Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life

Act One:

Become a Writer,

See the World!

1. A Portrait of

the Writer as a Young Obsessive-Compulsive

As a teenager, when I thought writer, I imagined berets, rooms wispy with smoke, lithe fingers craned over typewriters, and international intrigue. Someone might have told me then that I was mixing up writer with spy. Someone might have told me it would never again be Paris in the 1920s. That it was 1991 in America and women wore absurd shoulder pads (like lipsticked linebackers), Bell Biv Devoe had not one, but two, hit songs on the radio, and every time I flipped on the news a fem-bot was talking about Clarence Thomas and pubic hair. My stand-out success as a writer had been a paper on Jane Eyre that my high school AP Women’s Studies teacher mimeographed and passed around to the class. A paper which I wrote the night before it was due and, as always, under extreme duress.

Surely, I had an undiagnosed mental disorder, for I could not simply sit down with one clean sheet of paper and write out a tidy, alpha-numeric outline and then follow said outline as I typed merrily for a reasonable window of time and during which I did not chew pens or sit in various weird bird postures in my chair. As I began the paper (if began is the right word for spending an hour choosing which notebook or journal to write it in and another looking up mental disorders in the encyclopedia), I tore out sheet after sheet of the same bumbling introductory paragraph. The discarded sheets littered the floor around my chair, next to an exploded pen, a thesaurus, and class notes that were written in two separate notebooks and in the margins of various vocabulary handouts. Perhaps I kept my feet up in the chair because the mounting paperwork felt like circling sharks, the floor like dangerous waters.

In fact, I did have a mental disorder—ADHD, inattentive type—but I wouldn’t learn that until I was forty, an ostensible grown-up by then who was still struggling with the mundane tasks of daily life. Keith teases that I exude the whiff of an aristocrat who has stumbled upon a reversal of fortune or fish-out-of-water circumstance—he’s referring to the fact that I literally cannot boil rice properly, which he thinks makes me seem snobby or aloof. Perhaps I became a writer and later an academic for no other reason than it offers cover for such eccentricity, all huddled under the banner of absent-minded professor.

When I finally went to a neuropsychologist for evaluation a few years ago, the doctor confirmed ADHD, Anxiety, and mild OCD diagnoses.

Your verbal skills are off the charts, but your nonverbal skills are terrible, he said.

Thank you?

No, I mean, something’s not adding up because even with a high verbal, your nonverbal is so low that it doesn’t square with your IQ score. The doctor explained that the nonverbal was assessed with the various tests involving digital shapes and patterns that I had manipulated, matched, or identified by pushing buttons on a device that resembled an old Speak and Spell. In one game, I was supposed to fit falling blocks of various shapes and combinations into corresponding slots below before they reached the bottom of the screen. It was like Tetris, except the shapes fell so slowly, and the controls were so cumbersome, that I lost interest about halfway through.

Oh, that’s probably because I was bored, and so I just [sheepish smile] started pressing buttons randomly, I said. What forty-year-old behaves this way?

Well, one with undiagnosed ADHD, for starters, he said. The goal now, the doctor said—drum roll, please—is to learn how to work smart, not hard.

As I left his little office in the tangerine winter gloaming, the doctor smiled wanly as he closed the door after me, as if to say what we both knew in that moment that I was going to have to do this, too—ironically, inexplicably, comically—as I did everything else: the hard way.

They didn’t diagnose kids with ADD in the late 70s and early 80s the way they do now, much less little book-wormish girls, but I’m not sure it would have mattered because my dad—my primary parent during my formative school years—was, and still is, of the old school. That first year in NH was difficult: I struggled in math and anything that wasn’t reading, writing, or gym. And since I was six months or so younger than my classmates, with a birthday in late fall, my new teacher, Mrs. Lunkhead, suggested I stay back a grade.

"She’s reading The Red Badge of Courage as we speak," I remember my dad telling her, his face flushed and angry, gesturing for me to produce the evidence of my prowess from my bookbag. When I was formally diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, I asked Dad if he remembered this encounter. Maybe Lunkhead was right, I said.

"Who? That dingbat? She wore suede, for crying out loud, and lacked gravitas," he said. And I wonder why I am the way that I am.

I radiated pride (and fake humbleness) as the teacher handed out my Jane Eyre paper, throughout which I had parroted the prior week’s vocab words (ignominy, bildungsroman, Byronic hero), but other than this one glittering paper, I had no reason to believe I could be a writer. I resisted writing, for one. I was undisciplined, only got in the chair once the conditions became so dire that I was like a NORAD analyst pulling the overnight shift. Yes, I was a strong student and loved to read, but my research papers were hopelessly disorganized, my arguments muddied, and I had written only a few short stories, bad Mother’s Day poetry, and some clever mixtape titles. The stories all starred Alex, a bumbling, suburban white girl who often jogged by the house of one Sean O’Henry, and who spent untold hours listening to Prince tracks while making prank phone calls from the mission control center of her best friend’s bedroom. At the time, I thought fiction meant changing people’s names but leaving the soundtrack intact.

My reasons for wanting to be a writer, too, were unformed, adolescent. Recently, I told my friend, essayist Penny Guisinger, about the Tom Waits character in my literature class freshman year who caused me to change majors. He was an upperclassman from Tenafly, New Jersey—closer to the city than to our campus at Rutgers University, as he liked to point out—who smoked Old Gold cigarettes and wrote in Moleskine notebooks long before they were de rigueur. He took me to a bar in the city that autumn when I was still just seventeen, where he ordered whiskey sours and taught me how to tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue. I don’t remember who we were reading that semester, but I can still sing all the words to The Heart of Saturday Night. And I can still knot a cherry stem in my mouth in under a minute.

I think most of us dated that guy, Penny said, laughing.

Fine, I said, but did we all become English majors because of him?

At the Hippocamp Creative Nonfiction Conference a few years ago, Tobias Wolff gave a wonderful keynote address about his own origins as a writer, citing a photo of Hemingway with Ava Garner on his arm, which Wolff had seen in one of his mother’s magazines. Tracy Kidder says that in the 1960s, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner were still somehow like the current rockstars and that he initially identified as a writer for the same reason I suspect many of us do: to meet and impress girls. My own reasons for becoming a writer weren’t any nobler: I, too, wanted to be a literary rockstar. I, too, wanted to meet and impress girls. And boys.

Further, I was so averse to clutter and paperwork that instead of writing phone messages for the priest at the church where I worked after school (Our Lady of Teenaged Hormone Repression, I believe it was called), I just memorized the names and numbers of the callers. Even if I could find the pink tablet on which I was supposed to take the messages beneath the Hoarders-esque piles, I wouldn’t have written them down and added to the mess. (Almost no one called anyway, except Father Tom from our sister parish across town, The Virgin Mary’s Cherry, or Sister Deirdre from CCD, the Catholic education program we just called Central City Dump.) Father Joe would poke his head into the office, and I would say, So and so called, and he would nod through the dust motes and slouch away into the caverns of the rectory. And then I would call around to all the girlfriends I had left only hours earlier at the end-of-sixth-period bell to whine about the clutter and speculate on the movements of one Sean O’Henry. Years later when I worked at a law office (as a FILE CLERK), the records room gave me the vapors, with its groaning cabinets and files like disembowelment wounds. Ghastly.

The point is somewhere in my heady staggering toward becoming a writer, I overlooked a central necessity: paperwork. Literal reams. Triplicate backups of printer cartridges. Piles of papers stacked all over that, despite how artfully arranged, yip and swipe at your attention constantly. Sticky notes written in semi-conscious cursive unintelligible the morning after. Stacks of books: the I-can’t-believe-you’ve-never-read-X-stack; the stack to understand the how-can-you-never-have-read-X stack; the hopeless-bourgeois-climber stack; the stack to escape from the seriously-you’ve-never-read-X-and-call-yourself-an-intellectual stack; and finally, the books on your bedside table, the your-mother-doesn’t-even-love-you-lullabies-for-self-esteem stack.

So, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me when the wheels fell off my already tenuous sanity recently, as I found myself searching for notes on a scene that I had written, oh some time in fall? winter? and which suddenly seemed urgent. This was the scene that was going to crack open whatever thing I was writing. It was the Kafka ice axe scene, which had emerged brilliant and fully formed one morning while I inhaled a muffin and prepped for teaching a composition class. Naturally, I marked its arrival on a sticky note and stuffed it in the back of whatever book I happened to be reading in fall? winter? The sticky/scrap note situation in my life is dire, and don’t even get me started on the dust motes.

But even worse is the situation on my laptop, with its too-many and probably redundant files of essays, memoir, and what-have-you. (It’s an emerging genre, okay?) Dozens of versions of whatever thing I’m writing live on my desktop, on various thumb drives (and old floppies), or in clouds, all with increasingly hysterical names:

book.doc

originaldraftbook.doc

bookdraftwithBRAIDS2017.doc

CURRENTDRAFT.doc

SCENESONLYdraft2018.doc

ISITPOSSIBLEIAMMAKINGITWORSE2019.doc

HEYASSHOLEAREYOUEVERGOINGTOFINISHTHISBOOK2020.doc

and, finally, 2021KILLYOURSELF.doc.

So how can a writer manage all the minutiae and paperwork?

The hell if I know.

I wish I had some practical advice that would change your writing life—the twelve habits of highly productive people, the writerly equivalent of the perfect t-shirt fold, some filing system, a clever mnemonic. But I still have my oak tag journals from second grade. I still have every school notebook, every diary, every boozy journal I ever wrote in—all stuffed into one grandmotherly valise, which I only call a valise because everything sounds better in French. My methods, such as they are, are hopeless, messy, not worth describing—for every good writer knows to skip the stuff the reader will. The truth is balancing a life of writing, teaching, reading, and creating has always felt too hard, has always felt just beyond my reach. But I guess you know already what I never seem to—that the reaching is, in fact, the whole point. That it’s only in living beyond or above or past or outside ourselves that we’ll ever learn anything, that we’ll ever be useful, that we’ll ever be