Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ This is chaos with no way out. The metaphoric connections have been cut. The wonders are gone. The worst has happened. I am no longer a writer. And then, after another five minutes of self-flagellation, I start writing again.

      When I took my first writers workshop, I heard someone talk about the continuous dream. The essence was this: once you set up your story, you should step into it and write as if you are living in that fictional dream. The result would be a story that would make readers feel that they, too, were in a seamless story, a dream. I believed that the continuous dream was a normal state that most writers went into, a state of higher awareness. It happened to me from time to time, but in spurts, and not as often as it should. I was new to writing fiction, and I believed that in time, my continuous dreams would become more continuous. While trying to minimize the noise of construction work in an adjacent building, I discovered that listening to music could keep me immersed in the mood of a scene for longer periods of time. But I still had to create the scene, characters, and basis for the story. Music could not fix flaws. Nor was music successful in keeping external distractions from reaching me—the phone, faxes, and what would happen to my privacy after I was published. I was naive—unaware that heaps of self-consciousness awaited me. After my first book was published I found my groove far less often than I did ruts. Each book since then has been increasingly difficult to write. The more I know about writing, the more difficult it is to write. I am too often in a self-conscious state that excludes the intuitive subconscious one. I need to stop rereading each sentence I write before I continue to the next. You can’t write a novel one sentence at a time.

      Distractions vie with self-consciousness as the reason novels-in-waiting languish from neglect. I have learned to say no to events, to parties, to seeing friends from out of town, to providing comments on books about to be published. But none of the strictures I put on my time are able to hold tight when there is a family emergency, or when a friend has just received a bad diagnosis. None of it works when I hear the piteous screams of my little dog, which was what he emitted the other night. I came out of the land of continuous dreams and ran to him. After loving his teddy bear, my little dog was unable to retract his penis into its protective sheath. The sight of that problem was much bigger for such a little dog than I would have ever imagined possible—had I even imagined it. Imagine my four-pound Yorkie as a miniature stallion. It was appalling to me, his noncanine mother. I quickly looked up information via the Internet and found the prognosis and the treatment: if the situation was not immediately handled—literally handled—my little dog would risk infection, even amputation. I got out the olive oil. I put on the examining gloves. An hour later, he was fine. I was not. That’s the kind of distraction I’m talking about, ones I must handle immediately, no matter how well or poorly my writing is going.

      To get away from distractions, I once tried an artists’ colony. While I can work perfectly well on an airplane, I discovered that in this haven for industrious artists, I could not begin. The room was oddly arranged, with two twin beds and three metal desks lined against the walls, a configuration that made me uncomfortable. It was bad feng shui, and I would be out of harmony if I did not change it. The beds had orange bedspreads, which I also found disturbing. I spent the entire first night moving furniture around. The next morning, I bought new bedspreads. I then discovered that the room faced the rising sun and cast a glare on my computer screen. The room was muggy and I had to sit right next to a large fan and anchor my pages so they did not blow away. I then couldn’t work because the unoccupied room next to mine became the meeting place for extramarital affairs. Its trysting sets of industrious writers, musicians, and painters banged the bedstead against the common wall without self-consciousness or consideration of my peace of mind. I bought better earphones and listened to louder music. I left the artists’ colony with twenty pages. My inability to write actually had nothing to do with the room. It was a beautiful room. Those orange bedspreads were not impediments to my writing. I was. I had imagined I was supposed to do great work in that room where Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers had also stayed. With their good works in mind, I found it hard to begin. I was too self-conscious of what I was supposed to produce, and thus I avoided writing altogether.

      I read a study recently on creativity and the brain, which gave me insight into my difficulties writing. MRI imaging was done on the brains of jazz pianists who play by improvising, which is, in essence, composing on the fly, a high level of spontaneous creativity. The results showed that when the jazz pianists were improvising, their brains were not more engaged, but less, in particular, in the frontal lobes. In nonscientific terms, the frontal lobes keep you under control so that you appear to be a rational, well-socialized human being. They keep you from telling your boss he’s an asshole or taking off your clothes in public simply because it’s warm. Whenever I meet people who are not aware how asinine they come across, I suspect their frontal lobes have suffered decay. The frontal lobes, I am guessing, are the center of self-consciousness and self-censorship. Somehow, jazz pianists are able to put that state of control on standby. One jazz pianist described improvising as complete freedom.

      When I write, I’m certain my frontal lobes are very much in active mode. The self-censors are busy. The wellspring of doubt and worry are overflowing. The standards of perfection are polished and on display. I imagine a look of deep concern on my editor’s face when he reads the manuscript. I think I have a brain disease. I suspect the gray matter in my precuneus is becoming a bit threadbare. My need to avoid complacency has trapped me. It has had an ill effect on my writing. It is time to put away the imagined critics, the ones who said, “Lacks imagination or drive, which are necessary to a deeper creative level.”

      Like those jazz pianists, I, too, have also had nonstop improvisational flights. I know exactly what they feel like. They have occurred at least once with every work of fiction, both in short stories and novels. They come as unexpected openings in portals that enable me to step into the scene I am writing. I am fully there, the observer, the narrator, the other characters, and the reader. I am clearly doing the writing, yet I do not know exactly what will happen in the story. I am not planning the next move. I am writing without hesitation and it feels magical, not logical. But logic later tells me that my writing was freed because I had already set up the conditions that allowed my frontal lobes to idle in neutral. Most of the logistics of time, place, and narrative structure had been established. There was less to decide, because there was less to eliminate. What was left was for me to say what happens next, letting emotions and tension become the momentum driving the story forward. If I can push out my inhibitions, I will have access to intuitions, and with that come the autobiographical metaphors I have garnered over a lifetime. The imagery arrives without my consciously choosing it. The narrative knows intuitively where to go.

      I cannot tell you the exact mechanics of how this happens. That would be tantamount to trying to deconstruct the arrival and contents of any stream of thought or emotions. But I do sense that the mind has an algorithm of sorts for detecting possible interactions of visual imagery, language, and emotion that can form autobiographic metaphors. Those combinations are not haphazard. There are patterns and parameters. It may be similar to chemistry. The brain is, after all, a busy hive of chemical interactions of oxygen, metals, hormones, and the like. Maybe each image has a valence—a potential for bonding with intuitions and emotions to form metaphoric compounds. Perhaps narrative tension is the electrically charged state that attracts pairings of words to thought, words to emotions, molecules of meaning.

      I do know that the more tension I feel in the story, the further I am pulled forward—once close to fifty continuous pages in a twelve-hour period. That run occurred during the writing of my third novel, the same one I had been trying to write the year before at the artists’ colony. By then I knew what was at stake for the narrator—the disappearance of a woman who may or may not have been her sister. I felt the same urgency and tension in thinking about the impending disappearance of my mother, who had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The stakes were doubled when my editor Faith Sale was diagnosed a month later with Stage IV cancer. She was like a sister to me. I had no excuse to delay the book and keep it from her. I rented an apartment in New York City, near where Faith lived. Like the room at the artists’ colony, the apartment was too sunny, the desk was not aligned according to the dimensions СКАЧАТЬ