For Writers: A Storytelling Life
by Joyce Maynard
Canteen Magazine, January 2008

Because this is about living one's life as a storyteller, I‘ll begin with a story. It's about the person who taught me how to tell a story, my mother. She was a difficult woman in many ways, a difficult person to have for one's mother, anyway -- demanding, guilt-inspiring, largely oblivious to the concept of a child's privacy, overinvolved to the point of inducing claustrophobia, sometimes. What saved our relationship was the expansiveness of her spirit, her incorrigible sense of humor, and -- this most of all -- her tireless need to explore life and seek out the story of everyone she met. She was a lover of literature, but nothing any fiction writer ever created fascinated her as much as the adventures of real people, and how they lived their lives. I never met anyone who could tell a story as well as she did.

For instance. There was the occasion she paid me a visit in the little New Hampshire town where I lived at the time, with the man I was married to then, and our children. My mother and I had gone out to dinner –- just the two of us, plus my best friend. I had tried mightily to describe my mother over the years -- the time she greeted my sixteen year old boyfriend with the question "At what age did you begin to masturbate?"; the horrifying moment when she stormed onto the playground at school to pull off the cap of a boy who had teased me, throwing it in a deep ravine. Still, none of this was sufficient. So I'd invited Sheri to accompany my mother and me to the restaurant that night. As if to say: take a look for yourself. Exhibit A: Mother.

We took a table in the corner. Picture one of those old colonial bed and breakfast settings, with old beams and waitresses dressed like Pilgrims, where the fare runs to prime rib and mashed potatoes, and a clove of garlic hasn't passed the kitchen threshold in the last fifty years. Picture the clientele: dyed in the wool New Englanders. Frugal, reserved, churchgoers, out for Sunday dinner with the person they refer to as their better half.

Picture my mother: Wearing a big, broad brimmed hat. Daughter of Russian immigrant Jews, a quarter century of life in a small New Hampshire town had not made a Yankee out of her. This was a woman who quoted Chaucer in the line at the grocery store, a woman who wore a Mexican lace dress, bra-less, to my wedding, a woman who once threw a party for a hundred people at which every guest was male. A woman who -- if she was sitting in the back row of the brass section of a symphony orchestra, and she'd suddenly started laughing -- could have overwhelmed even the tuba.

Now, as we sat around the checkered tablecloth at Ye Olde Country Inn, drinking our three dollar wine and sawing into our chicken, my mother began one of her stories. I can't remember what it was about anymore; there were so many of them -- stories so rich with character and dialogue, suspense, humor, tragedy and redemption, that if a movie were playing in the next room, you probably wouldn't have much interest in checking it out.

All of a sudden, partway through my mother's telling of this story, I realized something. Except for her voice, the restaurant was dead quiet. All eyes and ears on my mother.

The next day, my friend Sheri called me, still recovering. "I was at the bank this morning," she said. "And a man came up to me, who said he'd been at the restaurant the night before. He grabbed my arm with this desperate expression. "

"Who was that woman?" the man had implored my friend. "And where can I find her again?"

There you have it. My legacy. Daughter of a master storyteller -- for whom allegiance to the truth took second position, after reverence for good drama -- I took to heart the lessons of two stories told to me when very young. One was of the princess, locked in a room each night with a pile of straw, instructed to spin it into gold . That was what a writer had to do, I knew: Study a pile of dry sticks and grass, and figure out a way to make it glittering and precious. But the legend I loved even more came from Arabian Nights. It concerned Scheherazade, the young woman, condemned to death, who kept a man from killing her by telling him a new and irresistible story every night. Spinning a tale well, I figured, could actually save a person's life. Possibly mine.

The way my school classmates were taught by their parents how to play ball or ski, in our family, we were coached in the art of telling stories. Pace and voice, choice of language, what to include, what to withhold, and when. My mother didn't believe in euphemism. ("say ‘die" not ‘pass away', " she'd tell me. ) Child of the depression, she didn't believe in adverbs ("You're taking your reader to the bathroom," my mother said, of a passage in which I labored too long over chronology of each event. "Do your job well with all the other parts of speech and you won't need them," my mother instructed me. Forty years later, it is a rare event to find an "ly" word in any story I tell. )

But it was more than craft I learned, under my mother's ceaseless tutelage. It was the essence of what stories are meant to accomplish, told well -- the idea that the joy of writing well might actually redeem and even trump the raw material of painful experience, and thereby reveal, to the reader, deeply meaningful truths. Days when I'd come home from school, upset by some injustice or the hurtful behavior of a friend, a painful episode, my mother's words of consolation seldom varied.

"Never mind," she said. "You can always write about it." Then she went about the business of teaching me how. By her own extraordinary example, most of all. (In later life, once my sister and I were grown, our mother published books of her own. But it may be that her finest creative work took place over the course of those thousand and one nights she presided over some dinner table or another (mostly our own, in New Hampshire), entertaining us with her stories. And –mother of the fifties as she was-- in the raising and instruction of her children .

Both of us are writers now.

If the living of my life has not always been smooth, the retelling of it has provided consolation. Not that it works-- God only knows-- to use one's storytelling as a form of retribution or an opportunity to vent anger and bitterness, enlist a listener or a reader's advocacy and support against an adversary, or win points for heroism. But here's what I've learned in thirty five years of living as a writer –sometimes telling my own stories, sometimes making them up, but always inspired (as every writer is, I believe) by my own experiences and obsessions:

Bad times make for good art. If you are one of the three people in America who grew up in a totally happy, trouble-free family where nothing bad ever happened, you may still overcome your handicap. But it's going to be a challenge.

I gave a talk at a school a while back, in which I talked about growing up -- my father's drinking, my mother's passionate obsession with raising me to be a writer, and the stress of it all. Afterwards, a young girl came up to me, clutching her notebook to her chest.

"I always dreamed of being a writer," she said. "But the worst thing that ever happened to me was when our cat died. What can I do?"

There was hope, I told her. It might be a handicap, alright, to have lead a trouble-free existence so far. But now for the good news: Life was likely to provide a few challenges along the way, if she gave it time. Then too, there is always one's imagination.

I started sending off my stories to magazines and , later, book editors, when I was thirteen years old. (Straw into gold. That early concept.) Because I'd been so well schooled by my mother, I met with success and early publication. I might not have felt confident, calling up a boy I liked, but I could write a letter to the editor in chief of The New York Times, at age 18, to say I'd like to write for his newspaper. And he wrote back.

From my late teens, writing was my fulltime occupation, and all these years later, it remains so. But where, for most of her life, my mother did her storytelling at dinner parties and restaurants, I do mine for pay. It's an odd way to earn one's living, I often think, and I'm a lucky woman to get to do this. But the fantasy of a writer's life -- the literary parties, the readings in glamorous places, the solitary desk in view of windswept moors, fire crackling in the grate, whiskey close at hand -- bears little resemblance to the writer's life I know.

The solitary part, at least, is accurate. Except for this. A writer is never free of her characters and her story. We take them with us, wherever we go. They may delight and entertain us. But sometimes they haunt us, too.

For the last thirty five years now, more mornings than not, I have started my day performing an unnatural act in my bed. I wake up thinking about what I will write that day. I lie there, meditating on my characters. (Sometimes, too, I think about someone who does exist, though I may not have laid eyes on this person for a decade or more. Perhaps he is even dead. This person may have broken my heart, or maybe I broke his. He may be a murderer, or a four year old. I may have just imagined he was real.)

I do this because I'm a writer, and that means, my workplace –whatever I may have in the way of a desk or a chair or a snazzy computer monitor -- is my head. I don't drive to an office. I don't even need to get dressed, to work. Everything that happens, save a little movement of fingers on keyboard, occurs invisibly.

It's an odd way for a person to start her day, this business of thinking about characters and situations. But having so little structure or routine or regularity to the work I do, I hold onto this one, as a small, familiar path I take -- like a daily constitutional-- in a life of largely uncharted wandering through uncleared brush. For me, lying in bed meditating on the stories I'll tell today (in which, incidentally, my mother or some invented surrogate continue to feature prominently, even nineteen years after her death) remains as much a part of starting the day as brushing my teeth or making the bed. Soon enough, I'll be heading downstairs, putting on the coffee (another dependable repetious act in a life of too few), and making my way to my desk.

Once I sit down, no more rituals will exist to get me through the next few hours. Now there is only me, and the blank screen again. (As, in the old days, it was just me and the typewriter, me and the yellow legal pad.) Just me and my brain.

I can't complain. My mother raised me to be a writer, and I became one. All my adult life, since the age of eighteen, my job has been telling stories. With the exception of eleven months in my early twenties, when I worked as a newspaper reporter, and a summer I was a television staff writer in Hollywood, I have never gone to an office, answered to a boss, had to buy suits or panty hose, or labored in proximity to a water cooler.

In a world filled with individuals whose dream it is to quit their day job and go write novels or a memoir, I exist as one of that tiny, fortunate minority who have been able to pursue their passion not in what's left of the day, after the day job ends, but as their day job.

The tough part is that a writer starts every new day unemployed. (Every time the sun comes up --or sets, if you‘re a night writer-- you have to do it all over again, make something out of nothing, transform ideas into words, and words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and sustain it all long enough that when you're finally done, you have conveyed an experience with sufficient accuracy that even strangers to that type of thing can imagine what it felt like.)

Your work is never done. You are never off duty. Even assuming you've written your story, and sold it, and a sufficiently large group of readers has liked it, your reward is now you get to start all over again. It doesn't matter how many thousands of words you've written, either, or how many books with your name on them sit on the shelf. Every day, your screen is just as blank as the next guy's.

This is why I wake up thinking about my stories. I go to bed thinking about them, too. I can't kick them out of my brain if I want to. This makes writing not only the lonely profession it's generally acknowledged to be, but also -- ironically -- the one least likely to allow a person peace and quiet. Because our characters -- if we've done a good job making them come alive, anyway -- won't leave us alone. And of all the hard things about this line of work I seem to have chosen for myself, that one's frequently the toughest.

These characters of ours -- the real ones, the ones we invent -- move into our heads for a while, and once they take up residence it's hard to get them out. Sometimes they are wonderful characters, and when that's the case, finishing a book and having to bid them goodbye may feel, to the person who created these characters, like a small death. (Several years ago, after the youngest of my three children left home, I found myself alone -- truly alone -- as I had not been in over twenty five years. I missed my children so badly, I decided to insert, into the novel I was writing at the time, the character of a young boy who resembled, closely, one of my own sons, at the age of four. Loving this character as I did, anwanting to spend time with him, I practically raced to my computer every morning, to get back to him. As for those other characters from my life whose absence I mourn -- my parents, dead these many years: I resurrect them regularly, when I write. (Also when I teach writing. And it is as if I'm not even speaking -- my mother is -- when I say to a student "Write as if every word cost five dollars" and "You're taking the reader to the bathroom again." Of course, when you bring a character to life, with depth and authenticity, some troubling aspects of that person are likely to emerge too. Let the genie out of the bottle. Good luck, getting her back in.

A couple of years back -- partly, no doubt about it, for pragmatic reasons-- I decided to write a nonfiction book about a crime. Now all of a sudden, before I'd thought out what that would mean, there I was lying in bed morning after morning, and night after night, with a murderer and her not particularly sympathetic victim in my head. And for the first time in my life, I slept badly. And woke with a sense of unease. The story was fascinating, all right -- but toxic, too. When I was done telling it, I knew I'd never write a book like that one again. Not enough, I learned, to tell a story well. It should also be a story someone needs to know. In the most old fashioned way, I discovered, I believe a story needs redemption. I don't need things to turn out happily ever after, perhaps. But I want to bring the reader to some point of discovery and revelation, and a destination that matters. I want to tell stories that matter.

My measure of a piece of writing is a surprisingly simple one: Was it -- like a wanted child -- born of passion and love? Did the writer put this story on paper because she couldn't not tell it? I like to know the heart works alongside or ahead of the writer's brain.

In the end, most basic questions to ask of a piece of writing one reads, or a piece of writing one is in the act of creating are these: Do I want to keep turning the page? Do I care about these characters? Do I burn to know how the story turns out? If someone were recounting it, in a restaurant, one table over from where I sat, would I silence myself and my dinner companion, so I could hear the storyteller's voice?

When I was young, I suppose I harbored some of the old fantasies about a writer's life -- dreams of glamour and glory, fascinating friends, and maybe fame. What keeps me going now is both a humbler goal, and also maybe the most ambitious.

I want my characters and stories to enter your brain, as they occupied mine. I want to make a reader cry. I want to leave my reader sitting there, with her fork in midair, not even breathing for a moment, for fear of missing the next syllable.

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