How to stay

Are we really going to keep doing this, forever?

When I was getting my MFA in creative writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, I wrote a story called “How to Stay.” The story is about a small town in West Virginia, and told from the point of view of a local man/boy named John who meets a girl from out of town named Amy. All of John’s friends, who swore they would never leave town, are leaving town, and when they do, John writes their name on a piece of plywood he’s screwed to the wall of the bathroom in the gas station/general store in their town. He calls it, “The Wall of the Gone,” and there is no worse place to end up, to John’s mind, than on that wall. Amy and John hook up a few times, play music, hike in the woods, and forge a weirdly intimate bond. Then after a year or so, Amy tells John she’s leaving town, her mother back home has cancer. But it’s a lie. Here’s the scene where Amy comes around to John’s house, to confess:

“I don’t know how to stay in a place,” she said. She sniffed then made a face, as if smelling something sour. “If I did, I would. Here. But I don’t.”

What do you say to that? That I know what she means, that I know it is possible to use up a whole life just learning how to stay and that I am doing it. 

After Amy has gone, John debates whether to write her name on his Wall of the Gone, since Amy wasn’t from there. Before she could be gone, she first had to come. In the end, he decides to write her name, which he views as a gift or favor to her. It’s not nothing, he knows, to be someone who knows how to stay.

I never published this story because it’s not very good (I’ve given you the best parts here). It’s a ripoff of Raymond Carver or Breece D’J Pancake, and uses a kind of voice I thought I had to use to for things to go well in workshop in my MFA program, though people didn’t like the story much anyway. I remember sitting in my car crying in an undignified way to my girlfriend at the time. “This is the best I can do,” I told her, snot flowing freely as undergrads in boat shoes and lobster-patterned shorts paraded by.“This is the best I’ve got. And still they don’t like it.”

But it wasn’t true. I could do better, and eventually, I did, going on to write stories that were weirder and funnier and more me, and in which I didn’t take from experiences (growing up in Appalachia) that were not mine to take. Eventually, I figured out that whatever authentic feelings were in that story were better and more ethically rendered as nonfiction, and they became parts of The Third Rainbow Girl. Nothing is wasted.

In those years, I wanted so badly to be judged as talented, to be anointed, to win a prize. But talent, I’m thinking now, is not what I had.

In his lovely essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, Alex Chee writes about learning from Annie Dillard. “Talent isn’t enough,” she had told us. He goes on, recounting further wisdom from Dillard:

Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science, it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between myself and them is that I’m writing.

If I had read this in graduate school, I would not have believed Dillard. But it is true. Now, in the year 2023, most of the people I went to graduate school with are no longer writing. Of the fifteen people I crossed paths with (my cohort, the one above me, and the one below me) since I graduated in 2015, four of us have published books, and they are not at all the ones I would have predicted.

I am still writing. Why? How?

As it turns out, another important thing that happened to me in graduate school is that my program brought, as a visitor to give a talk and eat catered lunch, the writer Ron Carlson. I have no great love for Carlson, who I found to be self-absorbed and more interested in plunking around on a stray piano than in mentoring students. I also do not recommend seeking out his work, not least because he resigned as director of the MFA program at UC Irvine in 2018 due to “substantiated reports” that he sexually assaulted a high school sophomore at the Hotchkiss School while employed there as an English teacher in the 1970s.

But I will give credit where it’s due and say that I do have a lot of love for a particular passage Carlson wrote in his strangely useful fiction writing craft book, Ron Carlson Writes A Story, which I recommend buying used if you can find a copy.

The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence of to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understands that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially when you are not sure of what you’re doing, where you’re going? Yes. It’s impossible. Who can do it? The writer. 

Incredible, I thought then, when I first read this in 2014. Incredible, I think now, as I read it again. Though I don’t know if I agree with the “to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible” bit — fuck that’s harsh — I’ll stand with the rest.

Because it’s so true. The biggest difference between me now and me in graduate school (besides being less of a drifter and a jerk in a way that people in their twenties are jerks) is that I’m more able now to stay in the room, that is, I’m more able to sit at the desk and stay there, even when nothing is happening. I hope to be twice or even three times better at it in eight more years.

The main difference, I tell my students (and myself), between you and Jennifer Egan or Colson Whitehead or Claudia Rankine or [insert established prolific living writer you admire here] is not, at least chiefly, that they are more talented than you. It’s that they are better at staying seated at the desk with the word document open when they don’t know what they are doing than you are. They are better at staying with the words when everything is uncertain than you are. That’s it.

It sounds woo woo, but it’s not. It’s the most practical thing in the world.

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Come to my office hours

I’m doing a new thing! If you’re MAYBE interested in my summer class, Transforming Your Nonfiction Book From Idea to Reality, via The Shipman Agency, but not sure, come to my FREE Zoom office hours next Sunday, April 2 at 7pm EST/4pm PST to chat with me. You can also come if you have a burning question about writing or selling a nonfiction project and want my two cents.

So far, the response for this class, has been wonderful! I’m so pleased and can’t wait to work with folks on your books. While all scholarships have been awarded, there are still some spots available.

The goal of this course is to clarify the subject and form of your nonfiction book idea, generate significant new pages, and finally to produce both a polished 60-80 page book proposal or excerpt and a query letter to agents. Conceptualized as an accelerated 4-month summer intensive, this class is for people working on a collection of essays, memoir, or reported nonfiction project in progress at any stage. 12 sessions: Wednesdays, May 17, 24, 31, June 7, 14, 21, 28, July 5, 12, 19, 26, August 16, from 7:30-9:30pm EST. $1500 or 4 payments of $375/month.

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In Conclusion

I am under no illusion (delusion) that the reason many of us can’t or don’t keep writing is primarily about discipline or will or even desire.

It’s also about money and work and time and how artistic labor is not valued in this country and hasn’t been for a long time (ever?). I remember learning that France subsidizes many of its independent bookstores because they’ve decided, as a society, that having independent bookstores is an important thing that they collectively value. “But that is not the sort of society we live in,” as Cheryl Strayed/Dear Sugar says.

I am acutely aware that there may come a day when I can no longer write, when it is no longer tenable for me—for financial or emotional reasons. This industry is brutal on the self-esteem front and baldly exclusionary to so many brilliant folks with essential stories to tell and inextricably intertwined with venal capitalism. I wouldn’t blame anyone who got out to preserve their sanity or sense of basic hope. I’ll write your name on my own wall of Cherished Minds Who Made Other Choices.

But for me, that day isn’t today. For now, I’m going to stay.

yours,

Emma

P.S. Know anyone who lives in or nearby Paris and wants a cat, dog, plant, house sitter or sub-letter? I’m on the hunt for a situation this summer or fall. Thanks for helping make my Emma in Paris dreams come true.