I was fairly broke in grad school. Almost all of my graduate assistantship went to renting a small apartment tacked on to the top of my creepy landlord’s garage. The floor slanted and the ceiling was caving in, but amenities were included and I lived alone, which was a big deal for me. I had had a much cheaper rent before I found the garage apartment, but I also had six roommates (one of whom was a squirrel in my wall), a giant hole beneath the claw foot tub that revealed the dirt floor of the basement, and a landlord that insisted on keeping the thermostat set so low to save money that frost coated the countertops. So yeah, garage apartment and general-brokeness it was.
There were a few key things that kept me going while getting my MFA. The first: my friends, the second: my hip-hop dance fitness classes at Just Dance Roanoke (RIP), and the third: my midnight slices of torso-sized pizza at Benny Marconi’s in downtown Roanoke. I danced four to five days a week and ate Benny’s pizza close to the same number of times a week, most often with a beer and a friend’s manuscript in hand, and these things costed money, so I did all sorts of random jobs to keep myself sane through pizza and dance.
For a time, I worked in the Barnes & Noble at the mall. But then one day I was informed that I had to head back to “get into costume” before I could take my fifteen. Somehow, nobody thought it necessary to give me a head’s up that I would be donning the giant Clifford suit for story time. I could not see from inside the big red headpiece, so a coworker had to lead me through the store by hand to the children’s section, where I stood and blindly waved while someone read a story to the kids. I quit shortly after that.
Then, I started nannying a family across the Roanoke Valley from where I lived. The young daughter, Stella, did not like me and did not shy away from telling me so. But that was fine. What was difficult was caring for her baby brother, Benjamin. Benjamin cried and cried. Benjamin could not be consoled. His shrieking cries pierced my ears hour after hour as I tried to calm him every way I knew how from years of babysitting and nannying. Finally, one day, something almost snapped inside me. I set the baby down in his crib and walked away. While the baby cried in the next room, I called my father in Minnesota who answered on the first ring. I filled him in and asked him what I should do. By this point, I was crying myself.
Pop was gentle. “You have to remember that it’s a slow start,” he said. We talked for a few minutes and by the time we hung up, I was ready to pick up Benjamin and try again. We walked and walked around the house. I don’t remember if he ever did stop crying that day, but I remember a certain and calm patience buffeting me to the end of my shift. Benjamin couldn’t help that he was frustrated and sad. He was articulating his feelings in the only way he knew how, and he couldn’t do anything to meet his own needs. He was a baby. It was a slow start.
Despite my epiphany, I quit that job, too, and finally landed as the front desk worker in the campus art museum. A perfect gig. Quiet. Crisp, temperature-controlled air. Cordial visitors. Paintings and photographs surrounding me on all sides. Hours and hours to read and write.
Out of all the moments I had in all of those jobs, my father’s voice saying, “It’s a slow start,” has stuck with me the most. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately as I’ve witnessed the first months of my own son’s life. When people ask if he’s sleeping through the night, if he can roll over or sit up, or where he is regarding milestones, I often say a couple things just to be polite, but in my mind I’m shrugging. I know the general developmental milestones to look for, but I don’t have any apps or books to chart against. I’m following his lead. I’m not rushing it. It’s a slow start. And I want to dwell in it alongside him as long as possible, because I can already tell that all the clichés are true and that all of this is going to go by so fast.
There is another “slow start” in my life, and that is writing a novel. This slow start is something that I seem to have infinitely less patience for, but I’m trying to hype myself up about it. It has taken me about a year and a half to get one hundred pages into the first draft, and after about ninety of those pages, I realized that I needed to completely change the setting. Like, pick the whole thing up and move it across the country and forget it was ever set somewhere else. I have enough practice writing long-form stuff now that I know not to get too bent out of shape about large plot/structural changes, but it’s still exhausting knowing how close to the beginning of the process I am and how incredibly far I have yet to go. I am hopeful, though, that this novel will stick. I have written more than one draft of two other novels that I’m not convinced will ever leave the desk drawer. But that’s okay, I tell myself. Writing “failed” novels is part of the slow start. I’m teaching myself how to write a novel, and that takes time and practice.
I once attended a reading by Rebecca Makkai (whose book The Great Believers was so amazing and so sad that I cried so hard at the end I gave myself a headache that lasted five days), where she talked about how it took her nine years to write her first novel. She’s down to about four or five years per novel now, but it took her a good long time to figure out how exactly to create a story and how exactly to house that story in a novel. That gave me hope.
The trick about the slow start with the novel is that it’s not like a baby, where I support and hold and feed him, but honestly, simply encourage him and watch him do his thing. I know that he’ll figure things out on his own with time. As for the novel…I cannot just sit and stare in wonder at a novel-in-progress. It’s not going to do anything without me other than gather metaphorical dust in my google drive. So, while patience is required for the slow start of the novel, so is action. Which brings us to the crux of this whole matter—the shaded overlap of the Venn diagram with one circle being “parent” and the other “writer.” How do you dwell with purpose in the slow start of both spaces?
Well, first of all, being a parent comes first. I will never not drop everything to give my baby what he needs. He didn’t ask to be here. I brought him here. He needs me and I will do whatever I can to attend to those needs. I owe him all of the love and support I can give him. Will the world survive without my novel? Yes. Will I survive if I don’t ever finish this novel? Yes. Other people might answer those questions differently, but I didn’t have to think at all before answering them. That being said, will writing this novel make me happy? Will it feed something in me that will make me a better person and therefore, a better parent? Yes. So I owe it to myself and to my son to try to carve out space for my writer self. Gone are the days of writing in bed all day with Cleo warming my feet. Now I have to get much, much more creative with how and where and when I write. I also have to be more efficient because there is simply not enough time to do everything. I have to make my priority structure and then be okay being flexible when things have to give.
So how am I doing it? How am I writing while parenting a six-month-old? To be clear, I’m not writing a ton, but I am writing more than I thought I would. First, the act of “writing” has more firmly solidified as a landscape of actions. I’ve always thought best while on a walk or in the shower, and now I capitalize on those moments. I take my son and dog around the neighborhood and I try to untangle the sticky plot points of my novel in my head. While I’m doing dishes or washing teethers or pumping, I let my mind drift to the world of my novel, and now that I have less time to spend there, it feels more magical, more alive with possibility. You know what? I can move my novel across the country. What will happen if I do? How will the characters respond to this new place I drop them?
Oh the places you’ll write!
In a very practical sense, I have also become a phone writer. I’m writing this as I hold my sleeping son. I love writing by hand or typing on my laptop, but that doesn’t always work these days, so I use what I can. I also just think about things more before I write them down. In graduate school, I would plow through stories, not certain at all of where I was going. I am still not the kind of writer to storyboard every chapter, but I do try to firm up a rough plan in my mind before I get to the page. I had a professor in grad school who was very obsessed with Edward P. Jones. (As she should be, he is an incredible writer, but, I mean, she was very obsessed. He was her teacher before she became our professor, and I’m thinking it was maybe some sort of unrequited love situation? It was, like, that level of obsession. Anyway.), and she told us that before he wrote a word of any of his work, he would spend years imagining the entire thing. Then, when he had everything in place, he sat down and typed it out. I was recently listening to an essay in Ann Patchett’s newest essay collection These Precious Days, and she talked of a similar process. She said that she never takes notes on a novel before she begins, because once she writes something down it feels set in place, unchangeable. Instead, she thinks about it for a good long time and trusts that whatever ideas stick will turn out to be the right ones. A number of best sellers later, it’s clear she’s on to something.
So often when we first learn about writing, it is in high school and we are to write a five-paragraph essay about how virtue turns to vice in Romeo and Juliet, and our teacher shows us how to make an outline and number it with Roman numerals and all those lower case ii’s and things, and it is an efficient way to plot out how virtue turns to vice in Romeo and Juliet, but it is decidedly un-magical. In graduate school, my beloved teacher, Richard, would talk to me all the time about the subconscious. He instilled in me this fervent belief that if I let my brain kick something around long enough, and if I was patient enough, I would figure it out eventually. Soon enough, I’d turn to the page and the answer would be there, waiting for me. In fact, it had been somewhere buried deep within me the entire time and just needed a good walk or two and a little prodding from the universe in the form of a burst of birds from the trees, or a well-timed glimpse of a woman in a park, bent over the side of a bridge, staring at the fish gulping at her from below. The answer would dislodge and and fall into my lap, and then a new start of questions would arise. The slow start.
What is becoming clearer and clearer to me is the fact that the slow start is delicious. If you allow yourself to dwell in it, all sorts of delightful magical will reveal itself. You’ll catch the moment your baby first sticks his stompy toes in his mouth. You’ll weave backstory for your characters that is so intimate because only you will know it. You’ll spot a brown creeper (relation of the nuthatch) scurrying across the bark of a tree in the park.
I took an oil painting class for fun in graduate school and I was always make huge paintings full of frenetic, gestural marks. My teacher walked by, noticed me sweating, paintbrush dripping in my hand. “You can make marks like these slowly, you know. You don’t have to rush it.”
Don’t rush it. Enjoy the slow start.
What slow start are you in during this season of your life? I’d love to hear about it.