Garbage and sky
When my husband walked in to the bedroom to see an image of Zadie Smith beside me on his pillow, we knew that things had gone too far. There’s devotion and then there’s obsession. But that woman deals in words that feel as if they’re drawn straight from my soul; it’s hard not to fall in love. Harder, though, to accept that those words (any words) will never be as silken and luminous in my own hands.
Teaching writing has taught me that there are no rules for writing. There is only practice. The practice of feeling the words in your body, of trusting their progress all the way to your hands. The practice of sitting down and teasing them out, again and again and again, so that slowly they coagulate to characters, who turn out to have always been there, on the sidelines, just waiting for the portal of language to open for them.
They have become my children, these characters, even the half-formed and abandoned ones. They lurk at the corners of my thoughts, small sparks of being in a semi-verbal limbo. So, too, do my students, who are decidedly more fully formed, and often very verbal indeed. Each connection, each intention, each moment of shared understanding anchors them in my daily list of ruminations. They would not like me to say it, I fear, but many of them are so very young. Even through the veil of hard-earned middle-aged wisdom I recognise the urgency, the hunger, the frustration, the apathy. ‘Life,’ a friend of mine once said when we were students, ‘is huge,’ and I see it the students’ overwhelm, their disbelief that the world extends beyond the map of formal education. I want to tell them that it’s going to be alright, that the world will carry on being huge, but that it will gradually feel a little smaller and eventually they too might one day write the book they’re carrying around inside them. That their embryonic characters might live in other people’s minds and happily ever after.
If only it were so simple. Life, though, isn’t a three act structure. It’s not a narrative arc. It’s a spiralling iteration of exultant heights, mundanity, and the occasional horrible blow. I’ve known too many people get sick and die to claim that a rejection is a devastation, but even so, it hurts like fuck. And that’s the truth of writing that I can’t quite bring myself to share with my adopted student children. You are not the lead character in this story and the characters in your story are not your babies and even so, you will briefly believe that maybe both these things might reasonably be true, and then when rejection comes — as it unavoidably will — you will wonder why you do this to yourself.
And then you will remember the note you found inside a book. Fail again it says, Fail Better. Good old Samuel Beckett, you’ll think, and fold it back for the next time the universe needs to direct you that way. You’ll hear a whistle from the shower: the opening bars of Back to the Future. You’ll remember that there’s always another thread to pull, another line to follow. You’ll remember that at the end of the film, the Delorean runs on garbage and doesn’t even need roads. You’ve failed, and it’s ok. Fail again. Fail better. Keep failing. Garbage and sky is all you need to keep going. So keep going.
