Almost Everything Read online

  That is all you need to know—say it, say what happened that seemed worth the telling, or that you don’t want to forget. Stories are when something happened that you didn’t expect, that lead to some deep internal change in yourself or the main character. Tell it.

  Something happened, both to and inside a person, that we need you to help us see, and if you believe it wasn’t old and boring, I want to hear it.

  And everything that has happened to you belongs to you. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

  I have three good friends who have each been working on their novels for more than five years, and in two of these cases a great deal longer. Every so often, they each share their novel with a friend, an agent, or a random wife, and every time the person tells them the novel is not done yet, which means not yet publishable, which they hear as meaning not that there are some structural problems, but that they are losers, asshats, dilettantes. But then they get back to work, deeply alone with their bad minds, for hours, in their little hovels, completely absorbed, in slightly cranky ways. Why would they do this?

  Because it gives them joy. They got to be writers when they grew up, their lifelong dream. Their stories, their memories, imaginations, and images are like treasures in their hearts, springing forth from the ground of being, the common well, things that they alone can tell, in their own voices and language, even if inadequately, with a sense of accomplishment, struggle, concentration, fulfillment, and for a few minutes every few days, pride.

  My friends’ novels are taking years, because they have to dig deep, and insist on being true to the story, to the story they are called, assigned, or moved to tell, and on being honest about what they found, instead of telling the story they thought or wished they’d found. Writing that carries truth uplifts us, teaches empathy, purpose, dignity. This means taking out the lies and boring parts, and especially the grandstanding sections, which are probably the parts you love most. Jessica Mitford often quoted Arthur Quiller-Couch that you must kill your little darlings. Leave in the nuggets of life, illuminating and compact, where the reader can taste a soupçon of truth, or laugh and have to turn the page, like a child. Three things abideth: voice, a story, a trustworthy narrator; but the greatest of these is story.

  The story has to have really happened, even if the writer has made it up. The reader has to trust the truth in a story. We’re doing this all the time inside us, reporting to ourselves on what we see, trying to make sense of this life. The stories we tell ourselves and write can warp us or raise us, save or destroy us, illuminate or dissemble.

  The stories that younger kids love involve underdogs, like Harry Potter and themselves, who are ridiculed, stuck, trapped, in danger, and yet who find a way out, escape or redemption. These are my favorite stories, too, involving a shift in the point of view, from feeling so doomed, in such a deep hole, without any strength—until this unexpected event happens. We were going from A to B, from one place to another, and then something changed. It means there is the possibility of change, in this dark and unfair world, and in us: in this story, I rose up, and now I feel very different. Look at all that was in my way, look what helped, look at this funny detail. The details we choose are what make a story resonate, and when a story resonates, the dust of confusion clears for a few minutes, and things hold together—and how often does this happen in the rest of life?

  I tell the kids I teach that a writer is saying: Take a walk with me. Let’s see where this path leads. Two of them get up to leave. No, I say, on paper. They moan with disappointment.

  A story begins somewhere in space and time, when you step onto the path beside the writer. Where could that be? Mars, one girl says. Hogwarts, Hawaii, and my favorite, Nicasio, three towns away, population ninety-six. But oh, what some of those people gone and done.

  We get to know some characters who are recognizable as family, friends, ourselves, even in their distressing guise as vampires, orphans, or ministers. Events transpire, possibly not all leading to ecstasy or serenity, and people are changed. The universe is usually telling us the same story, that our lives are rich and fluid and infinitely mysterious; that we only thought we were stuck, that nothing stays the same for long.

  I tell the kids: Stories are flashlights. You shine a light in one place—an attic floor, a canyon wall, or a memory—and then you describe it the best you can. Maybe you need to find a photo of it in a book, or maybe it is right there in your memory, on the screen behind your eyes.

  What a writer is telling us, asking us to hear, has to have meaning. There is really no reason for you to keep shoehorning in cute, charming dinner table anecdotes. Tell us something that stirs us, that makes us think, or tear up, or laugh.

  How? You just start talking about it on paper, as you would to a very good friend.

  And once you’ve spewed it out, you can see the details and moments that made you catch your breath and be so glad you remembered this detail and got to share it.

  We have to cultivate the habits of curiosity and paying attention, which are essential to living rich lives and writing. You raise your eyes out of the pit, which is so miserable and stifling to be in and which tried to grab you and keep you there, until something sneaky hauled you out and changed you.

  I tell my kids to begin by scribbling away, to write one sentence at a time as fast as they can. A writer friend told me, first you spew on paper, then you chew, and then you choose the details that flesh out your story. The characters in your story are real people to you, and include you, but they aren’t yet real people to your audience: they weren’t there. The specific details are what make it universal, what make it sing. Life is made up of these mosaic moments, seemingly meaningless details that tug on your sleeve to get your attention. My writer friend also said that after you’ve chewed over your story, you find the frozen moment when the person turns, veers, or was grabbed.

  This has to leave you letting out your breath or gasping for it: This is what I saw! It was a trip and important to me, and now this is where I leave you.

  Let the energy of your story be the drama—what you’ve experienced that was so amazing or touching—instead of draping it with Christmas tree lights or sparklers. If we readers sense that you’re manipulating us—making the story hot, because you don’t have confidence in it—the story loses its beauty, and we turn on you.

  A story does not need to be hot. Stories are usually about a modest salvation. Events took us on a journey that was inconvenient or scary, and changed us, in ways that helped us feel more connected to life, made it more spacious and welcoming.

  There is a lot about writing that will not make sense for a while to the young kids I teach. Writers save the world—or at any rate, they saved me and everyone I’m close to. When we were small, they were our travel guides and companions in the great mysteries of life and family. They were mirrors, mentors, guide dogs. They helped me laugh about terrifying and isolating things, and made me question my very reason for existence, as well as my fears, prejudices, and illusions. They helped free me from hubris, and thus tunnel vision. They helped heal my pain, in giving me people I recognized, humans as screwed up and narcissistic and dear as I was, whom I was able to respect and enjoy, who had scary and/or profound experiences and discovered courage and grace that maybe I could find, too.

  It’s ridiculous how hard life is. Denial and avoidance are unsuccessful strategies, but truth and awareness mend. Writing, creation, and stories are food.

  But do not tell your family this. They’ll want to know if you have an agent.

  I tell the six-year-olds that if they want to have great lives, they need to read a lot or listen to the written word. If they rely only on their own thinking, they will not notice the power that is all around them, the force-be-with-you kind of power. Reading and writing help us take the blinders off so we can look around and say “Wow,” so we can look at life and
our lives with care, and curiosity, and attention to detail, which are what will make us happy and less afraid.

  At this point the kids are hanging on my every word, not, as it turns out, because they are thrilled by my talk, but because one little boy has now spread the rumor that I own the local library.

  Writing breaks the trance of our belief that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we need to protect ourselves and our families at all times. Stories goose us in a good way. The right story can show us how to lighten up. If we tread lightly, hold life lightly, we can look around more bravely. Without blinders on, we are not forced to get life to conform to our convictions, our past pain, or our superior belief system. It turns out there is not just this—there is also that, over there.

  For example, at a memorial service, there is deep grief in the room, but also gratitude, love, emptiness, and many kinds of food. At a holiday party, people are decked out in their finery, beaming with cheer, but maybe not doing so fine on the inside. We are this, and not this; that, and not that.

  There is so much I want to share with these kids, so they will be readers and writers, storytellers, listeners, and seekers, but we have almost run out of time, and some of this will have to wait for the next class, let alone next year. Then I will tell them that writing will help them see life more accurately. People are little truth-seeking missiles, but not many of us were encouraged to challenge our convictions and identities, except by writers and certain teachers, so we extracted meaning by selecting certain variables that agreed with our parents’ worldview. Yet the more variables we decide to include, the greater breadth of writing, the bigger bandwidth of truth, the more our understanding aligns with what truly is; paradoxically, the more expansively we can see, the more simple truth seems. Imagine the Google eye pulling back from the chaos and clutter of your garage, the jumble of the town where you live, and revealing patterns in the woods, the countryside, the canals and foothills, the crowds gathered to protest or sing.

  In later writing workshops, as my grandson grows, I will tell him and his colleagues that it is all so much bigger and wilder than we think, and we can deepen our ability to experience our attention to detail, the pattern on the butterfly’s wing, your grandma’s wondering eye, how the deep jagged cut on your finger has healed so perfectly. We start to get a hint of the power and sweetness and absurdity of life and to see it not as all fragile or harsh, but as real, the really real. We get buoyancy and, God knows, sometimes even effervescence. Perspective doesn’t reduce the gravitas; it increases reverence.

  I will tell my fifth-graders that the main reason to be a writer is that it is the perfect antidote to materialism, which drains our soul and spirit. Writing dilutes our habitual fear and our need for control. When they are older, the kids get to decide how to spend their lives: in tightly controlled, hyperachieving ways, putting away childish things, if they so choose. Or they can write.

  I tell the first-graders that the truth of the story is in the very telling of it, that if they write me a made-up story, that makes it true. Write me a story right now, I tell these kids. Start where you are, let yourself scribble and write badly. Then make it better. Their teacher and I will help them make it really good later. For now, we are all collectively going to keep our butts in our chairs for a while, okay? They nod. I put my hands on my hips just like my grandson does. “Deal?” I ask sternly.

  “Deal,” they reply.

  Grip those pencils, I tell them, close your eyes, let your heads drop to your chests while you study what is on the screen behind your eyes.

  They demonstrate good grippage, close their eyes, and bend their heads as if in prayer to see what is inside.

  SEVEN

  Bitter Truth

  Chocolate with 81% cacao is not actually a food. Its best use is as bait in snake traps. Also, as a shim to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. It was never meant to be considered an edible.

  Don’t let others make you feel unsophisticated if you reach middle age preferring Hershey’s Kisses. So many of your better people do. Also, always carry a handful of Kisses in your backpack or purse to give away. People will like you more.

  EIGHT

  In the Garden

  An elderly friend asked me one day when we wandered through a church garden and it started to rain what three things I would share with her young relative who fears death, as she knows I view death mostly as a significant change of address.

  The first thing I told her is that I have been on hand to help people cross over, been there for days and months at the end of a person’s life, and while I would prefer that all deaths be swift and sweet, without dementia or pain, every death has been rather beautiful.

  Second, the more time you spend in the presence of death, the less you fear it. Your life will be greatly enhanced by spending time with dying people, even though you’ve been taught to avoid doing so.

  Third, death is not the enemy; snakes are. And cheese: it is addictive and irresistible. I have had three kinds so far today.

  Shakespeare said we all owe God a death. That’s very nice. If I were God’s West Coast representative, I would try to work out some of the loan details of having to die. We can all agree that children should be exempt, that dementia should always be the spaced-out dithery kind (and not involve screaming), that pain should always be manageable, and that wars should be avoided through wise diplomacy, goodwill, and political sanity. In lieu of these codicils, though, while people in dreadful pain of any kind may long for the solace of a divine continuing manifestation, what we can offer is to stay with them faithfully. This may not seem like a lot until we show up for you, which we will.

  I asked my friend in the garden if I could add a few more thoughts that might help put her dear relative’s mind at ease. This is what I told her.

  Anytime you investigate how scary and bad loss is, it becomes a lot less bad, and a lot less bad is a small miracle. The great paradox is that drawing nearer to death will help begin to put it in the rearview mirror. Then, instead of living in unconscious fear of its arrival, crashing our party, we accept it as one of the musicians, like the old donkey on his way to Bremen to play the lute.

  And I promise that the people you lose here on this side of eternity, whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again both in your heart and in the world. They will make you smile and talk out loud at the most inappropriate times. Of course, their absence will cause lifelong pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptize, and hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk. Somehow, as we get older, death becomes as sacred as birth, and while we don’t exactly welcome it, death becomes a friend.

  Death is not whatever you feared as a child. It’s both more interesting and more casual, with fewer worms involved. It is usually doable, astonishing but plain, like notes played without sharps or flats, a natural G instead of A-flat, or succulents instead of roses.

  My friend dragged me to look at one corner of the church garden where she had seen an eruption of baby pink tea roses the week before, in similar weather, gray and wet. She said they made up for a lot, including that morning’s new threat of nuclear war with North Korea. But when we found them, they had already turned brown.

  “I rest my case,” I said.

  My friend next wanted to show me something else, in a part of the garden where most of the flowers were dormant, so I took her there. At eighty, she knows you don’t put things off. And we were charmed.

  They were plants called Hens and Chicks, a big succulent with smaller ones clustered beneath and around. They look like a cross between artichokes and lotus flowers, sea-glass green, the newer petals of each mother trimmed in light, the slightly older ones trimmed in rose, with thorns.

  I spend a lot of time with old people who know things but maybe need a hand. More than any other sentence I hav
e ever come across, I love Ram Dass’s line that when all is said and done, we are all just walking each other home.

  The tough little centers of the Hens, where the new petals spring from, looked like children’s belly buttons; there were drops of water collected in the centers like diamonds. This was surrounded by a controlled explosion of green joy, all of it expansive and enclosed at the same time—like us.

  I always used to be ambivalent about cacti. Pink tea roses were my favorite flower when I was young, because they were pretty and girly, smelling like flowers and tea, the opposite of death. There was no death in the fifties when I was coming up, except for pets. There were just pencil-shaped erasers with bristles at the end, so every last vestige of a person’s absence could be whisked away. Death was shooed out of sight, so of course we all grew up terrified. The stories and songs we children whispered to each other involved mostly ghouls, zombies, worms, long bony fingers.

  My parents had apparently not read the letter where Rilke wrote: “I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.” My erudite parents were above being bothered by death. It was something the nutty Catholics down the street seemed concerned with.

  The only death and dead bodies we tended to were our darling pets, and the little corpses that they had killed and brought to us. Death meant something was instantly not alive, no longer with you. You saw this most vividly when your pet died. All that unmitigated wriggly love was gone, was so dead, and it was the end of the world.