“There’s nothing to writing,” the great sports columnist Red Smith famously wrote. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Smith’s era predated that of computers, but no doubt many an Option and Shift key bear traces of hemic substance. So for Chronogram’s 2007 November Literary Supplement, we asked three writers of different persuasions and blood types—Gioia Timpanelli, Akiko Busch, and Janine Pommy Vega—to tackle one aspect of writing’s unholy trinity: Beginning, Middle, and End. Their personal essays appear in that order.
Beginnings, Eros, and Work
By Gioia Timpanelli
Begin, just begin. Each piece of writing finds its own way. I watched my parents, my family work together. Every one of them worked with real satisfaction. For me writing is real work, a quiet inner thrill, a real passion. So I begin from this love, attraction, from this Eros.
It could begin with a sentence that comes out of nowhere, like these sentences from my story “Working for the Den: Miss Eugenia Amadeo’s Notebooks, December 22, 1905”:
“I was once a teacher,” my Mother used to say, “I forget now for whom or exactly where.” I never believed that she had forgotten, but I knew she had her reasons for saying this.
Both my mother and father were students who “walked”—one didn’t say “studied”—with the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus. Perhaps he was her grandfather or her great uncle. The school was in the same place where my mother lived, but for my father getting to the celebrated, but quite hidden, villa was another matter. “I had to travel the length of Sicily twice, before I found it,” he always began, and then he would tell us stories of adventures and misadventures that we children loved, stories about Cyclopes and shepherds, sailors and flying machines, lost children and treasure boxes at the bottoms of dried wells. Although it took him years to find the ancient villa, when he arrived the teacher was waiting for him on the porch steps as if he were receiving a son that he had been expecting. Father had no introductions or credentials of any kind. “No one was ever sent away for foolish reasons,” Mother said, and then added, “Besides, he came like all travelers, tired and alert, with a black bear huffing at his back.”
Now this detail about the black bear is strange, but every time I remind my brother of this bear he says he never heard my mother say such a thing, not even once. But she did say it to me a number of times. Once, while preparing dinner, I was watching her go about her business with that absolute ease she had when working. Out of the blue, she turned to me and said, quite deliberately, “Did you know that Father came to our school with a black bear close at his heels?”
“Really? A black bear? I didn’t know we had black bears.”
“It was showing him the way.”
“Showing him the way? You said it was close on Father’s heels.”
“It turned out to be the same thing.”
“Out of the work comes the work,” says John Cage. Blessed work. A painting, a drawing, an image, a whole story; someone asks you to write something and there you are, you have to do it. At this starting point it is better to not care what those supreme critics, your Aunt and Uncle Titsufrie, will say. Words are not experience or life; they are beautiful play, an attempt to show the inner and outer worlds in as tricky and real a way as possible. They start from experience and with dream, reflection, imagination, lead you to a sentence, an image, a story. The cockroach’s leap and the mouse’s nibbling of a pear to its core—and there it is: Having been said, it is now the sudden exterior. Once revealed, once written, there is no division—inner and outer in the very same place. And you didn’t have to drag your bags up and down stairs.
Franz Kafka wrote, “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
But you have to be willing to do the work, to write down the first words, to begin. I’ll skip the middle of my librarian’s journal entry, but here’s the ending:
My dear father was a commentator on modern times. All the talk about “progress” that was declared at the turn of the century he believed would bring humans to complete ruin. “Many people foolishly believe everything can be made into coin, but that is because they do not ‘see’ the invisible worth of every created thing. Remember, the invisible part that you serve by work cannot be accomplished by machines.” At which point he would laugh at the thought.
“It is essential not to become discouraged, but instead to hold the power of this invisible sight steady in front of you, for we all have real work that is ours, truly so. Since all work must serve, it is essential that you know who it is you are serving with your work. But, like the seasons, this work can and often does change. To live one’s own real life. Ah!”
Putting down the first words and sentences might be hard, but it is good, humbling work, from beginning, Eros and work around to work, Eros, and beginning.
Midstream
By Akiko Busch
It’s common knowledge that the current is faster in the middle of the river than at the edges. The shifting contours of the bank, rocks, the shallow bed all work to slow the water at its edges, so it is in midstream that you come to know the river’s character. But the middle of the Housatonic River near Kent, Connecticut—on an afternoon in late August—is a quiet place, and the water seems to be moving as gently as it does near the banks. The current is barely perceptible.
The river is 50 yards across, maybe 75 in a few places, so there isn’t much to swimming across this river. Instead, my friend Karen and I have just decided to swim up the river as far as we care to, then back down. If it is possible to imagine that a river has a spine, this is the line we’re following, swimming up the fluid back of the river. The air is as quiet as the water; if there is any sense of movement at all, it is in the occasional leaf floating down to the surface of the water, nearly as languidly as the flow of the current itself.
For me, writing and swimming have long been parallel enterprises. In their elusive character, their shared mutability, the ease with which both can go from being transparent to opaque, words and water are natural colleagues. And whether in the middle of a page or midstream in a river, detachment is in the character of the place. Being in the river today affords a certain removal—even the willows, the tulip trees, the sycamores, and oaks seem remote, and the kayaker who paddles by us downstream now seems to occupy a different landscape—waterscape—as he is on the water, not in it. “Are you swimming all the way to Canada?,” he asks. We laugh. Maybe. We swim three-quarters of a mile upstream, then back down—it is the same both ways, no pull or tug at all. The water temperature is in the high 70s, comfortable. A river midstream is always a place of suspension. You are a world away, but you are still right there.
It is easy for a body of water to accommodate our notion of change; transformation and the flow of water seem inevitably linked in the human imagination. Now, that a change in the current can be so imperceptible comes as useful information. We commonly use the expression “sea change” to describe radical transformation, but on this particular afternoon, what I am thinking of instead is a “river change,” a more subtle adjustment of will or of direction or of intent. A soft breeze ripples the current, suggesting what could be the vertebrae of the water, and if I can read the language in the backbone of this river, it has to do with those changes that are hardly noticeable.
It is in the middle of the river that you become intimate with its direction, its flow, its velocity, where it’s going and where it’s taking you. It is the place where you will find the essential information. Often, that information is offered indirectly. Swim in the Hudson River at slack tide and you’ll entertain the illusion that you are swimming in a wide, long lake. A couple of hours later, when the tide is taking you upriver fast, you’ll understand why it is common river lore that it will take a stick thrown into the river in Troy eight months to reach the mouth of the river.
Even the Mississippi River has moments of calm midriver, before the current seizes you and swings you back into the swift downstream flow. The strength of that river is such that you go wherever it’s taking you—to a scrap of muddy beach on the far side, a thin grove of willows, a bridge abutment. One seems as remote as the other, and there’s no telling where you’ll find yourself. That destination can only be imagined, not planned, is an idea that translates easily to other endeavors.
Midstream, words can come and go with a flow that’s hard to anticipate, a velocity and direction that can be hard to predict. A narrative of any sort has the same volatile shifts. No matter how carefully you believe you have plotted your course, the words can come in a sudden rush or change direction before you have a clue. Stillness can settle in just as unexpectedly. This is what I love about being midstream: Whether it is a river or a story, you’re never quite where you think you are.
And it is exactly because writing and swimming have been parallel enterprises for so long that I know midstream is a place to just keep my eyes open, to keep looking around. And if a golden leaf from a tulip tree on the shore happens to drift my way or I happen to spot a blue heron swerving through the silver maples, I know this is my lucky day.
The End
By Janine Pommy Vega
Just lop it off. That’s what a friend of mine, Bob Hershon, says about the ending of most poems or pieces of prose. The author of several books, the editor for 20 years of the poetry magazine Hanging Loose, and the publisher of Hanging Loose Press, he comes by his opinion honestly. Just lop it off. He says a good writer has already reached the reader and made his or her point known. Perhaps seized by doubt, the writer thinks, Maybe they won’t get it—and proceeds to sum up once again, or tack on a coda, and thereby distance the reader, an intelligent accomplice, who does not need the world spelled out to leap forward to the end. When in doubt, just lop it off.
I’ve labored over endings where I wanted to tidily wrap up the whole subject and send it singing into the heart of the reader (or the universe, whichever came first) and light up the night. Mostly I’ve been glad to acquit myself with enough workmanlike grace to not trip over my own feet. The interworkings of a piece absolutely determine the end: You have to follow every strand in the net to make sure it is firmly knotted if you want it to hold your fish—if you want the reader to believe you. If you alter the body or fins of the fish it will show up in the tail. Any change in the particulars or highlights of the tale or poem must be proved out in the end.
I am rarely surprised by how a piece ends. I knew all along where I wanted to go. But flatfooted writing is such a joyless thing. If I present no ins and outs, who will want to go there with me? Where will the “A-ha!” have got to, if all along we all knew where we were heading?
The worst, of course, is when the writer’s ego is married to an image or phrase that has really nothing to do with the piece, but which the writer feels bound to carve into the end like one of the faces of Rushmore; then a derrick is needed to pry it loose. Here’s a case in point. In one story I had a woman in a church replete with patriarchal trappings, and she was singing songs to the mother goddess before a crowd. Naturally, she assumed there would be some reaction. A statue would fall from its niche beside the arch, someone would walk out in high dudgeon—but by the time she’d finished singing nothing had happened. Like Juan Ramon Jimenez’s poem remarks: Nothing happened? Or had everything happened, and were we standing now suddenly in the new way?
My character tells us she wished people would suddenly get up and dance in a great circle with their eyes shining, but that didn’t happen. Nothing did. Or had everything happened, as Jimenez said? And was she standing now like a woman in warm water up to her knees?
My editor called me up. A woman of infinite tact, she suggested that the last line had, er, nothing to do with the piece. I explained I didn’t know why it worked, but I felt it did. She said she had shown it to everyone in the office and no one got the warm water bit. What did it mean? I said I wasn’t sure, but felt that in time I would understand it.
“Just think about it,” she said.
To reassure myself, I called a friend I respected as a writer and editor. I read her the last few pages up to the end.
“Oh, I love it!” she said. “But what was that business with the water? What did that have to do with anything?”
And there it was. I’d stuck a private piece of internal shorthand that no one understood—not even me—in at the end because it felt good. I had sacrificed clarity to self-indulgence, the great no-no for any writer.
Be it memoir, nonfiction, poetry, interview, fiction, or anything else, the end is where we land—on one foot or two, and where the whole dance is somehow exemplified or held to light by the last posture on the page. Think of the main character in The English Patient who has been buried deep in a reverie of the past, and who comes to himself at the dinner table with enough presence of mind to catch the fork his daughter drops before it hits the floor. What a dance. What cinematic bravura.
I’ve read pieces that tangoed brilliantly along, and then just stopped—an end by default—with no conclusive gesture. As though this is what the writer wanted us to know, and this is how we’re to know it, hanging over an abyss with no ultimate stance to latch onto. If the last paragraph has, as we hope, the shape of a hull, it can sail off into the reader’s mind and become something somewhere else. The envoi, the boat across the waters.
But finally, like a season of the year, or a relationship (which it is with the reader), or an era with definable characteristics, a piece of writing stops at the end because it has been emptied. There is nothing more to say.
This article appears in November 2007.
