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.

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• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  In the next chapter, I’ll ask you to stretch the scope of your love even wider. Beyond the special people in your life, and even beyond those with whom you interact regularly, I hope to convince you that love’s reach is virtually unbounded. Experimenting with unbridled loving is perhaps the most challenging and rewarding of all. CHAPTER 8 Loving Without Borders TO LOVE ONE PERSON WITH A PRIVATE LOVE IS POOR AND MISERABLE; TO LOVE ALL IS GLORIOUS. —Thomas Traherne In a world replete with threats, uncertainties, and ceaseless distractions, the urge can be strong to simply look out for oneself. If you’re like most who grew up in Western culture, you’ve absorbed countless versions of this message. I know I did. The messages, both direct and indirect were clear: Be self-sufficient, independent, pay yourself first. You can’t necessarily count on anyone else to look after your needs, so you need to learn to take care of yourself. Indeed, entire economic systems are built upon this premise of self-interest. Many economists have assumed, first and foremost, that people direct all their available rationality toward maximizing their own self-interests. To be sure, a healthy dose of independence and concern for self is no doubt required for success in any culture. Even so, one unfortunate side effect of rugged individualism can be a thick cocoon of self-absorption that all but blinds you to the concerns, gifts, and welfare of others. Becoming more aware of the inherent value of positivity resonance can help you break free from this life-limiting cocoon. Indeed, study after study suggests that positive emotions, in and of themselves, unlock your ability to really see other people. When feeling good, then, you’re far more likely to approach each new person as an opportunity for connection and growth. Love, viewed in this way, knows no borders. When love is as modest as a shared interest, a shared inspiration, or a shared hope, you have no reason to withhold it from anyone. I again draw from the ancient wisdom of LKM in this chapter. As does LKM, I gently encourage you to stretch open your heart wider than you ever thought possible. I first invite you to experiment with extending warmth and goodwill to everyone you know and then to stretch that positive vibe even further to encompass everyone you don’t know. Once you set your sights, mind, and heart on these larger aims, you’ll find countless ways to forge tender, loving connections with everyone, without a single exception.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  He realized that what needed to change first and foremost was his own attitude. As he put it, “I was not celebrating education in any way.” True, he’d been given a difficult assignment. But he realized that if he made the effort to look at his situation in another way, he could also see that he’d been given “a rare opportunity to actually change these kids’ lives in a positive way, to actually rekindle their love for learning.” He began to see teaching as “a bi-directional relationship. They may be pretty despondent, but look at me. I am certainly not the life of the classroom when I walk in!” That’s when he decided to take a break from teaching basic math to build real relationships with and between his kids. “I said let’s get to know each other, so we played games.” He asked the students to share something about themselves, how many brothers or sisters they had, their thoughts about their town, anything to break the ice. He asked them to write stories about themselves, telling “who they were, what their worst experiences in life had been, what made them happy.” After one kid was bold enough to share his own story, “the stories poured out.” He said it was like penguins lining up along “the edge of an iceberg” all peering down at the water, and then “one jumps in and if it’s safe then everyone else jumps.” The kids began to open up, telling of dads who weren’t around or moms who were struggling to feed the family on food stamps. They shared their fears, alongside their hobbies and hopes. Ty had built his own stock car and had recently won two thousand dollars racing it. Tisha shared that she wanted to be a nurse. They learned to trust their classmates and to honor what each shared.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Of saintdom, and to clamor, moan, and sob Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer: Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin. * * * * * * Oh take the meaning, Lord: I do not breathe, Not whisper, any murmur of complaint. Pain heaped ten hundredfold to this, were still Less burthen, by ten hundredfold, to bear, Than were those lead-like tons of sin, that crushed My spirit flat before Thee. O Lord, Lord, Thou knowest I bore this better at the first, For I was strong and hale of body then; And though my teeth, which now are dropt away, Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard Was tagged with icy fringes in the moon, I drowned the whoopings of the owl with sound Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw An angel stand and watch me, as I sang. Now am I feeble grown: my end draws nigh— I hope my end draws nigh: half deaf I am, So that I scarce can hear the people hum About the column’s base; and almost blind, And scarce can recognize the fields I know. And both my thighs are rotted with the dew, Yet cease I not to clamor and to cry, While my stiff spine can hold my weary head, Till all my limbs drop piecemeal from the stone: Have mercy, mercy; take away my sin." Yet Symeon was not only concerned about his own salvation. People streamed from afar to witness this standing wonder of the age. He spoke to all classes with the same friendliness, mildness, and love; only women he never suffered to come within the wall which surrounded his pillar. From this original pulpit, as a mediator between heaven and earth, he preached repentance twice a day to the astonished spectators, settled controversies, vindicated the orthodox faith, extorted laws even from an emperor, healed the sick wrought miracles, and converted thousands of heathen Ishmaelites, Iberians, Armenians, and Persians to Christianity, or at least to the Christian name. All this the celebrated Theodoret relates as an eyewitness during the lifetime of the saint. He terms him the great wonder of the world,330 and compares him to a candle on a candlestick, and to the sun itself, which sheds its rays on every side. He asks the objector to this mode of life to consider that God often uses very striking means to arouse the negligent, as the history of the prophets shows;331 and concludes his narrative with the remark: "Should the saint live longer, he may do yet greater wonders, for he is a universal ornament and honor of religion." He died in 459, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, of a long-concealed and loathsome ulcer on his leg; and his body was brought in solemn procession to the metropolitan church Of Antioch.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Se da la vuelta, cargando el lavaplatos con jabón y encendiéndolo. —Gracias de nuevo por permitir que nos quedemos aquí —digo. Me mira. —Gracias por la cena. Y antes de irme, camino hacia la mesa donde dejé una vela aromatizada encendida. Debería haberle preguntando al respecto. Puede que no le gusten los aromas tontos en su casa. Inclinándome sobre la mesa, cierro los ojos, inhalo y pido mi deseo de siempre. Qué mañana sea mejor que hoy. Y soplo, casi inmediatamente oliendo el fuerte aroma del humo que flota en el aire por la mecha apagada. Siempre es el mismo deseo. Cada vela. Cada vez. Quiero una vida de la que no tenga que tomar nunca vacaciones. Esa es mi meta. Excepto por el fósforo que apagué en el teatro. Pedí algo diferente esa noche. Cuando abro los ojos, veo a Pike observándome. Rápidamente se endereza y se da la vuelta. Y mientras salgo de la cocina y me dirijo hacia las escaleras en la sala de estar, dejo mi revista en el extremo de la mesa junto al sofá. Ahora alguien vive aquí.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  She was a great believer in luck. Every week she bought a lottery ticket from the newsstand near her office because, as the guy in the commercial said, Hey … you never know … She even signed up for a junket to Atlantic City in early April just to see what all the hoopla was about. Gus had taught her to play poker the summer she was seventeen, the last summer they’d shared the house with the Chicago Boys. He’d been impressed with her stone-cold expression. You don’t give away a thing, do you, Cough Drop? Never , she’d told him. Sometimes she dreamed about how it would feel if her ship came in. About how she would spend all that money. But she wasn’t as certain now as she’d been at fourteen. She withdrew a hundred dollars from the ATM near her office in preparation for her trip. But she didn’t take her checkbook or credit cards. That way there’d be no danger of blowing more than she could afford, not that she could afford even a hundred, given her salary and expenses, but just this once couldn’t hurt. Maia and Paisley were heading out to the Hamptons to look for a summer share. They’d wanted her to join them but Vix said, “Not this weekend.” “She’s probably got a hot date lined up and doesn’t want us to know,” Maia joked. “Something like that,” she told them. For added luck, she wrapped her piano shawl over her raincoat. She felt exotic when she wore it, like a flamenco dancer. And if she didn’t exactly find luck in At lantic City, she found Luke. She wouldn’t tell Maia and Paisley they met at the craps table. No one ever had to know the truth unless she and Luke wound up together. Then Maia would say, Can you believe Vix met Luke at a casino in Atlantic City? At the craps table? No, they wouldn’t believe it. She kept her impulsive side to herself. She’d once overheard Maia telling a friend at school, Victoria is the least spontaneous person in our entire class, but I’d trust her with my life . Actually, she didn’t really meet Luke at the craps table. She watched him. He was hot, on a roll, with a stack of chips in front of him that doubled and tripled every time he threw the dice. He was boyish, flush with excitement. She didn’t know it was a twenty-dollar table until she tried to place a bet. Embarrassed, she quickly retrieved her dollar chips. She hung around to watch anyway, as the crowd cheered Luke on, betting with him. He looked up once, caught her eye, and smiled. At the end of the day, as she was playing a slot machine, he came up behind her, dropped a quarter into the slot, covered her hand with his, and pulled the handle.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Every night, almost, I had woken sweating from dreams in which I presented myself at her door, with my bags all packed and my hat upon my head, and she looked at me in wonder, and frowned, or laughed with derision; or else I arrived too late at the station, and had to chase the train along the track while Kitty and Mr Bliss gazed at me from their carriage window, and would not lean outside to pull me in ... That night at the Palace, however, she led me to one side, and pressed my hand, and was quite as kind and excited as she had been before. ‘I’ve had a letter from Mr Bliss,’ she said. ‘He has found us rooms in a house in a place called Brixton - a place so full, he says, of music-hall people and actors that they call it “GreasePaint Avenue”.’ Grease-Paint Avenue! I saw it instantly and it was marvellous, a street set out like a make-up box, with narrow, gilded houses, each one with a different coloured roof; and ours would be number 3 - with a chimney the colour of Kitty’s carmined lips! ‘We are to catch the two o’clock train on Sunday,’ she went on, ‘and Mr Bliss himself will meet us at the station, in a carriage. And I’m due to start the very next day at the Star Music Hall, in Bermondsey.’ ‘The Star,’ I said. ‘That’s a lucky name.’ She smiled. ‘Let’s hope so. Oh, Nan, let’s only hope so!’ My last morning at home was - like every last morning in history, I suppose - a sad one. We breakfasted together, the five of us, and were bright enough; but there was a horrible sense of expectation in the house that made anything except sighing, and drifting aimlessly from job to job, seem quite impossible. By eleven o’clock I felt as penned and as stifled as a rat in a box, and made Alice walk with me to the beach, and hold my shoes and stockings while I stood at the water’s edge one final time. But even this little ritual was a disappointing one. I put my hand to my brow and gazed at the glittering bay, at the distant fields and hedges of Sheppey, at the low, pitch-painted houses of the town, and the masts and cranes of the harbour and the shipyard.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  It is true that he tempts us every day. He disciplines us with seasons of adversity, since in misfortune we can exercise our virtue. He knows all our frailties, of course, and does not need to probe them further. He does everything for our own good. So be patient. Be of good cheer. I will say one more thing to you, lords and ladies of the pilgrimage. It would be almost impossible to find another Griselda in modern England. If you put a wife or mother to the test, you would find more brass than gold. A woman nowadays is like a bad coin. She will break rather than bend. Naturally I have nothing against the Wife of Bath. May God give her, and those like her, a good life! Long may she rule over us! Griselda is dead, and lies buried somewhere in the land of Italy. Her patience was in the end rewarded. But I beg you, all you husbands, never to test your wives as Walter tested her. Your efforts will not work. You will fail. All you noble wives, take heed. Never let humility nail down your tongue. Do not allow some other writer to tell your story as Petrarch recounted that of kind and patient Griselda. Do you remember the story of Chichevache, who could feed only on humble housewives? That was why he was so lean. Please do not be fodder for his stomach. You should follow the example of Echo, who always had an answer ready. Don’t be naive. Don’t be beaten down. Fight back. Keep the lesson of Griselda firmly in your mind. You can do nothing but profit from it. Oh you mighty wives, defend yourselves. You can be as strong as elephants, I am sure of it. Don’t allow men to get the better of you. Those of you who are not so mighty - well, I am sure you can still be fierce. You can rattle on and on, just like a windmill in a gale. Have no fear of your husband. Even if he were clothed in full armour, the arrows of your eloquence would get through the chain-mail. Make him jealous. Or - better still - accuse him of something. Then he will be as still and frightened as a little bird. If you are good-looking, make use of it. Show off your features, and your dress. If you are ugly, spend your money freely and make friends with everyone. Get them on your side. Be as light and playful as a leaf upon a linden tree. Let your husband do the wailing and lamenting. That is all I have to say. Heere endeth the Tale of the Clerk of Oxenford The Merchant’s Prologue The Prologe of the Marchantes Tale

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So his brother, the clerk, wept bitterly beside his bed. But then this brother, learned in many things, happened to remember his time at the University of Orleans. While he was living there he fell into the company of other young students, all of them eager for learning. Above all else they were fascinated by the arts of the occult. They searched in every corner for secret lore. He remembered that one day he had come across a book of natural magic. It had been left on a desk by one of his companions, a student of law who was interested in more than legal matters. This book described the operations of the twenty-eight mansions, or stations, of the moon. It is all foolishness to us nowadays, of course, worth less than nothing. The faith of the Holy Church is all we need. We no longer put any trust in magic or necromancy. But as soon as the clerk recalled the details of this book, his heart leaped. He said quietly to himself that his poor brother would soon be cured of his woe. ‘I am sure,’ he said, ‘that there are ways and means of creating magical illusions. Conjurors can do it, after all. I have often heard it said that, at royal feasts, the magicians have summoned up lakes and rowing boats within the great hall. They have sailed up and down between the tables! They have conjured up fierce lions, about to spring. They have turned a hall into a meadow of sweet flowers. They have created fruitful vineyards, and stone castles. And then, in a puff, they have made them all vanish. That is how it seemed at the time. ‘So this is my plan. I will return to Orleans and see if I can find some old scholar who is familiar with the mysteries of the moon and who knows how to practise natural magic. And, by these means, my brother will one day possess his wished-for love. I am sure that a good magician will be able to remove from human sight all of those dark rocks. Ships will be able to come and go along the coast of Brittany, at least for a week or so. Then my brother will be relieved of his suffering. Dorigen will have to keep her promise to him, or else be dishonoured for life.’ There is no need to make a long story out of this. He went straight to his brother’s bedside, and acquainted him with the details of his plan. Aurelius was so heartened and excited by the scheme that he rose immediately and took horse to Orleans with his brother. All the way there he exulted at the thought of being permanently cured of his pain. They were two or three furlongs distant from the city when they came upon a young scholar riding alone. They greeted him in Latin, whereupon he

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Lecture Twelve Book VI—A New Look at Christianity Scope: As Augustine continues to bemoan people’s inability to find those things that last forever, he also takes a fresh look at the Bible and Christianity. While doing this, he considers the idea of faith, something he had previously regarded as an insufficient basis for accepting anything. He wanted the certitude he found in mathematics as the basis for anything he would commit himself to. However, he realized that everyone has faith in something because no one has sufficient knowledge. It is not a question of “Do you have faith?” but of “What do you put your faith in?” As he is moving toward Christianity, Augustine “interrupts” the narrative to tell the readers about a new friend, Alypius, and how he had gone astray with a love of gladiatorial violence while in Rome. This seeming digression is vitally important, because Alypius will convert to Christianity just minutes after Augustine, and they will be baptized together. Again, Augustine asks readers to consider the nature and value of friendship. Outline I. Augustine’s movement toward Christianity in Book VI is intertwined with three important people in his life: Monica, his mother; Ambrose, bishop of Milan; and a friend named Alypius. II. In this book, Augustine takes a fresh look at Christianity by reading the Bible in a new way and by examining carefully, for the first time, the rationality of believing on faith. III. At the beginning of the book, Monica is more confident about the conversion of Augustine than Augustine himself is. A. Augustine is, thus, able to narrate his own doubts, yet give readers clues to the ultimate outcome of the story he is telling. B. He also tells us some interesting details of his mother’s life, preparing us for the longer account that he will give us in Book IX. 36 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  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. He promised Brian and me that we’d be shooting that bow and arrow like a couple of full-blooded Indian kids by the time we came back. If we ever came back. Hell, we might decide to live in the Grand Canyon permanently. We started out early the next morning. Once we got north of Phoenix, past all the tract-house suburbs, the traffic thinned, and Dad started going faster and faster. “There ain’t no better feeling than being on the move,” he said.

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

  Maybe you never quite get to the point where you think, “Ah—so that’s what a gun looks like from this end.” But you take in all you can, as a child would, without the atmospheric smog of most grown-up vision. And all the while you are writing away, editing, revising, trying new leads, new endings, until finally, at some point, you want some feedback. You want other people to read it. You want to know what they think. We are social animals, and we are trying to communicate with others of our species, and up to now you have been alone in a hole getting your work done. You have no idea whether it sings to anyone but you. You wouldn’t spend a month on an oil painting and then mummify it. You would hang it where people could see it. So the thought of a writing class or a writing conference may cross your mind. Blooming writers really do not know what to expect when they sign up for a workshop or a creative-writing class. Some want to learn to write, or to write better. Others have been writing a great deal for a long time and want some feedback. These are realistic goals. A certain kind of person finds writing classes and workshops to be like camp, and just wants to hang out with all these other people, maybe with a writer he or she respects, to get and give response and encouragement, and to hear how other people tell their stories. Some people want other people with whom to share the disappointments and rejection letters and doldrums. A lot of people like to work on other people’s writing because it helps them figure out what they themselves love in the written word, as well as what doesn’t work for them. And others want feedback from people who aren’t quite friends or editors but who will be realistic and honest and helpful. But a lot of people come to my workshops or classes secretly hoping that I will have read their submission and absolutely flipped. I will take them aside after class and tell them that all the story needs is for them to put a little spin on the ending, maybe shorten the scene with Cammy and the ducks, and that then we’ll send it off to my agent or The New Yorker , or maybe we’ll just send it straight to Sonny Mehta. We’ll fax it to Sonny; he would want it that way. But I tell them that this is probably not going to happen. Every so often at a writing conference, people get taken aside by wonderful writers who love their story and who help them in some pivotal way. Every so often during one of my workshops, I’ll take someone aside and say, “You’re very good; work on this another six months and then give me a call, and we’ll take it from there.”

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

  Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So after I’ve completely exhausted myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my more arresting financial problems, and, of course, the orthodontia, I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange. I also remember a story that I know I’ve told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” I tell this story again because it usually makes a dent in the tremendous sense of being overwhelmed that my students experience. Sometimes it actually gives them hope, and hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. So here is another story I tell often. In the Bill Murray movie Stripes , in which he joins the army, there is a scene that takes place the first night of boot camp, where Murray’s platoon is assembled in the barracks. They are supposed to be getting to know their sergeant, played by Warren Oates, and one another. So each man takes a few moments to say a few things about who he is and where he is from. Finally it is the turn of this incredibly intense, angry guy named Francis. “My name is Francis,” he says. “No one calls me Francis—anyone here calls me Francis and I’ll kill them. And another thing.

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

  So instead of staring miserably at the computer screen trying to will my way into having a breakthrough, I say to myself, “Okay, hmmm, let’s see. Dying tomorrow. What should I do today?” Then I can decide to read Wallace Stevens for the rest of the morning or go to the beach or just really participate in ordinary life. Any of these will begin the process of filling me back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories. I might want to write on my last day on earth, but I’d also be aware of other options that would feel at least as pressing. I would want to keep whatever I did simple, I think. And I would want to be present. [image file=Image00006.jpg] In the beginning, when you’re first starting out, there are a million reasons not to write, to give up. That is why it is of extreme importance to make a commitment to finishing sections and stories, to driving through to the finish. The discouraging voices will hound you—“This is all piffle,” they will say, and they may be right. What you are doing may just be practice. But this is how you are going to get better, and there is no point in practicing if you don’t finish. I went through a real crisis of faith about two-thirds of the way through my last novel. The thing is that I had gotten twenty-seven bad reviews in a row on my previous novel, and I was feeling just the merest bit unsure about my skills and the joys of publication. But during that crisis of faith, I made a commitment to the characters in the new novel, instead of to the book itself. So I spent a little time at my desk every day, just writing down memories of my family, my youth. I went for walks and to lots of matinees, and I read. I spent as much time as I could outdoors while I waited for my unconscious to open a door and beckon. It finally did. I did not have some beautiful Hallmark moment when I threw back my shoulders with a big smile, dusted off my old hands, and got back to work. Rather, it was like catching amoebic dysentery. I was just sitting there minding my business, and then the next minute I rushed to my desk with an urgency I had not believed possible. It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right. We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they’re not needed, hon. Just take in the buggy pleasures.

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

  To be great, art has to point somewhere. So if you are no longer familiar with that place of naive conscience, it’s hard to see any point in your being a writer. Almost all of my close friends are walking personality disorders, but I know innocence is in them because I can see it in their faces and in their decisions. I can almost promise that this quality is still in you, that you are capable of quiet heroism. This sophisticated innocence is a gift. It is yours to give away. We are wired as humans to be open to the world instead of enclosed in a fortified, defensive mentality. What your giving can do is to help your readers be braver, be better than they are, be open to the world again. One does not need to be optimistic in order to do this. My priest friend, Rankin, for instance, describes himself as a cheerful pessimist, and this attitude is enough to rescue him from the bleakness that would otherwise have him psychically curled up in the fetal position. Now, come to think of it, this autism is a great position for one of your characters to end up in near the climax, because the killing of this deadness is a great theme. In real life, most people don’t actually curl up in the fetal position in order to tune out their feelings. Most people get strung out on relationships with other people or on work or drugs or alcohol or food. But a similar trance is induced. You may find that your character is not well enough for this deadness to be killed or, at least, not ready yet. Heaven knows, punishment and trance are a great deal more comfortable and familiar than aliveness. It’s like that old joke about denial. A woman goes to the zoo and is completely taken by the beauty and power of the gorilla. She cannot take her eyes off him. He is sleeping against the bars of the cage, and even though a sign says not to, she reaches her hand in to stroke him. Instantly, he awakes and goes berserk, tearing the bars of the cage open to get at her, mauling her to within an inch of her life. Finally, the zoo personnel manage to hit him with the tranquilizer darts. The woman is taken to an ICU, barely alive, but slowly, slowly she pulls through. After four days she is finally allowed visitors. Her best friend arrives. The woman can barely open her eyes. “God, you look like you’re in a lot of pain,” the friend says, and the woman sighs. “Pain,” she says. “You don’t know pain. He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write …” This is one of my favorite jokes because the character is so familiar to me. She is probably familiar to a lot of people you know.

• 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 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 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)

  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)

  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.