THE DAY I FOUND MY WRITING VOICE

Here’s the back story for Rule 8: Trust Your Voice from Annie’s and my new book GOOD WRITING: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences

As I do when I drop out, I lived in a cabin in the woods, this time in upstate New York. I was 33; the previous year the clock called on me to drop journalism for fiction, my long-term dream. I was teaching myself fiction, writing one short story after another.

On a bright sunny Saturday I made the hour drive north to Saratoga Springs, to sleep in a Skidmore dorm for two weeks while I took a daily class from Marilynne Robinson at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

On Day Two or Three, she gave us the prompt that we were to turn into a story for delivery later in the week: “Evoke a childhood memory.”

We didn’t have laptops in 1989. That evening I tucked into the room of a dozen computers that had been set up for us. As I recall, I got there quite late, maybe 11 p.m. and found it blessedly empty, except one other student who was engrossed and easy to ignore.

Here’s how I describe what happened next in a paragraph from the new book:

“It often takes years of writing practice before your true voice comes to life. Malcolm Gladwell famously says that 10,000 hours of practice in any endeavor yields a sense of flow and mastery that has the feel of switching on cruise control. That was my experience. After years of dogged reporting and roughly 10,0000 hours of writing and rewriting, one day I sat down to write a short story, and it wrote itself for me in forty-five minutes. The story was populated with light and feathery thoughts, a natural arc, and an innocence and sincerity that bubbled out. I take no credit. My first reaction was ‘Crap, this doesn’t look like Faulkner at all.’”

So now I’m going to switch gears, interrupt this Substack, and paste that selfsame short story into this post.

Here’s the story:

How Did You Like It?

Daddy’s chair is protected by a semicircular beach of white papers whose borders, overlapping, sketch shadows like dunes. I lie on my belly where the surf would break if this weren’t a living room, my legs kicking the carpet under me in a slow crawl while I read a thin book called “F.W. Woolworth: Five and Dime Boy.”

I lie right where I’m sure daddy can look at me whenever he wants. As I turn the pages daddy’s big maroon wing-tipped shoe never moves, as if it and the exposed sock shank and the cuff of his suit leg are sculpted there.

I, however, fidget a lot, which I have only just discovered is expected of an eight-year-old. I have learned many things in the past hour; I remain eight years old -- my ninth birthday is not due for eight months and thirteen days -- but I have aged enormously in the past 60 minutes. Still, my body is that of a child. I lift an elbow every once in a while when the synthetic nap of the carpet burns, or I scratch the itch on the inside of my right elbow where it’s already nearly red enough for me to draw blood, or I cock my head down to where I can tell how many pages I’ve got left in this little blue book.

He’s daddy to me, never dad. Dad is a word that adults use, and though I have recently acquired the manifold of sentience that is expected of adults, it is only an hour old and I need to practice its use, I know, or I will alarm my elders. (Forget the word father; it suggests exasperation. And daddy, I know, is a girl’s word. But I have no choice; the term dad is taken for now. That word is used only by my father to describe his father. Everybody else calls the man that daddy calls dad by the name of Bobo. Bobo is bald and I’m told that I’ve met him twice, but I have lost the memories. Bobo built his house by hand -- a phrase I once took literally -- out of redwood. There’s a snapshot of me on his lap with some cousins whose names I knew for two weeks and who also called him Bobo when we were in California on vacation. One day I will be able to call daddy by the name dad. But I will always refer to my bald grandfather Bobo, even when he is dead, by the name Bobo.)

I know all this because today, the past hour, marked the emergence of my critical faculties -- it was rather sudden -- and it happened here where I lie on the floor, trying to read but having a hard time of it because everything around me is quite different from how it used to be, even a couple of hours ago, even more different than the way things seemed when I was seven and wasn’t yet eight and almost-one-third.

For the time being, and so long as daddy’s foot and leg remain motionless and I know that he’s immersed in the work he brings home from the office, I’m perfectly happy, perhaps even grateful (as if seeking a return to my less-conscious youth) for him to remain daddy. You see, with the sudden, immense growth of my worldview seems to have come an implicit understanding that revelations are due in an orderly fashion, and that disrupting the order may provoke a certain lack of sympathy, which may be registered in frowns or quizzical asides from adults, such as daddy and mom and Bobo.

Mom is just “mom.” Her parents have always been dead, and so “mom” isn’t taken. I gave up on “mommy” ages ago, when I was five. My brother calls her mother, but he’s just being a jerk and nothing more need be said about him.

Here is what happened:

For months now, daddy has been coming home from the office and after a short fight with mom -- until an hour ago I believed that I was the cause of those fights, for failing my childhood duties -- he has fixed himself a martini, pouring it into the funnel-shaped glass that mom places in the freezer when she hears his key in the lock, and he has sat in his velvet green chair in the living room and has spread out his work in untidy piles like the carpet was a giant desk. Sometimes he brings home two briefcases. On these evenings, I lie in front of him where he can see me and where he is bound to start talking to me when he takes a break from work, which isn’t all that often but is enough, I can now tell, to create a paternal bond.

“What’re you reading?” he asks. Or, sometimes, when he sees that I have finished a book, “What were you reading?”

And I tell him the title. It’s usually a biography or mystery, a book designed for children of a certain age, which is here and now in 1962 when America is in top form and everyone is quite busy.

“How do you like it?”

Or, “How did you like it?”

“It’s really great.” That has always been my answer. Always always always, until today. And then I try to tell him the plot and he lays in his lap the white sheaf he’s reading, and takes the yellow pencil out of his teeth and sets it behind his ear, and stares right at me. He smiles, with curiosity, as I talk. I speak confidently at first, naming a few characters and positioning them at the beginning of the tale. But then I always screw up rather badly, forgetting a character and ignoring subplots, and I become confused and try to fill in gaps, and I reluctantly search his fixed smile for sincerity, unconsciously suspecting him of boredom. I never can finish, so I scowl a lot and stutter a little, and bang my legs on the red carpet, and then I just throw up my hands and announce to him, “You can probably guess how it ends.” That’s how it has played out in the past, although I have a strong sense that our literary conversations will be quite a bit more satisfactory in the very near future.

And then typically we go back to work. He retreats -- from mom, from the very house itself it seems -- into his papers. I return to my book.

Only tonight it went differently.

Daddy heard me dramatically close my book and sigh, the sign that I had finished and would be soon off to another book.

“What were you reading?” he asked, one hand stroking the stem of the martini glass on the table next to him.

“Tom Edison: Electricity Boy.”

“How did you like it?”

I watched his ankle, fixed in place. “It’s not so good.”

I didn’t even know I had thought it before I said it. Not so good?! Why, I suddenly wondered, do daddy’s shoes have those holes punched in them? And then, pow! I had this transcendent feeling of critical consciousness. I scarcely had time to feel the shock before my mind’s disassembled thoughts, dormantly awaiting this moment for eight years three months and seventeen days, were frantically assembling themselves, the synapses instantly rearranging and lines of thought spinning out a tight web of millions of connections, like the blue dot when the TV’s turned on that blurs and then shoots out streams of pale blue and black and purple that course over the screen in a predestined map, filling up space in a blink.

My head bursting with knowledge, my brain seeming to fold over its folds, once, twice, three times, I calmly looked at daddy for reassurance, and in doing so I raised my eyes for the first time that I can remember from his mouth, which always gave what I needed and didn’t require overt emotion, to his eyes, which were wide and green and sparking with loss and optimism, and I knew that he knew.

We stared at each other for a long time, perhaps 15 seconds, an intimacy that we won’t repeat, I know, for 17 years, and then only when mom gets sick and almost dies. (Mom has a habit of straying into things, as she does in our lives, but she had nothing to do with my so-recent epiphany. The question remains, What was it about this moment in the living room, me just a child, that allowed daddy’s and my censors to relax? Looking back from a wiser vantage -- my critical powers are now more than an hour old -- I’m amazed that daddy can keep working, that I can hear the scratch of his pencil against the white paper that blocks his face from my view. How can he work, knowing what I now know?) Our eyes stayed fixed on each other even when mom’s voice came nagging out at me to take down the trash (which I had been avoiding for quite a long time, practically since I got home from school) and instead of yelling back, “Later, I’m busy right now,” I raised myself up, still staring at daddy who now could wink at me if he wanted, could poke me with an elbow, could slap me on the back, my new daddy who could actually learn from me if anything remained to be learned, and I turned suddenly and left and, avoiding mom who was standing in the kitchen, keeping my attention on the bumpy yellow acrylic floor, I grabbed the blue trashcan while suppressing my alacrity, knowing that glee would be misinterpreted and that I must shuffle out of the kitchen as if disgruntled, because mom didn’t know yet what daddy and I knew about myself, that in being able to reflect on books I could reflect on myself. And as I dumped the carrot peelings and coffee grounds and crumpled brown lunchbags and torn-open boxes and wax paper soaked in chicken grime into the bigger, round galvanized steel garbage can in the dark garage, I discovered a simple truth, my first: Taking out the garbage is the bane of all children. I knew immediately that there would be many more truths and I have already discovered dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, but as far as trash hauling goes, what a little more than an hour ago had been a simple oppression now is a complex concept of obeisance and familial servitude, and its universality -- the bane of all children -- resonates with the myths that are found in books.

Back here on the floor, with daddy’s looming wingtip unmoved, I’m not paying a lot of attention to “F.W. Woolworth: Five and Dime Boy” because other things, more revelatory engagements, are on my mind.

For instance a minute ago I was thinking, What will happen when Hamlet seems thin compared to Lear or Othello and I can’t let Mrs. Webb my eight grade teacher know because that would be ostentatious?

And what will happen when I’m 15 and my friend Skip Bartol who hasn’t read Henry Miller, who hasn’t lain in a Parisian park with his hand running up a taxi dancer’s thighs, tells me not screw his sister Estelle and I tell him that she’s not my type? When I get beat up is it because I didn’t get the context right or because I had to get pounded?

What will happen when daddy takes me out fishing on the lake this summer and after two hours of floating, my line stretching into the green opaque water at that weird rigid angle that questions gravity, the line suddenly tugs a curve out of the tip of my rod and I’m fighting my first bullhead and I know (but can’t tell daddy, who’s instructing me on how much line to let out and how much to let in) I know right then, right now, that catfish will always be the best-tasting fish, and that even when it gets trendy and wrong to order catfish in a restaurant, when I’m 25 and living in New York, I won’t be able to resist? And what will happen when I make sure to leak to my friends, who will wear suits to dinner, that I liked bottom feeders before they were fashionable?

What will happen tonight, this very night, just a few hours from now, when through the ceiling I hear the brass bed squeaking, and I’m supposed to think that in their wrestling daddy’s hurting mom, but instead I have to keep secret my joy that things are right and sexual in their world? Will I have the strength to climb the stairs and knock on their door and lie to them and ask to sleep between them? Or will they know that I know that what they want from me -- a child -- is gone, except in body?

What will happen in two years when Bobo dies and daddy wants to be called dad by me, and I can’t do it? Not yet at least? Not until I’m sure that Bobo’s bones have disintegrated where we laid them in the ground in a redwood box?

What will happen when I’m 30 years old and I’m lying flat on my back in a white hospital bed and I’m falling in love with my physical therapist and I’m trying to explain this moment to her, and I leave out my daddy’s big wingtip and ankle in my peripheral vision, and I refer to him as dad as I talk, and I leave out how I predicted Shakespeare and sex and adolescence and death, and I try to get her to understand that when I was eight years old there was a tick of the clock when critical thought appeared and my daddy knew it and I knew it and everything changed? What will happen when the physical therapist doesn’t get it and what will happen when I ask her to massage my back anyway?

But for the time being, in front of daddy who’s working in his chair I’m glad I’m reading “F.W. Woolworth: Five and Dime Boy.” It stinks, and maybe I’ll tell him and maybe I won’t.

Now we’ll switch back to the Substack post.

After my story was critiqued in class, Robinson asked me to lunch in the cafeteria. It was a little hair-raising; all my classmates sitting at our usual spot were staring at Robinson and me huddled at an estranged table in a corner.

She asked me about myself, giggled about her husband’s love for muscle cars and a particular shade of ceramic green on his current GTO or Camaro, I don’t remember, and informed me for the first time that the unit of fiction was the sentence. And then she paused and looked serious. My knees were trembling.

“You know, Housekeeping,” she said, referring to her first novel, “began as a prompt John Hawkes gave us in class. ‘Evoke a childhood memory.’”