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The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Mastering the Craft of Writing With Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro has made her living as a writer for more than 20 years. In this interview we have an in-depth discussion about working artists and what it takes to master the craft of writing. Here are some of the highlights from our conversation 

  • Why there are many trajectories to creative careers
  • Dani's early exposure to working artists
  • The importance of living and rebelling 
  • Why Having a story to tell matters so much
  • Getting back to callings of our youth 
  • How a new generation values of quality of life
  • Why Dani left New York for a quiet country life
  • What it truly means to live a creative life
  • How some of the great things in life happen accidentally
  • The importance of exposing yourself to great artists 
  • Some incredible insights on the best way to start your day
  • Slowing down your mind by reading physical books 
  • Making meaning from loss by telling a resonant story
  • The self doubt that every single writer faces before the page
  • Memory and imagination as engines for storytelling 
  • Being responsible with our gifts as writers 
  • When you feel misunderstood and wounded as a writer
  • The reason you can't hand lack of craftsmanship 
  • Why authors are increasingly responsible for their book's success
  • The role that talent plays in your ability to succeed as a writer

 

People and Resources Mentioned

Still Writing: The pleasure and perils of a creative life

Goodbye to all that: Writers on loving and leaving New York

 

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University, and she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

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Broadcast on:
22 Jan 2014
Audio Format:
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Blue Nile can help you find the gift that says how you feel and says it beautifully, with expert guidance and a wide assortment of jewelry of the highest quality at the best price. Go to Blue Nile.com and experience the convenience of shopping Blue Nile, the original online jeweler since 1999. That's Blue Nile.com to find the perfect jewelry gift for any occasion, Blue Nile.com. Danny, welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much. It's great to be with you. Yeah, my pleasure. But as we were talking about before I hit record here, I came across your book still writing on brain pickings. I just couldn't put it down. I was so intrigued by your work. My immediate thought was, "Okay, I have to get you here on my show. I think that you're one of the most poetic writers I've ever come across." I know that you're going to have some incredible insights. Let's start at the very beginning. One of the things I really like to do is find out about people's stories. I'd love for you to tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and how that has led you to doing the work that you're doing today. Sure, I'd be happy to. It's true that I think with any creative person, every story, well, with any human being, every story is completely different. But with people who have ended up with creative careers, I think often people think, "Well, there's one trajectory and there's as many trajectories as there are." Let's see. I was born in New York City and raised in suburban New Jersey. I come from a religious home. I was raised in an observant Jewish home, which was, in many ways, now when I look back, part of what was the breeding ground for my eventually becoming a writer, although I definitely did not know that then. I was an only child. My parents had a very complicated marriage. My father, it wasn't a first marriage for either one of them and my father was from this very religious and storied family, and my mother was not religious. I later found out that she was an atheist, so they had a lot of conflict between them and it played out over me, largely, their only child. By the time I was in high school, all I wanted to do in the whole world was get out of Dodge. I ended up leaving high school a year early and applying to college. All I knew was that I was running and I was aware that I was running away. I wasn't really running toward anything. I just knew where I didn't want to be. I had no idea where I did want to be, but in one of the really wonderful pieces of good fortune in my life, I ended up going to a school called Sarah Lawrence, which is a small, mostly women's liberal arts school outside of New York City. A really wonderful school with amazing artists and writers and musicians who taught there, and it was the first time in my life that I was ever exposed to working artists. I didn't grow up knowing that I appreciated art and I was a voracious reader, but I didn't make the connection that the books that I read actually that somebody who spent her life, for his life, dedicated to writing these books. I didn't know that that was remotely a possibility. I might as well have said I wanted to be an astronaut. So, at Sarah Lawrence, there were these amazing writers. There was a writer named Grace Paley, who is one of the great short story writers, one of the great American short story writers of the 20th century. The E.L. Doctorow and Russell Banks was teaching there. There were all sorts of really remarkable writers, and I think that a little pilot light at that point was lit for me. I wasn't ready. I was 17 years old. I think it's the very, very rare 17-year-old who decides what they want to do and actually it ends up really being what they do. I had a lot more living to do and rebelling to do. I was very rebellious, having been raised in this very strict way. So I dropped out of college and then I came back after a few years, and when I came back, I did so with a story to tell. During the time that I dropped out of college, I mean, I was all drug sex and rock and roll, and my parents were in a terrible car accident that ultimately cost my father his life and my mother was very badly injured. And I, as their only child, took care of everything, took care of burying my father, helping my mother as she began recuperating, which took the better part of a year. And I went back to college and it was with this feeling that I had this compulsion to write this story of my parents and of this time in our lives and of this rebellion that I was in. So I was, at that point, a senior in college and the wonderful folks that Sarah Lawrence said to me, "You're a writer. You should just stay here and go to graduate school." I don't even think I actually feel that in an application. They really were just like, "Honey, you're a writer. There's the door. It's through that door. They'll take care of you in there." And there was this wonderful MFA program at Sarah Lawrence, and that was where I wrote my first novel. It was not a very good novel. It's a novel that when people tell me now that they've read, I feel a little bit sheepish. It was a very young novel and it was also material that I wasn't ready really to write about, but it did, I'm grateful to it because it really did give me my start. And so by the time I graduated from the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence, I had a book contract and my first novel came out the following year. I love it. There's so much here. I want to start at the very beginning and talk about that sort of idea of running away. And you're saying at 17, you're one of the few people who really had an idea that, "Hey, I'm going to be a writer." And I remember something very distinctly when I read your book, you know, still writing. You said, "This life chooses us." And I can tell you, I also love that you brought up the notion that the idea that you could make a living or, you know, as an artist or a creative person was something so foreign to you. I mean, I grew up in an Indian family. You want to talk about a family that basically tells you that's not possible. I mean, that was never, that was an option that was never put on the table. But I think what we're finding more and more is that people are reconnecting with something that was lost when they were younger. And you, having found it, you know, at such an early stage in life and having worked with so many writers, I mean, how do we get back to that? How do we discover that in ourselves? That's such a great question. I think right now, I've been feeling like there's been a shift that I've been watching happen over the last few years, I would say since 2008, really. So since the time where, like, yeah, if you come from, you know, an Indian family, I come from a Jewish family, these are immigrant cultures where the desire for a certain kind of material success involved being a doctor, being a lawyer, being an investment banker, except there's this whole generation of people who are young adults now who look at their parents and don't feel like that made their parents very happy. And maybe didn't, maybe didn't get their parents with their parents thought they wanted or, you know, equating, equating a certain kind of trajectory in terms of an education and a career with, with happiness. And I just think that that's shifted. I mean, to give you an example, I wrote a piece last year for Travel and Leisure magazine where I'm a contributing editor. I wrote a piece about the Berkshires, which is this area in Massachusetts, about two hours from Boston, very beautiful, and very sophisticated sort of rural community. And it's, well, a lot of people have vacation homes there, but what I noticed was that there were all of these highly educated, really smart and ambitious in a certain way, young people, who were moving there and saying, you know what, I'm going to be a butcher. I'm going to be the best possible artisanal butcher. I'm going to learn everything that there is about how to, you know, sort of live, you know, in a genuinely sort of local way and live off the land and farm to table and all that. There's a cheese monger there, same thing. And I'd be going in and having conversations with these people that were, you know, highly literary and engaged and, you know, there's a young woman there who became the first selectman of the town and she wrote a cookbook. She started a blog and then it became a cookbook and then it became a best-selling cookbook. And it's just this way where I feel like they're beginning to figure something out about quality of life that eluded some previous generations that were just all about gritting their teeth and just getting whatever it is that they thought that they wanted and then discovering that that was a pretty elusive thing. You know, it's interesting. As I hear you say that, I think back to one of the conversations I had with Amber Ray, who said, you know, her entire mission has become about redefining ambition from getting ahead to coming alive. And I feel like we're seeing sort of this collective shift in consciousness as a society. And also the other thing, as I hear you talk about, you know, butchers and people who make things. I think that we're moving back strangely towards this era of craftsmanship and, you know, an appreciation for people who master their craft like we never have before. Like we look at things on the internet and what we appreciate more than anything I think is people who are really good at what they do and you can tell that years have gone into refining their craft. I think that's really true. I think it started with an nostalgia for it because we're living in such a high speed, noisy world. But at the same time, I think that that's actually that nostalgia has turned into a real life choice for a lot of people. I mean, my family and I have a 14-year-old son. And when he was three, my husband and I, and he moved from New York City to the country, to rural Connecticut. We lived what would be a sort of picture-perfect Brooklyn literary life. We had a brownstone. You know, we had the kid, the dog, the brown stone were both writers. And I think I'm more than my husband, but he too, I think found it just, I mean, to say stressful is too easy. It didn't feel fulfilling. It didn't feel to me like I would wake up in the morning and feel like in alignment with where I was. And when we left New York, our friends all were taking bets on how long it was going to take before we came back. And you know what's happened over the years? I've seen it again and again and again. I mean, we live in a house on a hill, on 10 acres, in a beautiful, beautiful part of rural Connecticut. And our friends come up and visit us and suddenly they want to be shown around. And they're like, "Oh, interesting." And they see that it's really, you know, that it's really worked for us. And there's this anthology that came out this year that actually I have an essay in, so I've been following it closely, but it's an anthology of essays by women writers called "Goodbye to all that" on loving and leaving New York. And this anthology has become a best-selling anthology, which is practically an oxymoron. I mean, analogies do not do this. And I think it's spoken to, and this isn't, I'm not bashing New York, I love New York, but I think it's spoken to a longing that people have, that quite a lot of people have, for a different way of life. So, a couple of questions come from that, actually. And then I want to get into some other piece of your story. I think that the idea of longing for a different life is not an uncommon thing. I think to some degree, the internet perpetuates it because everybody's life looks more epic than yours does on Facebook. But, you know, I think that there's also this sort of balance that people are trying to find. And I've asked this question to hundreds and thousands of people at this point, like, you know, escaping the life that you currently have, but dealing with the practical elements of day-to-day life, like surviving, you know, putting food on your table, keeping the lights on. And how do you make that transition? You know, there's so many people listening to this, who are probably thinking of that. So, like, I've become aware that people look at my life on Facebook. I mean, I actually wrote an essay, I don't know, it was in the last six months or so, about being jealous of my own avatar. Like, she looks like she's having a really awesome life. She's going to all these amazing places, and she's just doing nothing but giving readings. And her book is going into another printing, and her hair always looks good, and her kids always cute, and, you know, everything's just beautiful pictures of everything between Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. And the thing is, we all do that. We all kind of curate our lives in a way. And I've been kind of taking a stand a little bit, as much as I can comfortably against that, and I've been trying to just debunk that a little bit, because it's true that I mean, I have supported myself as a working writer for the last 20 years. And that isn't an easy thing to do, and it's a privilege. And there have been years where I have, you know, there was a time where my book advances, which is no longer the case, because no ones are. My book advances, you know, I could live on for a couple of years. And I would supplement that with teaching, and with writing for magazines, and with all sorts of things, but it always involves, I mean, when I say living a creative life, it also means for writers living a creative life, meaning, whatever, you know, whatever, I have a friend who I won't name, because she probably wouldn't want me to, but she's a very, very well-known writer. And she used to write copy for one of the great catalogs. There was something called the Peterman catalog. It was just this fantastic catalog. If the catalog could be like the best written catalog you could imagine with these little stories about these characters that would make you want to buy the umbrella. Well, she wrote it. You know, in this feeling of if you're a writer, there's no shame in whatever it is you possibly can do to put dinner on the table and to keep the lights on and to pay the bills. So that's where I think, I don't, there's almost no writer I know who isn't juggling multiple, you know, multiple plates to kind of keep it all going, almost no one. Well, you know, I think it's interesting, right? You know, at the very beginning of our conversation, you talked about the fact that, you know, we think that there is a trajectory, but every one of them looks completely different. Like, if you put all our paths together, it would be this just mess of a map. And you know, that's the one of the, one of the things I always feel like, I said, you know, people ask like, okay, what about your life? I'm like, I've taken the scenic route, sometimes not by choice. But that's how I've kind of ended up here. Like, I could have never predicted any of this. Mm hmm. But that's that that not being able to predict is, I think, a huge part of, you know, look as a novelist, when I'm working on a novel, I can see about a half a step ahead of my characters. And when I think I know I end up being wrong. And I think that that's, that's a pretty great metaphor for life, because we can make all sorts of plans and we can, we can kind of come up with a strategy, or we can have our fantasies of the way that we want it to be. But, and I'm sure this is true for you too. And true for so many of us, some of the very best things that have happened in my life, both personally and professionally, have been entirely accidental. And I think that there's a purposefulness in seeing the thing that's happened accidentally, and being able to adapt to it, and realizing, oh, wait a minute, this is a very cool thing. This wasn't part of my game plan, but wow, check this out. I, I, this is great. Mm hmm. So let's, let's shift gears a little bit. You know, I want to talk about your time at Sarah Lawrence. You know, there's one other thing that I remember you very distinctly saying in the book, you said, you know, fill your ears with the, the music of good sentences. You know, these are all the parts that I've highlighted in my Kindle highlights. So I go back to them and usually in the morning, if I need a writing prompt and I'm stuck, I will always go back to the stuff I've highlighted from your book. I, I'd love for you to talk about, you know, you mentioned having these influences and these amazing artists. And I think that to some degree, because we have short attention spans online, we're inundated with, you know, the latest from the blogosphere, we're all kind of in, in this, you know, almost incestuous ecosystem or echo chamber, we've kind of lost sight of that to some degree. And I can tell you, one of the biggest things that helped my writing was to, to get away from reading the same old stuff. And I'm very curious, kind of about the influences in your life that are shaped your voice as a writer and, and what, you know, what your advice is for people who are, are looking to have those influences. Mm hmm. One of the things that I would say, I think is, is most important. And I don't always, I mean, I don't always succeed at doing this myself, is, but it's true, when I say start the day with good sentences in your ears, not starting the day in front of the computer, not starting the day, you know, those, you know, emails don't count. Emails are not good sentences. You know, nothing. I mean, there can be good sentences in the blogosphere, but the blogosphere is not what, what I mean by this. What I mean is, I mean, I actually, in my office, and this makes an appearance any number of times in still writing, as you know, I, I have a Chez, you know, like a, like a, a couch that's in my office, that I specifically bought because I looked at it and it looked like the magic Chez, it looked like that was where I would get my reading and a good part of my creative writing done. My desk had kind of gone stale for me. You know, why my computers on my desk? You know, all the detritus of life is on my desk. Domestic life is on my desk. You know, I can't get away from it. And so when I start out my day in the morning, making a point of going, it can be for five minutes, ideally longer, but it, it really can. It's just a practice, it's a habit. And open one of the many books that I have piled around this Chez and just read. What it does is it slows down the mind. I think we've all had this experience now of after a while of pinging around online, it's very hard to sit and read narrative. You know, your, your eyes actually start sliding across the words. You're so used to doing things at a more rapid pace. And I actually write longhand as often as I can because it's writing at the pace of reading or even more slowly, as opposed to I can type very, very, very fast, but I'm typing faster than my mind should really be processing any of what I'm typing. And so with reading, I mean, I keep Virginia Woolf's writer's diary near me. I keep a rotation of poets. I keep Jane Kenyon. I keep Donald Hall. A lot of these are writers and poets that I referenced and still writing. I keep writers that I like to reread and go back. And I mean, I'm rereading Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's "Beautiful Novel" now. And I can take a very long time to reread something like that. I can dip in and out of it. I mean, I, as I'm talking to you, I just got off a plane and I'm in Los Angeles for a couple of days. And I'm looking at the desk where I'm sitting and I brought three hardcover books with me. I mean, I do this so optimistically I probably won't get to them. But it's, it's a way of, and one of them is a beautiful first novel called "Sea of Hooks" that I'm, that I find that I'm reading very slowly because it's got a puzzle-like structure and it's, you know, I'm not reading it for the plot. I don't read for plot. I don't like to read for plot. I read for sentences. I read for internal life. I read because I want my internal life to connect with the internal life that I'm reading on the page. I love it. It's just genius. It's, like I said, this is why I wanted to have you on the show. Listening to you say that makes me want to go and, you know, I have the Kindle version of your book, but I'm probably going to go and order the physical copy of it after hearing you say that. Nothing, nothing makes me happier than when somebody comes up to me and this has happened, I mean, I, I, I, a lot of times now and it's so humbling and, and, and, and thrilling with dog-eared, I mean, with dozens and dozens of post-its in the margins of, of still writing. And it's just such a great feeling to know that if somebody, you know, responded enough to want to, like, mark all these pages. So you, let me ask you this. You know, one of the things you said is that you would drop that ecology, went and lived life, you know, the sex drugs and rock and roll and then you came back with a story to tell. Um, you know, and, and of course there's a couple of elements of this that I want to ask about. Uh, one is that the story to tell is somewhat traumatizing. I mean, losing a parent. I, it's something that, you know, as I've watched my parents get older in front of my eyes because I, you know, I moved home at an age when I was older than I thought I would. It's, you know, as, as much as, you know, they can be a pain some days, like there are moments when I think, oh my God, there's going to be a day when they won't be there. Um, and I was like, okay, as human beings, we must be built to tolerate this like because it happens. It's a natural part of life. Um, so I'm curious about two things here. One is sort of recovering from loss and trauma because I feel like that that is such an important thing. And somehow some creatives, I feel like let that just become the death of them while others, you know, it becomes sort of a major point of maybe not inspiration, but a source to really drive them. Uh, so one, you know, your thoughts on, on recovery from, from that kind of trauma and loss. And then, you know, taking our life experiences and, you know, bringing them into the story that we want to tell because I think that when I talk to people, they're like, how do you write so much? And I'm like, well, I think so I'm able to write. Um, and that, you know, some people think that, well, I don't have a story to tell it. And I think that I feel like everybody has a story to tell. And how you find that in your life is, is I guess where I want to go with that question. Yeah, this is, this is really rich territory. I mean, in terms of trauma, I think at some point pretty early in my life, because I was, I was 23 when my father died and my mother was shattered and I hadn't experienced, I mean, I, I hadn't experienced death at all. The first funeral I ever went to in my life was my father's. And, um, you know, and I felt pretty sophisticated and, you know, like a woman of the world and like I knew all sorts of things. But I was really in terms of grief and, um, you know, of real hardship, I was a baby. Um, but I think something happened to me, which has stood me in incredibly good stead for my whole life, which is that there was this feeling of this has happened and it's senseless and it's tragic and it's chaos and it's, it's just so painful. Um, but it has happened. So what am I going to do with it? How am I going to make it something more or transform it into something that isn't only chaotic and tragic and painful and impossible to bear? And for me, the act of writing, the act of beginning to try to find a way to arrange the pieces of it, you know, in, in my, in my mind and in my heart and find a way to, um, to tell a story that might be resonant with others was a way of making meaning out of it. You know, we, we can't control what happens to us and how it happens and when it happens, but we can control what we do with it. And I really think that that became, I couldn't have articulated this when I was in my twenties, but I think that it became like a working philosophy for me where it felt ultimately that writing, writing was how I came to know my own internal life and still do. And it was a way of honoring what had happened. It was a way of, you know, finding, finding a shape for it so that it wasn't just so that it wasn't only random. And, and I, and I think whether people are writers or artists or not, we all do live with this knowledge somewhere inside of us that bad things will happen. That's part of what being human is. I mean, to, to love is to become willing to lose. It just is. And we don't like to think about it. We have all sorts of ways of not thinking about it. But I think that that was something for me, um, given, given that I had, you know, I don't, I mean, people sometimes will say to me, you know, you write about such difficult things and such painful and dark things. But, you know, I don't, I don't walk around and come across like, you know, morose and person. And I like to have a good time. And I, I like to cook and I like to go out to dinner and I like to be with my friends and I like to laugh and I like to do all sorts of things. Um, and, you know, I think what writing for me has done is, is allowed me to find a place to process it and to put it. And by process it, I want to be careful because it's not, I don't mean in a psychotherapeutic way. I really mean that in the attempt to make art out of something that is really sorrowful and painful, that, that is, um, that, that is, there's kind of a joy in that. There's a, there's a, there's a bittersweetness, but there's, um, there's something that for me, um, is very meaningful. And there was a second part to your question. Yeah, there was. I guess finding, you know, the story to tell within our own lives. Yeah. Yeah. So, so when I was in graduate school, I had a, I had a teacher who once said, writers are people to whom stories happen. And yeah. And when he said that, it like really rubbed me the wrong way because, you know, even, even at that point in my life, it's like, no, you know, stories happen to everyone. You know, things happen to all of us. And I think that in the hands of an artist with a singular vision and voice, it doesn't matter what the story is. Um, it, it, story people, I mean, so many of my students get hung up on plot. They get hung up on thinking that they need to write something that has a hook or something. I hate that word so much or something that's dramatic or, you know, that's the only way that they're going to be able to get their work out there is that if it has some sort of shock value and really the, some of the greatest works of art, um, both historically and contemporary works of art are driven not by plot and not by, you know, big explosions and, you know, or whatever kind of ideas people have about what's going to make something commercial, but they're driven by character. They're, you know, one of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Aristotle. Um, I can't remember whether this is in, in still writing or not, but in Poetics, Aristotle wrote, action is not plot, but merely the result of pathos. Action is not plot, but merely the result of pathos. And if you think about that and meditate about that long enough, what that is saying is that if you have characters, you people, a few people, two people, three people, eventually you have pathos. Something happens between these people. And that pathos becomes the plot, the result of the pathos. So what Aristotle was really saying is that plot is about people. Now, plot is about people feeling things and what that makes them do. And so when it comes to, I think, writers starting out with this idea of, you know, and, and every writer feels this way, every writer feels this way continually for the whole of his or her lives, this feeling of, I can't do this. Why not? This is stupid. Um, so and so did it better. Um, maybe I should just go to take a nap. Maybe I should go to law school. Um, you know, I, this time I'm really not going to be able to do it. This, you know, no, why is anybody going to care about my story? This is what goes through the mind of every writer when he or she sits down to work. But nobody believes this. Everybody thinks that actually what happens is there, it's just them and everybody else is happily pecking away at their computers in their rooms, writing the great American novel while they and only they are being tortured. And if there was anything or torturing themselves, rather, if there was anything that I really wanted to try to impart in still writing, it was this idea that writers have to give ourselves permission. No one else is going to do it for us. And that permission, I mean, I had somebody at a reading recently said to me, so when did you finally start giving yourself permission? And I said, this morning, because it never stops. It never stops. There isn't one single piece of work that I've done in the past 20 years that has not begun with the feeling that I've had of, oh, here goes nothing. This time it's not going to work. Let's talk about something that's not always top of mind, but still really important life insurance. Why? 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No, this is just how I talk and I really love my Bombas. They do feel that good, and they do good too. One item purchased equals one item donated. To feel good and do good, go to bombas.com/acast and use code ACAST for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com/acast and use code ACAST at checkout. You know, I remember a quote from your book. You said masters of the forum quake before the page. Oh, yeah. And that's really, I think, a perfect way to sum up that part of our conversation. But yeah, it's so true. I really, really appreciate your perspective on this. You know, one thing that I'm very curious about, you know, a lot of what you're talking about, I think people are going to, you know, a lot of people listening to this are nonfiction writers. And I'm, you know, until I started talking to a lot of people who write fiction, I never started to say, you know, see myself as a character in my own stories or as a character in the nonfiction that I'm writing. And I'm wondering how we translate what you were talking about into the world of nonfiction writing. Well, I think, I think understanding, when you say nonfiction writing, do you mean memoir or creative nonfiction or journalism? Probably a bit of both. Maybe not memoir so much. I mean, I think that, I think people, you know, who are listening really tend to write about their lives or, you know, their businesses are kind of driven by content where, you know, their life becomes fodder, I guess, for all their writing or their material. I mean, I think it's always important to understand that it is a story that you're telling and the way that we, the way that we human beings process things, understand things, learn things is through story. So whether it's a reporter, you know, setting down in a foreign country, figuring out, you know, well, I know I'm interviewing this person or I know that I'm covering this war or I'm going into this corporation to write in an investigative piece. But still, until the reporter, until the journalist knows what the story is, it's just reporting. The reporting is what leads ultimately to being able to see the shape of the story. I mean, in nonfiction, and it's one of the reasons why I like to teach both nonfiction and fiction together in mixed genre classes, because storytelling is storytelling. There are different engines for them, and when you're writing a novel, the engine is the imagination. When you're writing a memoir, the engine is memory. And the interesting thing about that, I actually have a piece that just came out about this is getting like a ton of, was created a lot of controversy where I, someone had written me a very angry comment on Facebook about having read my memoir, Slow Motion, and then Googling Me. And then she, she felt like she had seen something on Google that meant that I hadn't included in the memoir. And so she was angry with me for not having included it in the memoir. And so I ended up writing, I ended up writing a letter that begins Dear, Dear Disillusioned reader who contacted me on Facebook. And what it is, is really my attempt to educate about what the difference is between memoir and autobiography, right? So in memoir, the facts are not what the writer is after. Memory is what the writer is after. And I think we can all agree that memory is not factual. It is constantly shifting, and it will shift over the course of a day among the year of lifetime. If somebody were to write a memoir about, say, events that happened at the age of 20, and they wrote it when they were 20, it would be one book. If they wrote it when they were 30, it would be a different book. If they wrote it when they were 50, it would be a different book and so forth. Because the relationship between the self and the story is the story. Because you can't fact check memory. However, when you're writing journalism, absolutely it is about the facts and the recreating of a scene as it happened, a character and what that character said. But within that, still there is the necessity of storytelling, in the sense of, I mean, I often have journalists come to me who want to write fiction, and they can't write a scene to save their lives, because they're sort of so stuck on telling that they lose sight of the fact that in order for the reader to be able to enter anything they write, they need to show it. They need to, you know, we the reader need to be able to enter this moment. We need to be able to be walking down that corridor with your characters or entering that room or smelling and tasting and hearing and seeing what these characters are seeing. I love it. I mean, you know, it's interesting, as you're talking about the idea of, you know, the book, you could write the same book at the age of 20, you could write it at the age of 30, you could write it at the age of 40, and it would be a different book. I look like at things that I've written six months ago and think, "Wow, this would be really different if I wrote it right now." That's right. That's right. And that's where I think this problematic idea of what memoir is, and certain readers who feel like, I mean, and I should just make a distinction here. I'm not talking about the kinds of, you know, sort of fake memoirs where the writer's trying to like pull something over on the reader. I get very angry at those kinds of books and, you know, they've always existed and they're not even worth really, you know, they're not even worth our time. But what I am talking about is, you know, I've had students over the years kind of become very jaundiced at the whole form of memoir because they feel like, "Well, wait a minute, how does that writer remember exactly what the words were that somebody was saying?" Well, they don't. They're recreating it using memory. It's almost like, it's a completely different tool. Using your memory creatively and using your imagination creatively are two different things. And you know it when you're doing it. You know when you're making something up and you know when you're trying to remember something. They're just completely different. Yeah, I don't think I have anything particularly insightful to add to that. I love it. I mean, so much of this is just pure poetry. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. And let's start talking about the craft itself of writing. I mean to me that was, you know, what I really, as I was telling you before we even hit record here, you know, when I read the book, when I read still writing, I felt like it was just, you know, it was interesting because it was like, you know, this beautiful arc and narrative and the hero's journey of a writer while mastering the craft. And you had so many interesting segments in there of, you know, your own growth as a writer, you know, the students. I won that particularly, you know, came to mind. The one I remember very distinctly was your student who was impatient about getting published and never really, and you never heard anything about her again. And I think that we live in a world that is extremely impatient. You know, I see people who start some online project and they're like, nobody reads this thing. And it's like, you know, you know that most of these people who you hear about have been at this for five to 10 years. But I'd love for you to talk about mastering the craft of writing and sort of the tipping points in your life as a writer and, you know, the things that, and you know, even molding moments. Mm. These are wonderful. I mean, they're really one of questions. And the, the, um, I love the hero's journey, um, uh, aspect of the way, you know, the way that you see it. I mean, I felt like these memoir pieces had to be a part of still writing, uh, because they felt to me like the, the, the glue, they felt like the connective tissue that I really, I wanted, it was a little bit daunting and scary because it's a little bit like looking under the hood of a car. But I, I wanted to look at what formed me as a writer. I wanted to really like take a look at, um, what was formative. And I think there have been, you know, it's, it's such a discipline. And, you know, what you're saying about people's impatience, there's a great line that Annie Dillard has in, in the writing life, which is one of, um, one of the books on writing I really love, where she, she, she pretty much says, you know, a book takes 10 years. Um, and, you know, some books take less than 10 years and some books take 10 years and some books take more than 10 years. But I like it because it's kind of a tonic. It's really, it's a tonic for this insane culture of immediate gratification that we all live in where you can just, you know, and I think blogging has had a lot to do with that because, you know, you hit publish. And then, um, you have this sort of instant, this kind of rush of instant gratification or, um, I mean, I know I've, I've kept a blog for years. It's what still writing came out of. And I know that whenever I put up a blog post or if I have something published online, it kind of messes up my writing day unless I'm very disciplined because it's a little bit addictive. It's like, oh, let's see. What, what are the comments saying? Where they say, oh, look how many people are retweeting it. Oh my God. Wow. Wow. And then the day is just like sort of stupidly wasted on, um, you know, this being a little bit, um, what's the word, uh, uh, overstimulated, by response, you know, writing is really meant to be done alone in a room with no distractions, in solitude, uh, over a long period of time, and then slowly to make its way out into the world. Um, you know, to publish a book in the traditional model, you know, you write the book and that takes, God knows how long it takes for, you know, I mean, books for me typically take about a year of pulling my hair out and not knowing what I'm doing. And then, you know, maybe a year and a half of writing the thing and then maybe another six months of, of revising and editing depending on the book. And so you're talking about like three years and then from that time when it goes to the publisher, it can be easily, it's at least nine months. It's like having a baby. It's at least nine months and sometimes more than that, um, before the book is actually in stores. And so there's this exercise in waiting and in slowness and in patience. And through these years, and when I was a younger writer, I would be working on, I would fall in love with my own sentences, which is something that really pretty much doesn't happen to me anymore, even though I think I'm actually a much better writer. But I had a kind of love of language. I mean, I still have a love of language, but you know, not my own so much. But I would carry my pages around with me and read them, you know, in cafes and on the subway. And you know, I would just always have them with me. And there was a kind of, you know, if one simile was good and three was better, you know, I was always, I was, there was this kind of torrent of language. I was very sort of just into the poetry, the sound, the sound of it. And I remember a professor of mine who became a mentor and a very dear friend saying to me, "You have a gift. You know how to write a sentence that is very beautiful. You better make sure it means something." And that was huge for me. And I've never forgotten it because sometimes I think our greatest gifts as writers can also be the things that we have to really watch out for. And I did and do have, you know, kind of a lyric gift where, you know, it comes from, I think, having been a pianist for most of my life and a combination of that and also sitting in synagogue and the sounds of the words and the Hebrew and whatever it is, wherever it came from, you know, the sounds of things and how words are put together matter to me enormously, but they can't matter to me to the exclusion of meaning. Meaning has to come first. And so I think if I were to look at my writing life all the way through, I think I've become harder on myself about that, about, you know, distilling, you know, there is one perfect word for this and I'm going to find it, that kind of, that kind of care. And also I think I've slowed down and I don't write just for the sake of writing. I find that I'm more mindful of what the next book is going to be, what the next project is going to be. There's a little bit of a feeling of, you know, there are only so many books any of us have in us, you know. It's years of a creative life. So am I choosing wisely or do I really have a choice in the matter? Or, you know, sometimes you just have to wait until you're tapped on the shoulder by the next book. And as opposed to writing out of anxiety, which might be one of the biggest things I have to say that might be useful to people listening, because we're all very anxious. I mean, it's an occupational hazard. We're impatient and we're anxious. And we're doing something that requires more patience and fortitude than, than, than, than lots of other things. And, and I know writers who have written out of their anxiety, written too fast, pushed things out there. And it doesn't go well. Because there's, there's a depth that needs to be there's, there's, there's no shortcut to things have to simmer. You know how like it's like the difference between fast food and something that's been sitting in a slow cooker and marinating for, you know, for 12 hours and the, and you know, the depth of the flavors, it's completely different thing. Yeah, you know, it's, it's really interesting to hear you describe this process because I think about, you know, my, my, my book, which, which came out, you know, that as I'd mentioned to you by freakish coincidences done wildly well. And I think about, you know, it's like you said, I was like, you know, this is, I've been at this for five years. And I wrote the book in 90 days, but it took five years to write, if you know what I mean. And of course, like, there's, there's definitely that element of it. And it's strange, but I am, you know, I remember the first time this is actually one of the things I want to talk briefly about is dealing with sort of our critics, because I remember you writing about the one star reviews. And I remember the first time I got a one star review, I was kind of like, Oh my God, this person just vilified me. And you know, and then I went and read your book. And it, you know, I think that the insecurity just starts to play out. And I was like, Wow, maybe I'm not that good. Maybe I just got a big lucky break from some guy who's huge. And my writing isn't that good. Like, I think that we all deal with this to some degree. So I'm very curious, you know, one, but, and then on the flip side of that, what I find is that it's only when I'm willing to be that vulnerable, like that work wouldn't be what it is if I hadn't gone where I did with it. Right. No, the, the. Let's talk about something that's not always top of mind, but still really important life insurance. Why? Because it offers financial protection for your loved ones and can help them pay for things like a mortgage credit card debt. It can even help fund an education. And guess what? 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There's a line instill writing that I really wanted to have t-shirts made for every writer, friend of mine, and put it on t-shirts, which is every day in new indignity. Which is one of the reasons, again, to go back to Facebook and social media and all that, which is everybody putting their best face forward, when in fact, every day there is a new indignity. Every day there is something. In a writer's life, there are good things and bad things every day. I'm particularly busy right now because I'm still writing and because I've been doing this for a long time and I've had a very good year and been on Oprah and all that stuff. But the fact is that every day something comes into my inbox that stings and something comes into my inbox that's like, "Oh, isn't that nice?" But our make-ups, generally, just as human beings, is to fixate on the thing that stings and to have the things that are lovely, just be like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that's good." At least it's my makeup and I'm really calling myself out on it because I very much am trying to change being that way because the things that are lovely are really lovely. The things that sting are often just kind of absurd. Even if they're not absurd, it's like, "Okay, fine, so there's that." You stick your neck out. I had a very vicious and wrong-headed review of still writing, really vicious, that made me so mad that I forwarded it to my agent with a note saying, "I really feel like I want to respond to this in some way." And she was on vacation and she's a very busy woman and usually in a situation like that, she might take a couple of days to get back to me. I got an email back from her in about five seconds that said, "No, you may not do that. I'm dead serious under no circumstance. Are you responding?" That is a terrible idea. But it came out of this feeling of like, "We all have this," of just feeling totally misunderstood and wounded. The question and what she said, and I know this is why I brought this up, what she said in that email to me, aside from practically tying my hands, was, "You stick your neck out there and anyone can project anything they want to on you. You've chosen to do this. You've made yourself a public person. People can project anything they want to on you." And you know what? She's right. Writers are people who are in fact putting ourselves, our words, our stories, our sensibilities, our philosophies out there into the world. And to do that has to be willing to tolerate the consequences or to ignore them. I mean, this letter to the Facebook complainer, today's count more than 70 online comments right now about that, and I have not read one of them, and I'm not going to. Because that's another place to get sort of all sucked into. And there's just, my husband and I have this expression, "No good can come of it." But what could possibly be good about doing that? Our job is to get back to work. There's a great story about Joyce Carol Oates, who is, God knows, one of the most prolific writers who's ever lived, and Joyce Carol Oates was sitting at breakfast one day with her then husband Ray, and he was reading the paper. I guess she was reading another section of the paper. And he said, "Oh, dear, there's a review of your new book in the Times." And she said, "Well, I'm not going to read it." He said, "Are you sure?" She said, "Yeah, because if it's a good review, it'll ruin my writing day, and if it's a bad review, it'll ruin my writing day. But either way, I'm going to have a writing day." I love that. I think you've made a case for me to never look at the reviews of my book again. Going on Amazon and reading reviews is a slippery slope. I think it's wonderful that readers can write reviews. I think it's wonderful that there is as much interaction between writers and readers today. I like hearing from my readers. But I think when it comes to ratings and places where there's anonymous online comments, I don't think it's particularly healthy or useful for writers to spend our time taking our temperature looking at what an anonymous person has to say about our work. It's already complicated enough doing something for which you receive criticism, reviews, good ones, bad ones. You're not in control of it. But to have it be that noisy, and many, many of us get caught up in it, but it really is, I think there's a tenacity and a clarity in just saying, "No, no. I'm going to get back to work. I'm going to work." I have a number of friends who have begun to just swear off all social media and only use the internet for research or things that are practically useful and some really wonderful writers who just simply don't, they don't do it because they recognize in themselves that it's just they wouldn't be able to discipline themselves or tolerate the consequences of doing it. But almost everyone I know struggles with it. I love that you brought this up. My business partner, Greg, when he asks people, he said, "Do you know how to use the internet?" And usually, the question I'll ask them is, "Show me something you've made using the internet because it's for making things," which I think is such a brilliant observation. I know we're getting close to our time limit here, so I want to ask you a few other questions and then we'll start wrapping things up. One of my favorite parts of the book of still writing was when you said, "I hate the word platform unless it has to do with shoes." And I thought, "Man, what a refreshing take on building your online presence." I think that it's such a counterintuitive mindset. Right when I read that, I was like, "Wow, this woman is my writing soulmate." I was like, "Despite spending years interviewing bloggers and social media people," I was like, "Oh, people so need to hear this." Well, what's so interesting about it is that all of the years that I have done what I've done on social media, and I think my husband was a very early adopter of a lot of... He was really early. I don't even know what to call them chat rooms or whatever they were before. There were things like Facebook. Had it not been for him, I might not even have really begun to have a social media presence, but I took to it in a very organic way. And this goes back to the beginning of our conversation and talking about things that are accidental. I laugh now when people come to me for advice about how to build their social media platforms, which they do all the time, because apparently I've done a good job doing that. But I didn't know that's what I was doing. All I was doing was building a community, trying to be as authentic as I possibly could be without being masochistic about it. I'm not going to post on my Facebook page. I just had a fight with my husband last night and woke up with a terrible headache. There are people who do things like that. But having a somewhat curated, but at the same time, authentic Facebook presence, and then Twitter, I lurked on Twitter for a year before. I felt like I couldn't write anything on Twitter without it being like the perfect haiku. I would freeze, and I think, my God, I am spending my creative energy on how to tweet. But then at some point, I actually just started doing it, and you know what? I found a way to do it that I enjoyed. I tweeted things that I read. I tweeted interesting links. And then little by little, I built this community. But there was nothing purposeful about it. And I think that that's important, because too often what I'm seeing is I'm seeing writers go into this completely backwards thinking I need a platform. And they don't have anything to do with that platform. They think they need a platform or a hook or a handle or what all these things are. And they don't have any product. They haven't spent years alone in a room writing something that then they're just aching to bring out into the world. They think they need the platform first and that then, they're reverse engineering something that can't be reverse engineered. Yeah, I really appreciate the perspective. And I think it brings us full circle to that whole idea of mastering a craft. We just did a major design overhaul as many of you guys know. But I mean, we couldn't hide lousy work behind a beautiful website. That's just not possible. That we would be found out. I mean, you'd be an imposter if you did that. Right, right. No, exactly. I think that there's a lot of there's a lot of emperors with new clothes, you know, and or no clothes rather. And it seems to me that to go full circle to what we were talking about, I think that there is a move, I hope, a slow sort of drift towards a kind of authenticity and just a way of being in all of this that really is about being genuine, about being seen, about being truthful. And I think with still writing, what I really wanted to do was to say to every other writer out there through this book, you're not alone. You need to be alone in the room to do the work. There's no way around that. But we're all doing this. We're all alone in our rooms doing this work. And it was just my wanting to have a book that would be like a companion to other creative people saying, yeah, me too. This is what we're all in this together, even though we're all alone in it together. So two final questions. One, you know, having been around the world of writing and publishing for so long, I mean, what are your thoughts on our movement towards self publishing and you know, the the elimination of gatekeepers? I'm very curious to hear your perspective on it. You know, I have multiple perspectives on it. I think that it creates a really wonderful sort of field of possibilities for people. There's been an interesting kind of movement, because if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said, I don't see good books go unpublished. I have not seen with any of my students a book that was really ready to be published by a mainstream publisher go unpublished. And that was really true. But it's no longer true, because I think with the consolidation of publishers and with, you know, the way that there really are only a very small handful of companies, kind of running the whole thing anymore. And with the consolidation of book stores and the loss of a lot of independent bookstores and with Amazon and all of that, that publishers, mainstream publishers are increasingly nervous about publishing books that otherwise they would have taken a chance on. And so then what there is is there, first of all, are a lot of small indie publishers. It's the same as what's happened in film. You know, there's there's small indie publishers who are doing beautiful jobs and those books are through social media and through the places that still review have every bit as much of a chance of a critical reception and of a book actually taking off and working as books from the mainstream publishers. And then you have self publishing, which we're, you know, where we know the stories of books that simply find they find their own way. And the thing is also authors are increasingly responsible for finding our books way in the world. Nobody is doing it for us. They're not doing it for us, whether you're at a mainstream publisher or whether you're self publishing. It is, it is, it is an entrepreneurial time. It is a time when everything is shifting and nobody knows how it's all going to play out. And so that, just like the Wild West, you know, is sort of it's daunting and nobody has any answers, but it's also exciting. Yeah, I would, I would have to agree with that based on kind of my own experience. I think that we've really reached this kind of interesting point where we're at, you know, I think I'd had Jonathan Fields here probably about a year and a half ago talking to me about uncertainty when he published it. And he said, you know, we're at this interesting crossroads where there's this stigma that the self published book used to have. And now that stigma is just slowly dissipating to the point where nobody cares. I mean, you basically, as a freelancer, I mean, if, you know, I can go and I can find the best cover designers in the world, and some of them are going to be better than what I would get from a publisher. I mean, I, you know, when, when my book, you know, did, went well, you know, my, my friend is a later agent called me, she's like, do you want to shop this around to actually go and change it? And I thought, you know, I, you know, not really. I think it's, it's done, you know, it's, it's found its way in the world. But even Seth Godin told me, he said, the day and age, in which strangers who've never heard of you buy your books, he's like, that ended a long time ago. Right. And he said, books find their way through word of mouth. And he said, and that's, that's really kind of the way the way the world is going. But you're right. I think it's, it's really, it's, it's exciting to see where we're going to go with all this. It's true. And I just think that there are different, there are different opportunities for, for a book to get air underneath it. And then what the usual channels had been, you know, it's not, it's not just the usual suspects anymore. Mm hmm. So, you know, Danny, I want to wrap with my final question. You know, I've asked a similar version of this question to just so many people over the last few years. I mean, you've been a writer for 20 years. I mean, you've probably seen people fail. You've seen people succeed. Uh, maybe, you know, and I think we live in a world in which opportunity is at our fingertips like never before. And yet, you know, I always say the internet is a developing country where certain people seem to really do well and others linger in obscurity forever or never quite make it or get to where they want to with their creative careers. I mean, what do you think it is that that separates somebody who gets to this point of what I like to call being unmistakable and successful with their career from the ones who don't? You know, I write about this and still writing a bit. And I think I write about it in terms of writing and not the internet, but I think it really relates, which is that, um, I think it has to do with a, well, a combination of things. I mean, there's no question that there is talent involved. And that's the kind of thing people don't really like. No, they don't like to talk about it because, you know, it's not everyone is created equal in this regard. There are people who are more gifted with language or with kind of like an immediacy of language or with, you know, whatever, whatever it is that sort of separates them out from the pack than others. Now that said, over the years that I have taught, I have had multiple students who have had really phenomenal gifts who haven't made it, who have just kind of dropped by the wayside. Sometimes it's because they've decided to do something else. But more often it's been that they've been kind of, um, they've been their own worst enemy in one way or another. These ways being, they got to impatient. They put, they put their ambition and their desire to prove something and to get somewhere before the quality of the work that they were doing. Or they just kind of put their tail between their legs at a certain point and just couldn't handle the rejection, the uncertainty and just went off and kind of, you know, disappeared into doing something else. And there's this beautiful word that this editor that I write about in still writing, Ted Solitarov, coined in an old essay of his, which is "indoor ability, the ability to endure." I really believe that as long as there is a gift, if there is a gift and there is the ability to endure, you have a winning formula. And but, you know, the ability to endure involves all of the things we've been talking about. It involves good habits, patience, discipline, the ability to shrug off rejection. The ability to not be self-destructive, you know, the to not get in one's own way, to make good lifestyle choices, to not become, you know, a drug addict or an alcoholic. I mean, all of these things are very real in creative people, but to persist and to honor one's gift, to understand that to have a gift is, it's a precious thing and to, you know, to nurture it and to give it the time and the space that it needs and to not get all caught up in the noisiness of the rest of the world, which is not there to nurture your gift. I love it. I think that it's a fitting end to our conversation. You know, Danny, as I said before we even hit record, right when I came across this book, I really, I was so thrilled that you agreed to come and join us and I can't thank you enough for being a guest here on The Unmistakable Creative. I mean, you've really, you've given us so many gems and so many insights. You know, for those of you guys listening, I will hands down and say, this is the best book I've ever read on about how to be a writer. I mean, it's one of the most informative things and after our chat, I'm definitely going to be getting myself a physical copy of the book. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you. You just asked really wonderful questions. If you like what you heard, the greatest compliment you could give us is a share the show with a friend and let people know what you think by leaving a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening to The Unmistakable Creative. Let's talk about something that's not always top of mind, but still really important life insurance. Why? Because it offers financial protection for your loved ones and can help them pay for things like a mortgage credit card debt. It can even help fund an education. And guess what? Life insurance is probably a lot more affordable than you think. 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Dani Shapiro has made her living as a writer for more than 20 years. In this interview we have an in-depth discussion about working artists and what it takes to master the craft of writing. Here are some of the highlights from our conversation 

  • Why there are many trajectories to creative careers
  • Dani's early exposure to working artists
  • The importance of living and rebelling 
  • Why Having a story to tell matters so much
  • Getting back to callings of our youth 
  • How a new generation values of quality of life
  • Why Dani left New York for a quiet country life
  • What it truly means to live a creative life
  • How some of the great things in life happen accidentally
  • The importance of exposing yourself to great artists 
  • Some incredible insights on the best way to start your day
  • Slowing down your mind by reading physical books 
  • Making meaning from loss by telling a resonant story
  • The self doubt that every single writer faces before the page
  • Memory and imagination as engines for storytelling 
  • Being responsible with our gifts as writers 
  • When you feel misunderstood and wounded as a writer
  • The reason you can't hand lack of craftsmanship 
  • Why authors are increasingly responsible for their book's success
  • The role that talent plays in your ability to succeed as a writer

 

People and Resources Mentioned

Still Writing: The pleasure and perils of a creative life

Goodbye to all that: Writers on loving and leaving New York

 

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University, and she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

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