Adair Lara on Writing Partners
An excerpt about writing partners from Naked, Drunk and Writing, a forthcoming book by Matchwriters founder Adair Lara
-- By Adair Lara
"Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing."
-- Hilaire Belloc
You are only here to give voice to this, your own astonishment
Chapter 1 Show me yours; I'll show you mine
"I need feedback! I need someone to tell me whether I'm hitting anything. If no
flesh warms or flinches, if no socks go up and down like Venetian blinds,
writing is no more than too much smoking."
-- my dad
“The worst of writing is that one depends so much upon praise.”
-- Virginia Woolf
Real writers hate writing. Doctors don’t have trouble
showing up at hospitals. Mechanics go right to their garages, deep-sea divers
right into the drink. Writers are different. They would rather do almost
anything than write. I heard of one who strapped herself to the desk with a
safety belt, not out of fear of earthquakes, but because her body would bolt
from the chair and be off to divide the whites from the coloreds in the laundry
before her mind could stop her.
Despair and self-loathing
As “Feast of Love” author Charles Baxter observed,
“Bracing self-confidence among writers is a rare commodity and often a sign of
psychic instability.” A friend of mine who once worked for a company that
published self-help books, told me their best-selling book on phobias lacked an
author photo because the author couldn't stand having his picture taken.
When I was little, writing was easy: I just wrote and wrote and everybody
beamed at me. I covered sheet after sheet with my dad’s square carpenter’s
pencil as I told a story of a dog that rescues a family from a flood or a fire
(I was influenced by the “Lassie Come Home” series). Faithful dogs, faithful
horses—it all caught in my throat. I tore holes in the paper in my haste to get
it down.
I had some success: one of my stories was read aloud to other classes at Isabel
Cook Elementary, and at recess a kid eyed my home haircut and baggy brown plaid
dress and accused me of copying it out of a magazine. I raced home and told my
mother’ I was going to be a writer when I grew up.
But as I grew up and got some years into adulthood, I didn’t turn into a
writer. The gap between the exciting and moving things I read and the junk I
wrote was obvious. I never dared take creative writing in college, and felt it
was putting on airs to even call myself an English major (though I had to
because it was the only way to get a lot of writing assigned to you back then).
I realized I had no talent and nothing to say, which meant I felt like an idiot
because I couldn’t write and I couldn’t not write either.
I’d moved into San Francisco, finished college, married, had kids, unmarried.
All the events of my life were punctuated with feeble attempts at being a
writer. At night in my railroad flat high up on Dolores Street, after I got
most of the dirt off my kids and threw them into bed, I’d start tapping away at
the kitchen table on one of those early “Trash-80” Radio Shack computers. After
a page, or two, or three, I'd read over what I'd done, cringe, and hurl it
across the room. Years of that. It was like a chronic illness, those fits of
trying. What cruel twist of nature would give a person the desire to write and
the ability to write only crap?
It was only later that I realized that sometimes I’d find a scrap that had
missed the wastepaper, read it, and think, This isn’t so bad. I should have gone
on with this.
I didn’t become a writer until I was grown, divorced and on the north side of
thirty and discovered writing partners. By then I had a job as a copyeditor at
San Francisco Focus, the local city magazine. It had an office in a modest
building set amid the warehouses, factory outlets, and coffee shops south of
Market Street, a few blocks from my apartment. Pleased to my rope sandals to be
hired at a real magazine, I proofread, factchecked, and coded manuscripts for
the typesetter. I called up writers to say things like, "Listen to this
sentence and see if you can live without the comma." When I was hired I’d sworn
to the managing editor that I wasn’t a writer, that my happiness lay in making
sure Natan Katzman in the KQED masthead was not supposed to have an "h" in his
name. But I labored over the captions that came my way as if they were "War and
Peace" and wrote headlines like "Swell Wines at Swill Prices" (which they
refused to use, the cowards).
I’d remind myself it was terrific to be an editor, lots of lunches out and all
that black to wear. All the time, though, I could not help eying the writers
who came into the office with longing. They looked as if they had tramp
streamers moored outside, or came in from wintry palaces. They were emotional,
and wore stiff leather coats and came and went at odd hours. I revered them
all, even Michael Greenfield, the nightlife columnist, who wore a stupid black
beret and read his copy aloud to the busy copyeditors so that he could see
their dazed admiration as he read.
Writing Club
My friend Cynthia, the production editor, wanted to be a writer as much as I
did. She was as thin as a butter knife, wore her sweaters down to her knees and
pulled charmingly on her curls. Some days after work, hung over from a long day
of polishing other people's sentences, we’d go to the bar across the street to
drink huge round glasses of red wine and nurse the certainty that we were
destined to slave over the torturing of hacks while we were ourselves literary
lights winking out unseen.
One day at the bar I suggested to her that she and I start a writing club. We’d
give each other 500 words every weekday and mark the parts we liked in the
other’s pieces with a yellow highlighter before returning them.
I got the idea from a teacher I had when I attended windy San Francisco State
ten years before. The teacher used a yellow highlighter to mark our essays so
that when the papers were turned back, everybody had something – at least a
paragraph or two -- bathed in yellow, something to feel proud of. He asked us
to read the highlighted sections aloud, which we did in embarrassed, pleased
voices.
Cynthia, who herself lived an apartment filled to the wainscoting with
balled-up efforts at writing, said it sounded good, and we excitedly scribbled
a list of topics on a bar napkin: parking, rain, first dates, and father. And
so it began. She and I handed our daily exercises to each other over the
cubicle walls at work, fished them out of our purses at the bar, and brought
them with us in our gym bags to our Saturday Rhythm & Motion class in the
Haight.
Crucially, life-changingly, it didn't matter what the words were— we could copy
them from the Yellow Pages or the back of the Cheerios box if we wanted to. I’d
rarely shown my work to people before, outside of school, because you only
showed people stuff because you thought it was good, and all I wrote was junk.
But now I gave Cynthia any old piece of dashed-off thing. I gave her my writing
not because it was good, but because it was due.
The pressure was off. Instead of waiting for Big Ideas or for a piece I was
proud of having written, I wrote about any stupid thing. I wrote about buying
an impractical low-slung black Toyota Corolla sports car after because it was
raining and my boyfriend was a jerk and my kids liked it. I wrote a piece about
my childhood rivalry with my six siblings called “How I Became So Hideously
Nice.” In her turn, Cynthia as writing as if a faucet had been switched on. I
remember a wonderful piece about being trapped with her mother in a tornado,
and another about the day her kindergarten teacher “told us to go home and find
out whose child we were."
When Cynthia gave my pages back, I'd read the sentences highlighted in yellow
in swooning admiration of my own words. Even if there was one yellow sentence,
I was happy. I wrote that! I could rewrite the whole piece, now that I knew I
had it in me to come up with that sentence that Cynthia liked so much. Her
scrawled, "I love this!" gave me back the confidence I'd had as child. I kept
showing up at the magazine, but with a new song playing in the back of my head:
I was a writer. I was 34. Even though I would go on to one more magazine before
becoming a paid full-time writer, I was doing what writers are supposed to do:
thanks to that stupid little writing club, everyday I put black marks on paper.
Emboldened by Cynthia’s praise, I mailed my pieces to the San Francisco
Chronicle Sunday section called the Punch. Everybody read the Punch, starting
with the Herb Caen column running down the left-hand side and then turning to
the articles in the inside pages, many of them written by freelancers.
I had grown up with the Chronicle. It was not respected—famously, in the movie
“All the President’s Men,” they said “send it to the San Francisco Chronicle,
they’ll print anything.” But it was loved, and full of voices from Count Marco
to Art Hoppe to Herb Caen to the urbane genius, Jon Carroll, who replaced the
equally smart but more curmudgeonly Charles McCabe.
When my little humor pieces began to appear I'd talk the Iranian proprietor at
the corner store into selling me the Sunday paper early. “The sports page not
here yet!” he’d object .I’d have to practically jerk the thing out of his
hands. I’d rip the fat wad open right on the street and force people to go
around me while I read my own piece—or rather my own name, over and over.
Cynthia and I both went on to other writing partners after I was hired at a
style magazine across town, passing myself off as someone passionately
interested in interior design (which amused my family no end---they remembered
me as a kid sitting on the new living room couch for six months before jumping
up and saying, "Hey! We have new furniture!").
Writing partners
I realize that many (male) writers sniff at the idea of showing their words to anyone.
How male writers operate. I am man. I will go into jungle and write book. My
friend Jeremy is an example. He worked on a novel for five years. He took only
as much engineering work as he had to in order to pay the bills and showed the
book to no one but his partner. Then he UPS’ed the manuscript to me (and to
other friends) bought me a Cesar salad at the Grind around the corner on Haight
Street and asked me what I thought of his finished book. "It's great," I said.
It was actually confusing and repetitious, but what else could I say? At that
stage in the process he was asking for praise, not suggestions. His book did
appear in print, years later.
Once I interviewed Don de Lillo in his shadowy room in the Four Seasons hotel
on Market Street. He said he had not shown his new book, “Cosmopolis,” to his
wife or anybody but his agent and his editor (and I got the feeling he really
would have preferred not to show it to them) and all the time I was thinking
what an awful, awful book “Cosmopolis” was, and thinking, Jesus, Don, have you
no friends? No one to say, “You know, Don.."
Yes, I know. We girl writers write a paragraph and nervously email it to ten
people before going on. We seek so much feedback that we end up confused by
contradictory advice and don’t learn how to rely on our instincts. Even
Roseellen Brown, author of “Before and After,” said, “While I’m a decent critic
of a word or a line of my own, I have little faith in my capacity to judge the
whole, at least until a great deal of time goes by and possibly not even then.”
And yes, I know I’m making huge generalizations. Lots of men have taken my
class, and I know women who (literally) work in closets and show their work to
no one.
Still. Writing partners changed my life in powerful, simple ways: they made me
fill pages with words, and they told me when those words meant something to
them. When I was discouraged, they said, It’s fabulous, just keep going!
I am unlikely to shut up about them anytime soon.
The writing-partner pieces I was publishing in the Sunday paper led to my being offered a column.
It began with a cocktail party at Trader Vic’s in downtown San Francisco back
in about 1988. The party was given for Connie Frances by David Starr, who was
some sort of makeup person (his eyebrows were on billboards all over town). I
was managing editor at San Francisco Focus magazine, in charge of making sure
we didn’t leave bylines off and printed photographs right side up. Starr had
evidently mistaken me for someone higher up on the masthead (I was entirely in
black of course, being an editor). He kept bringing me bites of people and then
taking them away again, like dim sum. I had a bite of local politico Milton
Marks, then a quick taste of TV anchor Lilah Peterson, and a generous serving
of a chatty couple from Hillsborough--I couldn’t finish them—and an underdone
mouthful of fashion clothier Wilkes Bashford.
Then Starr brought over a woman wearing a neat little suit and introduced her
as Rosalie Wright, features editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rosalie greeted me warmly and said she’d been following the freelance humor
pieces I’d been publishing in the Sunday section. “She’s better than Anna
Quindlen,” she said to her companion, who rattled the ice cubes in his glass in
bored answer.
The features editor! I spent the rest of the party drifting around the room in an orgy of self- admiration.
I fully expected the paper to send a limo around the next day to beg me to come
work there, but nothing happened until a year or so later when Rosalie began to
talk about my coming to work for the paper as a columnist. I was excited, but a
little worried about that word, “columnist.” I assumed I’d be required to be a
pundit, talk about how to get the economy on track, scold politicians, save the
snail darter. I worried about this side of columnists, frankly, because I
hardly even read the paper. I didn’t know who most celebrities even were, and
got a lot of my knowledge of what was going in the world from reading the
headlines in newspaper racks as I went by.
When, thrillingly, in June of 1989 Rosalie asked me to write ten sample columns
I gave her Rosalie pieces on being left-handed, on being a twin, on how not to
be from my family, and other personal topics. Rosalie called a day after she
got them to say she loved them, and would pass them on.
After that, nothing. When I called (furtively, from my office at the style
magazine where I was an editor by then), I was told that so and so in the
Chronicle management was out of town, was touring the appellations of Burgundy,
and could not be reached. June, July, and most of August went by. Finally I
wrote a letter saying that I’d other offers dangling (a lie): “If I haven’t
heard anything from you by the end of August, I’ll assume you’re not
interested.”
At 5:30 pm on August 31 Rosalie asked me to come in for an interview. Dressed
in a velvet-jogging outfit (it was 1989), I drove my beat-up VW convertible to
the historic old Chronicle building at Mission and Fifth streets and parked in
the garage nearby. Rosalie met me in the lobby, her helmet of dark brown hair
tilted up at me reassuringly, and we took the elevator to the third floor.
The city room spread out before me exactly the way they looks in movies, with
open cubicles stacked with papers and plastic toys and pasty reporters wearing
headphone and talking into mikes or staring into the dim green of the Coyote
computer screen, I didn’t feel as if I had the right even to be there. I hadn’t
even taken journalism, unless you counted my review of “I am Curious (Yellow)
in the Jolly Roger back at he concrete corridors of Sir Francis Drake High
School. Nervously, I followed Rosalie into a large office paneled in dark wood
where a grey-haired man in shirtsleeves sat reading at a huge mahogany desk in
the middle of the room. It was Bill German, the editor in chief who had to
approve her hire.
The interview lasted only five or ten minutes, most of it German talking about
some Russians he'd had to entertain on a boat that day, and then about where
his desk was placed. Did I think it looked weird right in the middle of the
room like that? I must have mumbled something, but he was hard of hearing.
Finally he shifted the papers on his desk. “How many columns a week are you
thinking of?” he asked abruptly. Then 72, German had a large square face that
he swung around on his otherwise stiff shoulders like a club.
I hesitated. Rosalie and I hadn’t talked about that. I said, "Three?"
Thank god we settled at two.
I drove home in a daze to my apartment on Waller Street . My two kids were at
their dad’s next door. (An early column would explain how I came to be living
next door to the husband I had separated from a couple of years before).I was
so happy that I plunged from room to room, from the tiny kitchen overlooking a
dime-sized back yard to and the tiny room eight-year-old Patrick shared with
the water heater to ten- year -old Morgan’s room down the hall, with its sea of
clothes covering the floor (she liked to be able to see all her clothes at
once) . I called a boyfriend I’d just broken up with so I could tell him,
letting us both in for an idiotic further six months together before we came to
our senses again.
I gave notice at the magazine. Two weeks later, Rosalie led me down Fifth
Street, past the main building (to my disappointment) to an anonymous-looking
structure near Folsom Street, where the expanding Chronicle had rented a floor
for critics and columnists. ( I later learned to call it Folsom Prison, as the
others did). She showed me a shadowy cubicle with a window onto Clementina
Alley, with an old folks' home across the way, showed me how to work the huge
brown Coyote in-house computer, and left, the clicking of her high heels
fainter and fainter until it faded entirely.
I was alone. I heard the tapping of my new colleagues in their own felt-paneled
cubicles, heard a phone ringing across the floor. The Chronicle was stacked to
the rafters with great columnists. Steve Rubenstein wrote four times a week as
a kind of man on the street, although he sneaked in an occasional piece about
his golden retriever and his kids as they came along. Jon Carroll appeared five
days a week. He had no restrictions, except that he was asked to keep sports,
cats, and gardening to a minimum. (It would be hinted to me, as much by readers
as by anybody else, that it would be better if I did not acquire a dog or a
baby or a garden at this time.)
I touched a button. A green cursor started to blink on the dark screen.
German was already turning back to the papers on his desk when I realized I still had a question. He was hard of hearing, so I had to shout.
“What should I write about?” I yelled. He waved impatiently. "Write about your life."
And I did. With the help of writing partners.
Of course they can be irritating. And needy. A steady writing partner will
email you every week day, and expect you to, like, drop everything and read a
story that happened when she was six and being chased by on older retarded boy
until she ran him into a tree. Surely, having waited so long already, the story
can bear to remain unread a little longer, until after your nap or scotch or
upcoming vacation to Ireland’s green fields? But no! Here’s another email. “Did
you get my piece? Just wondering...”
Oh, for Christ’s sake. All right!
Hmm... This isn’t bad.
The phone is ringing. You’ll get it later. Now your writing partner is making
you feel like, well, writing. And just when you were making progress on weeding
out the VHS movies you don’t want anymore. You let “The Princess Bride” drop
back onto the shelf.
And nosy? I tell you. You write, , “My mother liked the sun.” She writes,
“Expand?” What does she want to know? That your mother tried to sit with at
least one arm in the sun, like a plant sending out a runner? That she smelled
of Coppertone, and wore her bathing suit under her shirt all the time, just in
case? Should you say that the house you grew up in was surrounded by trees and
got no sun at all, so you had to keep the lights in even in the daytime, and
the whole family avoided the house? Honestly, can’t she tell all that from what
you already said? “She liked the sun.”
And they can be unresponsive. You send a piece and five minutes later, nothing!
You tap my fingers, glare, and still the only email is from that Nigerian
widow. Your partner hates what you sent, that’s what happened. She read it and
is trying to figure out how to get out of being writing partners with you . You
hate her. Oh, here’s an email from her. She did read it. That was fast.
“Nice,” It says after the first sentence. What a mousy little word that is. You
admit to a slight lift to the corners of your mouth when you read that, but
only because you’ve just realized for yourself that it really is an outstanding
sentence. She doesn’t know crap when she sees it. You know this for sure,
because that’s all you send her, and she sends you back encouraging comments
instead of asking you to stop wasting her time. She even makes suggestions that
you hadn’t thought of. How can you respect a person who is moronic enough to
like your work?
Later, when I ventured into books, it was my writing group that made all the
difference. The fellow writers who red my terrible early drafts were like
people with flashlights on a dark highway. They told me which roads not to
take, when to speed up, when to slow down.
Since then I know that when I don’t a writing partner or a group, I bog down. I
have read books on craft, and taught it for years, and still I have ripped this
book apart repeatedly, because my writing group stopped meeting, and once again
doubt creeps in. I am stuck on two books—three if you include the childhood
memoir I've been working on for 14 years, but I can't talk about that without
bursting into tears. I have no trouble making myself work on my projects—I
print out pages to work on in the car when we drive through sticky Santa Rosa
heat to see my mother-in-law. But I keep having new ideas on how to structure
them. I keep windowing up old material from old files and dropping them in,
printing out the whole mess, and then taking the dropped-in material again. I
need a reassuring voice to whisper in my ear, or I lose faith in what I'm
doing, and the wastebasket fills up and I have to go to Costco to buy more
reams of paper.
