cabelludo, y la camiseta se eleva mientras cruzo mis piernas y me siento en el suelo de la piscina. No sé cuándo comencé a hacer esto. No crecí con una piscina, por supuesto, pero quizás fue el campamento de verano cuando tenía doce, o Cam llevándome a la piscina pública cuando era niña, que me di cuenta de lo asustada que podría llegar a sentirme por lo desconocido. Me gusta desafiar esa parte de mí, porque eleva mi confianza cuando tengo éxito. Llevando mi ropa hasta la lavandería en el sótano de mala muerte de mi viejo apartamento, sola. Dormir en la oscuridad sin siquiera una luz en el pasillo. Conducir a casa a las dos de la mañana después de un turno y sin revisar el asiento trasero para asegurarme que estaba sola en el auto. Miro alrededor, girando mi cabeza y viendo solo agua, pero mi visión solo me lleva hasta cierto punto y la vista se desvanece en nada. Cualquier cosa podría venir nadando hacia mí de la distancia. Cualquier cosa podría estar detrás de mí. Cualquier cosa podría salir del desagüe, o sumergirse desde la superficie. Cierro mis ojos. Si puedo hacer esto, Cole y yo estaremos bien. Todo estará bien, y seguiré adelante. Mis pulmones comienzan a arder, pero mantengo mis ojos cerrados y permanezco quieta. Algo está mirándome. Y hay algo deslizándose en el agua, dirigiéndose directo hacia mí. Lo siento. Está viniendo por mí. Sé que es mi miedo, así que mantengo mis ojos cerrados, perseverando. Sé que todo estará bien. Es mi imaginación. Puedo hacerlo. Puedo hacerlo. Mis pulmones se estiran dolorosamente, y mi garganta quema, pero aprieto mis puños. Solo otro segundo. Un segundo más.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  So I wrote all this down in my letter to Sam, and little by little memory and detail and fact and feeling wove themselves together. Like a Polaroid, the letter emerged, and from it the essay, clear and bright, full of smells and sounds, and full of hope, because baseball, like life, throbs with hope, or it wouldn’t exist—and full of me, for Sam and his children to read one day. Writer’s BlockThere are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer’s block, where you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your sock. Or you look at the notes you’ve scribbled recently on yellow legal pads or index cards, and they look like something Richard Speck jotted down the other night. And at the same time, as it turns out, you happen to know that your closest writing friend is on a roll, has been turning out stories and screenplays and children’s books and even most of a novel like he or she is some crazy pot-holder factory, pot holders pouring out the windows because there is simply not enough room inside for such glorious productivity. Writer’s block is going to happen to you. You will read what little you’ve written lately and see with absolute clarity that it is total dog shit. A blissfully productive manic stage may come to a screeching halt, and all of a sudden you realize you’re Wile E. Coyote and you’ve run off the cliff and are a second away from having to look down. Or else you haven’t been able to write anything at all for a while. The fear that you’ll never write again is going to hit you when you feel not only lost and unable to find a few little bread crumbs that would identify the path you were on but also when you’re at your lowest ebb of energy and faith. You may feel a little as if writing a novel is like trying to level Mount McKinley with a dentist’s drill. Things feel hopeless, or at least bleak, and you are not imaginative or organized enough to bash your way through to a better view, let alone some interesting conclusion. You know where every idea, quote, and image came from; none of them is fresh. You’re so familiar with what you’re saying that your words all sound utterly commonplace. Writers are like vacuum cleaners, sucking up all that we can see and hear and read and think and feel and articulate, and everything that everyone else within earshot can hear and see and think and feel. We’re mimics, we’re parrots—we’re writers.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  A fine green mold spread over the books and papers and paintings that were stacked so high and piled so deep you could hardly cross the room. Tiny mushrooms sprouted up in corners. The moisture ate away at the wooden stairs leading up to the house, and climbing them became a daily hazard. Mom fell through a rotted step and went tumbling down the hillside. She had bruises on her legs and arms for weeks. “My husband doesn’t beat me,” she’d say when anyone stared at them. “He just won’t fix the stairs.” The porch had also started to rot. Most of the banisters and railing had given way, and the floorboards had turned spongy and slick with mold and algae. It became a real problem when you had to go down under the house to use the toilet at night, and each of us had slipped and fallen off the porch at least once. It was a good ten feet to the ground. “We have to do something about the porch situation,” I told Mom. “It’s getting downright dangerous to go to the bathroom at night.” Besides, the toilet under the house was now totally unusable. It had overflowed, and you were better off digging yourself a hole in the hillside somewhere. “You’re right,” Mom said. “Something has to be done.” She bought a bucket. It was made of yellow plastic, and we kept it on the floor in the kitchen, and that was what we used whenever we had to go to the bathroom. When it filled up, some brave soul would carry it outside, dig a hole, and empty it. ONE DAY WHILE Brian and I were out scrounging around on the edge of our property, he picked up a piece of rotting lumber, and there among the pill bugs and night crawlers was a diamond ring. The stone was big. At first we thought it was just neat junk, but we spit-polished it and scratched glass with it like Dad had shown us, and it seemed real. We figured it must have belonged to the old lady who had lived there. She had died before we moved in. Everyone had said she was a little loopy. “What do you think it’s worth?” I asked Brian. “Probably more than the house,” he said. We figured we could sell it and buy food, pay off the house—Mom and Dad kept missing the monthly payments, and there was talk that we were going to be evicted—and maybe still have enough left over for something special, like a new pair of sneakers for each of us. We brought the ring home and showed it to Mom. She held it up to the light, then said we needed to have it appraised. The next day she took the Trailways bus to Bluefield. When she returned, she told us it was in fact a genuine two-carat diamond. “So what’s it worth?” I asked. “That doesn’t matter,” Mom said.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. Even someone as grim and unsentimental as Samuel Beckett, with his lunatics in garbage cans or up to their necks in sand, whose lives consist of pawing through the contents of their purses, stopping to marvel at each item, gives us great insight into what is true, into what helps. He gets it right—that we’re born astride the grave and that this planet can feel as cold and uninhabitable as the moon—and he knows how to make it funny. He smiles an oblique and private smile at us, the most delicious smile of all, and this changes how we look at life. A few small things seem suddenly clear, things to which we can cling, and this makes us feel like part of the solution. (But perhaps we have the same problem with the word solution as we do with the word moral . It sounds so fixative, and maybe we have gone beyond fixing. Maybe all we can do is to make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor.) Or look at the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who is, for my money, the sanest person currently on earth. He says simply, “My true religion is kindness.” That is a great moral position—practicing kindness, keeping one’s heart open in the presence of suffering. Unfortunately it does not make great literature. You will need to embroider it a little. Otherwise you will have a one-sentence book, and potential agents will look at you as if—as the Texans say—you are perhaps not the brightest porch light on the block. So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive. My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another. Some of us are interested in any light you might be able to shed on this, and we will pay a great deal extra if you can make us laugh about it. For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are the ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food. So write about the things that are most important to you. Love and death and sex and survival are important to most of us. Some of us are also interested in God and ecology. Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics—cappuccino enemas, say.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She’d settle in, find a place for us, and I’d follow her as soon as I could. I told Lori about my escape fund, the seventy-five dollars I’d saved. From now on, I said, it would be our joint fund. We’d take on extra work after school and put everything we earned into the piggy bank. Lori could take it to New York and use it to get established, so that by the time I arrived, everything would be set. Lori had always made very good posters, for football rallies, for the plays the drama club put on, and for candidates running for student council. Now she started doing commissioned posters for a dollar-fifty apiece. She was too shy to solicit orders, so I did it for her. Lots of kids at Welch High wanted customized posters to hang on their bedroom walls—of their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s name, of their car or their astrological sign or their favorite band. Lori designed the names in big fat overlapping three-dimensional letters like the kind on rock albums, then painted them in Day-Glo colors, outlined in india ink so the letters popped, and surrounded them with stars and dots and squiggly lines that made the letters seem like they were moving. The posters were so good that word of mouth spread, and soon Lori had such a backlog of orders that she was up working until one or two every morning. I made money babysitting and doing other kids’ homework. I did book reports, science essays, and math. I charged a dollar per assignment and guaranteed at least an A– or the customer was entitled to a full refund. After school, I babysat for a dollar an hour and could usually do the homework then. I also tutored kids for two dollars an hour. We told Brian about the escape fund, and he pitched in, even though we hadn’t included him in our plans because he was only in the seventh grade. He mowed lawns or chopped wood or cut hillside weeds with a scythe. He worked after school until the sun went down and all day Saturday and Sunday and came home with his arms and face scratched from the brush he’d cleared. Without looking for thanks or praise, he quietly added his earnings to the pig, which we named Oz. We kept Oz on the old sewing machine in the bedroom. Oz had no plugged hole on the bottom, and the slot on the top was too narrow to work bills out, even if you used a knife, so once you’d put money into Oz, it stayed there. We tested it to make sure. We couldn’t count the money, but because Oz was translucent, we could see our cash accumulating inside when we held him up to the light. • • • One day that winter, when I came home from school, a gold Cadillac Coupe DeVille was parked in front of the house.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  He said he didn’t take our New York money, but if Lori was hell-bent on living in that cesspool, he’d finance her trip himself. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few wadded dollar bills. We just stared at him, so he let the crumpled money fall to the floor. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Why are you doing this to us, Dad?” I asked. “Why?” His face tightened with anger, then he staggered to the sofa bed and passed out. “I’ll never get out of here,” Lori kept saying. “I’ll never get out of here.” “You will,” I said. “I swear it.” I believed she would. Because I knew that if Lori never got out of Welch, neither would I. • • • I went back to G. C. Murphy the next day and stared at the shelf of piggy banks. They were all either plastic or porcelain or glass, easily broken. I studied a collection of metal boxes with locks and keys. The hinges were too flimsy. Dad could pry them apart. I bought a blue change purse. I wore it on a belt under my clothes at all times. When it got too full, I put the money in a sock that I hid in a hole in the wall below my bunk. We started saving again, but Lori felt too defeated to paint much, and the money didn’t come as quickly. A week before school was out, we had only $37.20 in the sock. Then one of the women I’d been babysitting for, a teacher named Mrs. Sanders, told me she and her family were moving back to their hometown in Iowa and asked if I wanted to spend the summer with them there. If I came along and helped look after her two toddlers, she said she’d pay me two hundred dollars at the end of the summer and buy me a bus ticket back to Welch. I thought about her offer. “Take Lori instead of me,” I said. “And at the end of the summer, buy her a bus ticket to New York City.” Mrs. Sanders agreed. • • • Low-lying pewter-colored clouds rested on the mountaintops around Welch on the morning of Lori’s departure. They were there most mornings, and when I noticed them, they reminded me of how isolated and forgotten the town was, a sad, lost place adrift in the clouds. The clouds usually burned away by midmorning, when the sun climbed above the steep hills, but some days, like the one Lori left, they clung to the mountains, and a fine mist formed in the valley that turned your hair and face damp. When the Sanders family pulled up in their station wagon, Lori was ready. She had packed her clothes, her favorite books, and her art supplies in a single cardboard box.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. Even someone as grim and unsentimental as Samuel Beckett, with his lunatics in garbage cans or up to their necks in sand, whose lives consist of pawing through the contents of their purses, stopping to marvel at each item, gives us great insight into what is true, into what helps. He gets it right—that we’re born astride the grave and that this planet can feel as cold and uninhabitable as the moon—and he knows how to make it funny. He smiles an oblique and private smile at us, the most delicious smile of all, and this changes how we look at life. A few small things seem suddenly clear, things to which we can cling, and this makes us feel like part of the solution. (But perhaps we have the same problem with the word solution as we do with the word moral . It sounds so fixative, and maybe we have gone beyond fixing. Maybe all we can do is to make our remaining time here full of gentleness and good humor.) Or look at the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who is, for my money, the sanest person currently on earth. He says simply, “My true religion is kindness.” That is a great moral position—practicing kindness, keeping one’s heart open in the presence of suffering. Unfortunately it does not make great literature. You will need to embroider it a little. Otherwise you will have a one-sentence book, and potential agents will look at you as if—as the Texans say—you are perhaps not the brightest porch light on the block. So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive. My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another. Some of us are interested in any light you might be able to shed on this, and we will pay a great deal extra if you can make us laugh about it. For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are the ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food. So write about the things that are most important to you. Love and death and sex and survival are important to most of us. Some of us are also interested in God and ecology. Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics—cappuccino enemas, say.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I sat in corners with my little finger hooked over my bottom lip, reading, in a trance, lost in the places and times to which books took me. And there was a moment during my junior year in high school when I began to believe that I could do what other writers were doing. I came to believe that I might be able to put a pencil in my hand and make something magical happen. Then I wrote some terrible, terrible stories. In college the whole world opened up, and the books and poets being taught in my English and philosophy classes gave me the feeling for the first time in my life that there was hope, hope that I might find my place in a community. I felt that in my strange new friends and in certain new books, I was meeting my other half. Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously. I became a socialist, for five weeks. Then the bus ride to my socialist meetings wore me out. I was drawn to oddballs, ethnic people, theater people, poets, radicals, gays and lesbians—and somehow they all helped me become some of those things I wanted so desperately to become: political, intellectual, artistic. My friends turned me on to Kierkegaard, Beckett, Doris Lessing. I swooned with the excitement and nourishment of it all. I remember reading C. S. Lewis for the first time, Surprised by Joy , and how, looking inside himself, he found “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” I felt elated and absolved. I had thought that the people one admired, the kind, smart people of the world, were not like that on the inside, were different from me and, say, Toulouse-Lautrec. I started writing sophomoric articles for the college paper. Luckily, I was a sophomore. I was incompetent in all college ways except one—I got the best grades in English. I wrote the best papers. But I was ambitious; I wanted to be recognized on a larger scale. So I dropped out at nineteen to become a famous writer. I moved back to San Francisco and became a famous Kelly Girl instead. I was famous for my incompetence and weepiness. I wept with boredom and disbelief.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I looked at Mom, who was stirring her soup as if it were an ordinary evening, and that was when I lost it. “Do something!” I yelled at her. “You’ve got to do something to help Dad!” “Your father’s the only one who can help himself,” Mom said. “Only he knows how to fight his own demons.” After the better part of a week, Dad’s delirium stopped, and he asked us to come talk to him in the bedroom. He was propped up on a pillow, paler and thinner than I’d ever seen him. He took the water jug I offered him. His hands were shaking so badly that he had trouble holding it, and water dribbled down his chin as he drank. A few days later, Dad was able to walk around, but he had no appetite, and his hands still trembled. I told Mom that maybe I had made a terrible mistake, but Mom said sometimes you have to get sicker before you can get better. Within a few more days, Dad seemed almost normal, except that he’d become tentative, even kind of shy. He smiled at us kids a lot and squeezed our shoulders, sometimes leaning on us to steady himself. “I wonder what life will be like now,” I said to Lori. “The same,” she said. “He tried stopping before, but it never lasted.” “This time it will.” “How do you know?” “It’s his present to me.” • • • Dad spent the summer recuperating. For days on end, he’d sit under the orange trees reading. By early fall, he had recovered most of his strength. To celebrate his new life on the wagon, and to put some distance between himself and his drinking haunts, he decided that the Walls clan should take a long camping trip to the Grand Canyon. We’d avoid the park rangers and find a cave somewhere along the river. We’d swim and fish and cook our catch over an open fire. Mom and Lori could paint, and Dad and Brian and I could climb the cliffs and study the canyon’s geological strata. It would be like old times. We kids didn’t need to be going to school, he said. He and Mom could instruct us better than any of those shit-for-brains teachers. “You, Mountain Goat, can put together a rock collection the likes of which has never been seen,” Dad told me. Everyone loved the idea. Brian and I were so excited we did a jig right there on the living room floor. We packed blankets, food, canteens, fishing line, the lavender blanket Maureen took everywhere, Lori’s paper and pencils, Mom’s easel and canvases and brushes and paints. What couldn’t fit in the trunk of the car, we tied to the top. We also took along Mom’s fancy archery set, the one made of inlaid fruitwood, because Dad said you never know what wild game we might find in those canyon recesses.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be? The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into. Your parents and grandparents will be shouting, “Don’t do it, don’t sit down, don’t sit down!,” and you’ll have to do what you did as a kid—shut them out and get on with finding out about life. Then I look into my students’ faces, and they look solemnly back at me. “So why does our writing matter, again?” they ask. Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: Excerpt from “Modern Love,” from Getting Over Tom , copyright © 1994 by Abigail Thomas. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Frederick Buechner: Excerpt from essay by Frederick Buechner from Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing , introduction by William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Reprinted by permission of Frederick Buechner. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: “I Go Back to May 1937,” from The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1987 by Sharon Olds. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Phillip Lopate: Excerpt from “We Who Are Your Closest Friends,” from The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open by Phillip Lopate (Sun Press, 1972). Reprinted by permission of Phillip Lopate. Milkweed Editions: Excerpt from “August in Waterton, Alberta” from The Dead Get By With Everything (Milkweed Editions, 1991), copyright © 1991 by Bill Holm. Reprinted by permission of Milkweed Editions.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  He never complained about Welch, and unlike Lori and me, he’d made a lot of friends there. But I thought it was in Brian’s long-term interest to get out of the town. I made a list of reasons he should move to New York, so I could argue him into it. I called him at Grandpa’s and presented my case. He’d need to get a job to pay his share of the rent and groceries, I said, but jobs were going begging in the city. He could share the living room with me—there was plenty of space for a second bed—the toilet flushed, and the ceiling never leaked. When I finished, Brian was silent for a moment. Then he said, “When’s the soonest I can come?” • • • Just like me, Brian hopped the Trailways bus the morning after completing his junior year. The day after he got to New York, he found a job at an ice-cream parlor in Brooklyn, not far from The Phoenix . He said he liked Brooklyn better than Manhattan or the Bronx, but he also developed a habit of dropping by The Phoenix when he got off work and waiting for me until three or four in the morning so we could take the subway together up to the South Bronx. He never said anything, but I think he figured that, as when we were kids, we both stood a better chance if we took on the world together. I now saw no point in going to college. It was expensive, and my aim in going would have been to get a degree to qualify me for a job as a journalist. But I now had my job at The Phoenix . As for the learning itself, I figured you didn’t need a college degree to become one of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own. And so, if I overheard mention of something I was ignorant about—keeping Kosher, Tammany Hall, haute couture—I researched it later on. One day I interviewed a community activist who described a particular job program as a throwback to the Progressive Era. I had no idea what the Progressive Era was, and back in the office, I got out the World Book Encyclopedia . Mike Armstrong wanted to know what I was doing, and when I explained, he asked me if I had ever thought of going to college. “Why should I give up this job to go to college?” I asked. “You’ve got college graduates working here who are doing what I’m doing.” “You may not believe this,” he said, “but there are better jobs out there than the one you’ve got now. You might get one of them one of these days. But not without a college degree.” Mike promised me that if I went to college, I could come back to The Phoenix anytime I wanted.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  If you don’t believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth’s: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend’s early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, “Good for you. We can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!” In any case, the bottom line is that if you want to write, you get to, but you probably won’t be able to get very far if you don’t start trying to get over your perfectionism. You set out to tell a story of some sort, to tell the truth as you feel it, because something is calling you to do so. It calls you like the beckoning finger of smoke in cartoons that rises off the pie cooling on the windowsill, slides under doors and into mouse holes or into the nostrils of the sleeping man or woman in the easy chair. Then the aromatic smoke crooks its finger, and the mouse or the man or woman rises and follows, nose in the air. But some days the smoke is faint and you just have to follow it as best you can, sniffing away. Still, even on those days, you might notice how great perseverance feels. And the next day the scent may seem stronger—or it may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless. Perfectionism, on the other hand, will only drive you mad. Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what? Vonnegut said, “When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up. I didn’t give up, largely because of my father’s faith in me. And then, unfortunately, when I was twenty-three, I suddenly had a story to tell. My father was diagnosed with brain cancer. He and my brothers and I were devastated, but somehow we managed, just barely, to keep our heads above water. My father told me to pay attention and to take notes. “You tell your version,” he said, “and I am going to tell mine.” I began to write about what my father was going through, and then began to shape these writings into connected short stories. I wove in all the vignettes and snippets I’d been working on in the year before Dad’s diagnosis, and came up with five chapters that sort of hung together. My father, who was too sick to write his own rendition, loved them, and had me ship them off to Elizabeth, our agent. And then I waited and waited and waited, growing old and withered in the course of a month. But I think she must have read them in a state of near euphoria, thrilled to find herself not reading “Arnold.” She is not a religious woman by any stretch, but I always picture her clutching those stories to her chest, eyes closed, swaying slightly, moaning, “Thank ya, Lord.” So she sent them around New York, and Viking made us an offer. And thus the process began. The book came out when I was twenty-six, when my father had been dead for a year. God! I had a book published! It was everything I had ever dreamed of. And I had reached nirvana, right? Well. I believed, before I sold my first book, that publication would be instantly and automatically gratifying, an affirming and romantic experience, a Hallmark commercial where one runs and leaps in slow motion across a meadow filled with wildflowers into the arms of acclaim and self-esteem. This did not happen for me. The months before a book comes out of the chute are, for most writers, right up there with the worst life has to offer, pretty much like the first twenty minutes of Apocalypse Now , with Martin Sheen in the motel room in Saigon, totally de-compensating. The waiting and the fantasies, both happy and grim, wear you down. Plus there is the matter of the early reviews that come out about two months before publication. The first two notices I got on this tender book I’d written about my dying, now dead father said that my book was a total waste of time, a boring, sentimental, self-indulgent sack of spider puke.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  I have tried to suggest that the identity categories often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics, that is, deemed necessary in order to mobilize feminism as an identity politics, simultaneously work to limit and constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up. The tacit constraints that produce culturally intelligible “sex” ought to be understood as generative political structures rather than naturalized foundations. Paradoxically, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of “agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed. For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary. That the constituted status of identity is misconstrued along these two conflicting lines suggests the ways in which the feminist discourse on cultural construction remains trapped within the unnecessary binarism of free will and determinism. Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible. The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize. The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them. This theoretical inquiry has attempted to locate the political in the very signifying practices that establish, regulate, and deregulate identity. This effort, however, can only be accomplished through the introduction of a set of questions that extend the very notion of the political. How to disrupt the foundations that cover over alternative cultural configurations of gender? How to destabilize and render in their phantasmatic dimension the “premises” of identity politics?

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  liquid. Mom never touched the stuff, and I wondered what Dad found so irresistible. I opened the bottle and sniffed. The awful smell stung my nose, but after working up my courage, I took a swig. It had a hideously thick taste, smoky, and so hot it burned my tongue. I ran to the bathroom, spat it out, and rinsed my mouth. “I just took a swig of booze,” I told Brian. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.” Brian grabbed the bottle out of my hand. He emptied it into the kitchen sink, then led me out to the shed and opened up a wooden trunk in the back marked TOY BOX. It was filled with empty liquor bottles. Whenever Dad passed out, Brian said, he took the bottle Dad had been drinking, emptied it, and hid it in the trunk. He’d wait until he had ten or twelve, then tote them to a garbage can a few blocks away, because if Dad saw the empty bottles, he would get furious. • • • “I have a really good feeling about this Christmas,” Mom announced in early December. Lori pointed out that the last few months hadn’t gone so well. “Exactly,” Mom said. “This is God’s way of telling us to take charge of our own fates. God helps those who help themselves.” She had such a good feeling that she’d decided that this year we were going to celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day, instead of a week later. Mom was an expert thrift-store shopper. She read the labels on the clothes and turned over dishes and vases to study the markings on the bottom. She had no qualms about telling a saleslady that a dress marked at twenty-five cents was worth only a dime, and she usually got it at that price. Mom took us thrift-store shopping for weeks before that Christmas, giving us each a dollar to spend on presents. I got a red glass bud vase for Mom, an onyx ashtray for Dad, a model-car kit for Brian, a book about elves for Lori, and a stuffed tiger with a loose ear that Mom helped me sew back in place for Maureen. On Christmas morning, Mom took us down to a gas station that sold Christmas trees. She selected a tall, dark, but slightly dried-out Douglas fir. “This poor old tree isn’t going to sell by the end of the day, and it needs someone to love it,” she told the man and offered him three dollars. The man looked at the tree and looked at Mom and looked at us kids. My dress had buttons missing. Holes were appearing along the seams of Maureen’s T-shirt. “Lady, this one’s been marked down to a buck,” he said.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Be kind to the others, grab the fleck of riverweed, notice how beautifully your bug legs scull. All the good stories are out there waiting to be told in a fresh, wild way. Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions. Some people will sing it spontaneously, with a lot of soulful riffs, while others are going to practice until they could sing it at the Met. Either way, everything we need in order to tell our stories in a reasonable and exciting way already exists in each of us. Everything you need is in your head and memories, in all that your senses provide, in all that you’ve seen and thought and absorbed. There in your unconscious, where the real creation goes on, is the little kid or the Dr. Seuss creature in the cellar, arranging and stitching things together. When this being is ready to hand things up to you, to give you a paragraph or a sudden move one character makes that will change the whole course of your novel, you will be entrusted with it. So, in the meantime, while the tailor is working, you might as well go get some fresh air. Do your three hundred words, and then go for a walk. Otherwise you’ll want to sit there and try to contribute, and this will only get in the way. Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck. You’ll sit there going, “Are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet?” But it is trying to tell you nicely, “Shut up and go away.” Part FourPublication—and Other Reasons to Write Writing a PresentPublication is not going to change your life or solve your problems. Publication will not make you more confident or more beautiful, and it will probably not make you any richer. There will be a very long buildup to publication day, and then the festivities will usually be over rather quickly. We will talk about all of this at great length shortly. In the meantime, let’s discuss some of the other reasons to write that may surprise a writer, even a writer who hasn’t given up on getting published. There are arenas full of potential for rich reward, where your life and your sense of self and of abundance really can be changed. (All of a sudden I cannot remember if we are allowed to use the word abundance in California anymore.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive am I willing to be? The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into. Your parents and grandparents will be shouting, “Don’t do it, don’t sit down, don’t sit down!,” and you’ll have to do what you did as a kid—shut them out and get on with finding out about life. Then I look into my students’ faces, and they look solemnly back at me. “So why does our writing matter, again?” they ask. Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: Excerpt from “Modern Love,” from Getting Over Tom , copyright © 1994 by Abigail Thomas. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Frederick Buechner: Excerpt from essay by Frederick Buechner from Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing , introduction by William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Reprinted by permission of Frederick Buechner. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: “I Go Back to May 1937,” from The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds, copyright © 1987 by Sharon Olds. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Phillip Lopate: Excerpt from “We Who Are Your Closest Friends,” from The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open by Phillip Lopate (Sun Press, 1972). Reprinted by permission of Phillip Lopate. Milkweed Editions: Excerpt from “August in Waterton, Alberta” from The Dead Get By With Everything (Milkweed Editions, 1991), copyright © 1991 by Bill Holm. Reprinted by permission of Milkweed Editions.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch the aspic set. Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness. They shouldn’t be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is all about. I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am; for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy. I like for them to have hope—if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. It makes me overeat. I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy. Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. Although as my friend Jane points out, if you or I had been there speaking really bad French, they would have turned us in in a hot second—bank on it. In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision—especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a great deal.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  slept under an inflatable raft Mom had won in a sweepstakes by sending in Benson & Hedges 100s packages we’d dug out of trash cans. If I left, Brian could have my old bed. My mind was made up. I was going to New York City as soon as the school year was out. I clambered up the mountainside to the rear of the house—the stairs had completely rotted through—and climbed through the back window we now used as a door. Dad was at the drafting table, working on some calculations, and Mom was going through her stacks of paintings. When I told them about my plan, Dad stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, and climbed out the back window without saying a word. Mom nodded and looked down, dusting off one of her paintings, murmuring something to herself. “So, what do you think?” I asked. “Fine. Go.” “What’s wrong?” “Nothing. You should go. It’s a good plan.” She seemed on the verge of tears. “Don’t be sad, Mom. I’ll write.” “I’m not upset because I’ll miss you,” Mom said. “I’m upset because you get to go to New York and I’m stuck here. It’s not fair.” • • • Lori, when I called her, approved of my plan. I could live with her, she said, if I got a job and chipped in on the rent. Brian liked my idea, too, especially when I pointed out that he could have my bed. He began making wisecracks in a lockjaw accent about how I was going to become one of those fur-wearing, pinkie-extending, nose- in-the-air New Yorkers. He began counting down the weeks until I left, just as I had counted them down for Lori. “In sixteen weeks, you’ll be in New York,” he’d say. The next week, “In three months and three weeks, you’ll be in New York.” Dad had barely spoken to me since I announced my decision. One night that spring, he came into the bedroom where I was up on my bunk studying. He had some papers rolled up under his arm. “Got a minute to look at something?” he asked. “Sure.” I followed him into the living room, where he spread the papers on the drafting table. They were his old blueprints for the Glass Castle, all stained and dog-eared. I