The Hanging Bridge

Starting a new book is like putting one foot on the edge of a hanging bridge, not knowing what’s on the other side, or even if the other end is attached. 

I’m starting to write a new book now, a novel about a family, The Blues; I think that will be the title.  Everything is ahead.  I hardly know them yet; they can morph and change a thousand times till something, I don’t know what, tells me “That’s who they are.  I know them.  I can count on them.”  Of course I can’t.  As the writing and the thinking goes on they can still defy me and change, become other people, do what I won’t allow them to do, peter out and die…anything.  But the moment my figurative foot is on the imaginary bridge, the book is in motion, the journey has begun.

The first words: “Everybody chooses the wrong person.  Sometimes it works out.”  (Or should it be “everyone?  Or should it be “the wrong partner?”  Or should it be....?)

I will be wandering now in strange territory, together, maybe, with the characters, or maybe they will be strangers, unknown to me, to be discovered, or discarded, or changed, given bigger roles or smaller, loved, killed.

What power I have over them.   And they over me.

When I first start I have a vague notion of where I want to go -- but how to get there?  Sometimes I think, “I can do this in a year.”  Sometimes it is never, ever done; the end of the bridge is darkness; I lose my way.

And then there’s the voice – the voice of the book itself, which is my voice, and yet not.  If it comes in a kind of rhythym the book begins to write itself; I am the pen, the fingers.  And if there’s no voice – drudgery, hours and days of sitting mindless, waiting, “alone on a wide, wide sea.”  Nothing matters.  Stupid daily life takes over.  Maybe the journey will start again.  Maybe never.

This minute, writing this right now, I feel ready to start, to type the opening words: “Everyone (yes, everyone) chooses the wrong person....”  I put my foot on the hanging bridge, and I’m afraid, yet giggly, giddy with excitement.  The bridge quivers a little; maybe it’s not anchored; maybe I’ll fall.

But maybe it will be the smoothest, most glorious time I ever had, maybe it will be wonderful, hungrily read, understood, appreciated, loved....

The bridge seems strong, as though it was made of steel.  There’s sun on the other side.  Avanti!  Let’s go!  It’s beginning!

*

Last Words, First Words

The last word my Aunt Lillie ever said was “Mama.”   She was in her sixties, in Mount Sinai, dying.  She hadn’t seen her Mama since she was four years old.  The cancer that sapped Lillie’s life had killed her mother, too, at 34.

In writing, first words and last words have huge importance.  The first words a character speaks in a play, even if it’s “hello”…ah, but should it be “hello,” or “hi,” or “Yo,” or “Good afternoon?”; the possibilities are endless. These words are the audience’s first inkling as to what the character is about.  They should, if the writer is skilled enough, link somehow to the very last words that character speaks, better still, to the last words of the play itself.  The audience doesn’t need to know this; perhaps it shouldn’t.  Like the last notes of a piece of music, the beginning and the end of a play, or a story or a book or a poem, for that matter, should have a sympathetic resonance in – if I can draw this analogy shamelessly further – the key signature of the whole.  Do I mean that if the first word is “hello,” the last word might be “goodbye”?  Maybe.  Or maybe that’s too obvious.  It’s what the skill, the intuition, the – dare I say art? – of the writer should decide.

Not every writer knows this, not even the good ones.  Some do it by instinct, and couldn’t for the life of them tell you why the beginning and end seem right together, but they do.  If they don’t, if they jangle, if the end has no relationship to the beginning, then the work, whatever it is, is like an uncooked meal; it gives you indigestion.

In life, first words are often Mama, or Dada, or Gimme, or Light.  And last words – well, they can be as telling as Gertrude Stein’s: “What is the answer?” and then:  “Well, then, what is the question?” or Henry Thoreau’s when asked if he’d seen the Other World: “One world at a time, one world at a time.”

How much these last words tell about their subjects!   How much the first words and last words of a literary work tell about what comes between, and the skill of the writer who chooses them.

If I were writing this – and I am – I would tell you that my Aunt Lillie’s first word in this world was very probably the one she died on: “Mama.”

A Beginning . . . .

An old love's birthday just passed -- and it seems good to begin this conversation about him, whoever he was. This former love was hugely interesting to me. There was something about him that seemed unknowable, unpredictable, that I could never capture and contain. I wanted to own him, but feared always that if he chose to, he could own me.

This is what he looked like: tall, consciously in shape, careful about his clothes, hairy where you could see and where you couldn't, blunt-faced and handsome -- women took notice of him, and he knew that. He had what the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES had that marked her as sensual: a sliver-sized gap between his front teeth. I have always liked that. He had a grinny, superior smile. It took years for the warmth between us to flare up into fire, and in the meantime we thought and thought and fantasized about each other.

People often ask a writer: "is this story about you, your own life?" The answer is nearly always "Yes," and "No," and "I don't know."

If you read STEAL ME! you will meet him there, or a version of him. As the movies say, any similarity between the characters in this story and real life is purely coincidental. But that, of course, is a lie. Sausage isn't pork loin and meat loaf isn't steak. They are far from the same thing, but there's a relationship. The events in STEAL ME! are fiction, a fantasty. The book is wild and funny and a little crazy, but there's truth in it too -- at least that's what I think -- truth, or some human thing I found out, or think I did, about love and marriage and men and women in the years we knew each other. It took a long time to write the first line -- "He looked so sweet standing there..." and then came the story.

The first line of the new, new, newest idea for a book I'm working on is this: "Everyone chooses the wrong person. Sometimes it works out."

What, I wonder, will that book be about?