As anyone conscious during the past two weeks knows, “Gatsby” refers to more than Fitzgerald’s novel, backlist-favorite that it is.  Gatsby’s topping of Knox comes from the new Baz Luhrmann movie, which has also inspired a new Fitzgerald Suite at the Plaza (at $2,800 a night) and  Tiffany’s new Great Gatsby Theme Collection.  Billboards and bus posters all over town show a dapper di Caprio and a flappered-out Carey Mulligan as well as jewelry models wearing cloche hats.  (Doesn’t anyone remember what Fitzgerald had to say about billboards?  Forget Dr. T. J. Eckleburg at your peril.)

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m thrilled that Gatsby—the book—has topped Knox.  Nothing against Knox, and nothing against memoirs, although yes, something against overhyped sensationalist memoirs.  (Knox reportedly received $4 million for her book; Fitzgerald got $3,939 in 1923, or $52,406 in today’s dollars.)  To be fair, I haven’t read Knox’s book.  But I have read Fitzgerald’s.  Everyone knows the story:  American dream, gone bad.  Boats beat back, etc.  Girl with a voice like money.  The Buchanans’ red-white-and-blue living room with its wine-colored carpet recalling Homer’s sea.  (OK, I was an English major…)

And, yes, no doubt about it: the theme of Gatbsy comes to mind first.  Opulence and great dresses, and just about every kind of decline imaginable.  The corrupt American Dream is just as pungent and relevant now as it was in 1925.

So what bears examination and re-examination and awe and reverence and joy?  Fitzgerald’s sentences. Yes, the famous ones about boats beating and the orgiastic future, about the green light and the foul dust.  But also these, so acute in metaphor and modifier and just a sampling:

• …Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
•  …motorboats slit the waters of the Sound
•  …gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden

And my favorite, that I read over and over for years without thinking much about, until one day on a couch helping a high-school student with her American-lit essay, I read it again.  There, distilled into image, gleamed the pitch-perfect description of despair, as Gatsby sees “an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”

I shivered, too.  (And, yes, some might point to an overdoing of adjective and adverb, but don’t verbs like slit and corrugate more than make up for it?)

So I’m happy that Jay is ahead of Amanda in sales right now, though I know it has mostly to do with the glitzy, stylized movie.  I’ll go see the movie—how can I not?  But when I need solace and inspiration from the pure pleasure of words, I’ll pick up my dog-eared copy and read again.

What are your some of your favorite books for language?  Which novels make for great movies (The Godfather and Gone With the Wind come to mind) and which fall short?

Sounds like the kind of thing we’d do here in California, and for a lot more than $100 for seven classes.  (Maybe the price is a typo…)  Seriously, though, I love heart openers—the yoga poses, I mean.  Here’s one of the simplest:  Take a block, place it length-wise on its side and lie back, your thoracic spine over the block.  You’ll need a folded blanket under your head and perhaps your hips.  Bending your knees and placing the soles of your feet on the floor will avoid strain to the lower back.  If you’ve never done yoga, check with your physician beforehand.  More to the point, check with your mood.

For years, I took Iyengar yoga classes from a woman named Barbara.  Somewhere in her seventies, with the body and mobility of a child, Barbara had bright, bird-like eyes and a wide smile.  She ended each class by visiting every mat to rub the backs of our necks as we lay prone in savasana (corpse pose).  I learned a lot about alignment from Barbara, and I’ve never forgotten her advice about heart-openers.  “Be careful,” she told us, after a class of supta baddha konasana and supta virasana and the aforementioned chest-over-block.  “You’ll be more open to the world.”  The skeptic in me thought, Yeah, right, but here I am these ten years later telling you Barbara’s story:  A man had been pursuing her, a man she wasn’t particularly attracted to, but when he called after she’d been doing a series of heart openers, she couldn’t say no.

Think of a cat, asleep on its back, belly exposed.  (Or, if you prefer, a dog.)  The cat (or dog) wouldn’t get into this pose unless he or she felt utterly safe.  Poses like the ones accompanying Callie’s writing exercises make us vulnerable.  They’re called “heart openers” for a reason.  In yoga, if we do a series of them, we might follow with some forward bends (not right away)—to change that outward openness to something more protective, more inward.

The past few mornings, I’ve been sitting on my meditation cushion for twenty minutes in the mornings, as I read and contemplate the psalm appointed for the day.  As I’ve done so, I’ve felt a strong physical desire to lie over a block.  I spend most of the day hunched forward—at the keyboard, over the steering wheel, in front of the dirty dishes.  In the pool, I do some backstroke, but I do a lot more crawl—face down.  So it’s no wonder my body wants to drape its upper portion over a block.

What, you may be wondering, does any of this have to do with writing or reading or teaching or craft?

Here’s what (in addition to the trigger of Callie’s class):  I’ve been struggling all week to write a scene of confrontation. I don’t like confrontation.  I avoid it in real life, and I avoid it on the page.  I’m not good at it.  I crumple, I prevaricate, I whimper.  I’m getting better at standing my ground, but mostly I slink away.  But I write fiction, so I can’t avoid confrontation on the page for long.  Fiction depends on conflict.  And yes, there can be the subtle conflict, the passive-aggressive conflict, the human-versus-environment conflict where nature provides the antagonist (snow in the Yukon or the wolves surrounding Pa Ingalls’ horse).  But I write character-driven fiction, so conflict depends on, well, character.

In grad school, I wrote a story about a young girl who wanted, more than anything, to go to Marine World on her birthday.  Her sister, a few years older, wanted their father to come home.  When the mother anted up the trip to Marine World, the older sister thought that Daddy wouldn’t be far behind.  But he never showed.  In the first draft of the story, I used imagery to convey the older sister’s disappointment and anger.  In revision, I realized that this girl—so buttoned up, so cautious—needed to explode, and needed to do it in scene.  She had to have a temper tantrum.  I was afraid to write the scene.  Whether I was daughter or mother or both, I feared letting down my guard. But I did it, and the story—“What Her Sister Wanted,” in my thesis and later published in The View from Below—benefited.

Now, in my novel, two women face each other in a scene that has to do more than it currently does.  Yes, I realize I’m being rather vague, and that’s because I haven’t written the scene to my satisfaction yet.  I stare at the page, I move words around, I get up for another cup of coffee.

What do heart openers have to do with confrontation?  Isn’t opening your heart about not being able to say no, as Barbara cautioned us?  Doesn’t conflict depend on No?

Sometimes.  But saying Yes, lying belly-up in the sunshine, feeling safe and trusting can be just as dangerous, just as risky as any guarded confrontation.  That’s the conflict I want to effect in this scene:  that of utterly exposed yearning and what happens what it bumps up against another desperate, giddy open heart.

What physical movement complements your creative output?  Hinders it? 

I started reading Poets and Writers back in its black-and-white newsprint cover days. When I left New York to start a graduate program in creative writing in the wilderness of California’s Sacramento Valley, my publishing colleagues sent me on my way with a gift subscription.  Ever since, I’ve had an off-on thing with the magazine.  Getting a new issue in the mail made me feel, in the early days, like a real writer.  That is, some days, eager to pore over the listings for places to send early stories, contests to enter, and writing wisdom to sop up.  And on other days, consumed with dread or possessed by the not-so-little green monster.  Some 22-year-old had just won a grant.  An editorial assistant I once ignored at the coffee machine in the Random House kitchen was being hailed at “fiction’s newest champion.”  Reading about other people’s publishing success could, on a bad day, plummet me into a nasty vortex of competitiveness, despair and my own failings.  I began to feel—in fantasy only, please remember—like the Tonya Harding of writing competition.  Not that I’d ever wish injury on someone, just maybe a little less sudden stellar success.

Come to think of it, on a bad day, anything about writing could wreak this havoc on me.  Books like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction (the latter of which I now recommend to my students) could do such a number on me that I’d throw the book across the room—or drop it in a stupor.

“Describe a barn as seen by someone who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder,” Gardner says.  Huh?  Now, of course, I see where he was going with that particular exercise, but at the time, his oh-so-serious, oh-so-self-important tone made me feel I’d never make it.  Don’t. Fuck. Up. 

What was wrong with me, that those how-to-write books in front of which others knelt in abject homage left me bereft?  Clearly, I didn’t have what it took to write.  But I kept writing.  I kept fucking up.

And then I discovered Bird by Bird.  This was before Anne Lamott became the star she is today.  After writing beautiful novels that barely sold, she hit the big time with Operating Instructions and then wrote Bird by Bird.  Probably because I’d already read and loved a few of those early novels (Rosie; All New People), I trusted her.  And the fact that I’d heard how she’d had to scrape by before hitting it big didn’t hurt, either.  Yes, John Gardner and Janet Burroway paid their dues, too—but Anne Lamott made me laugh. She wrote about radio station KFKD (K-Fucked) and Shitty First Drafts.  You will fuck up, she pretty much came out and stated.  What relief!  You will feel like Tonya Harding. Phew!  Yes, you will get miserable with competitive angst and do a number on yourself if you pay too much attention to who won what prize in Poets & Writers.

Around that time, too, I began to go to writers’ residencies and conferences, places like Ucross and Writers@Work.   I’d won entrance to such places, which meant I got my own little blurb and photo in Poets & Writers.  But the real benefit of such rewards came from sitting around the dinner table or the sofa in the lounge late at night, discovering that I wasn’t the only one who dreaded the arrival of Poets & Writers in the mail.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I still get the magazine and I recommend it to students.  But I also suggest that it’s OK if the back issues pile up, waiting for a day when you feel strong enough to encounter an article about someone half your age winning a prize you’ve entered twenty times.

How-to books on writing fill shelves and shelves, and continue to sell.  We look to them for a trick, an answer.  We can’t help it.  Just this morning, going through email, I clicked on Alison Presley’s blog with its header of “Writing Advice from Writers.”  It shows photos of  writers’ hands, on which are inked various tidbits: Write. Finish Things. Keep Writing.  And Start the Next One.  And the best of the lot, from Lev Grossman:  Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.  By necessity brief enough to fit on the palm of a hand, they remind me of the quotes I’ve clipped from articles over the year, pasted to my wall and magnetized to my fridge.  Another favorite, from Samuel Beckett:  Fail.  Keep trying.  Fail better.

I love this stuff.  I eat it up.  I just try not to take it too seriously.  Maybe I should, though, if only before the next carpet cleaning.

What’s your relationship to writing advice?  What’s helped you?  Hurt you?

I’ve written that before, many times,  for the most part about a self-imposed deadline. Even this blog, which I try to keep posting to every-other-Friday, is a voluntary act.  As much as I hope that some of you enjoy reading what I write here, I’m under no delusions that anyone waits with baited breath to read these words.  Still, I do it, just as I sit down at the keyboard every weekday morning for a minimum of four hours to work on a novel that no one, as yet, clamors to publish.

We need our discipline, our structure, and where we can’t find it, we make it.

But this deadline is real, externally imposed, printed onto a contract signed by yours truly and an editor.  I’ve promised to deliver a personal essay—800 words on a certain topic by a certain date.  April 8, to be precise, which seemed reasonable when I signed.

It still does, I remind myself. I know how to deliver on time.  I’ve done it with many personal essays (about swimming, about my father’s pancakes, about a stray glance with a handsome stranger on the street, about my brother’s addiction), and I’ve done it with two books.  And even if the time when I regular wrote and sold personal essays seems like another era—around the turn of the last century, to be precise, before every publication had a website so I can’t give you links here though I can point to a few on my website—the process feels familiar.

It’s what I describe to my students every term, not as the gold standard of the only way to write a piece, but as what works for me and might work for them.  Worth a try.  Open a file and pour out all your thoughts.  Write in circles.  Repeat.  Talk to yourself.  Ask questions.  Make typos.  Expand, explain, defend, undermine.  And, when you feel you’ve said all you want to say on the page (or screen) on this particular topic—when, in other words, you are only repeating yourself—stop.  Print it out, typos and all.  Read though, highlighting what seems essential, slashing out where you go off-track, noting repetition.  Then, in my experience, you’ll find the “nut,” the point you want to make.  And once you’ve found that, you’re there.  The rest is clean-up.

So that’s where I began on this particular assigned topic. Except that I felt rusty.  The process felt weird.  The tone sounded stilted.  The supposedly uninterrupted gushing of the “messy first draft” process now jerked like the VW bug in which I’d learned to drive a stick-shift.  I’d been working on my novel for so many months, an entirely different writing process with an entirely different narrative voice.  Yes, I’d written new scenes but I was revising, fine-tuning, not generating raw material.  I was writing in the point of views of several fictional characters.  And, now, for this essay, I needed to write as myself, in my essayist voice, but she (I) sounded pedantic, or tedious, or whiny.  She kept wandering off.  I kept wandering off. I would type a sentence or two—ten or twelve if I was on a roll—then I’d get up for a glass of water.  Check email, make some coffee, Google the spelling of a word that probably wouldn’t even make it into the final draft, type five or six more sentences.

It’s OK, I reminded myself. Keep going.  But I felt frustrated, stuck.  What was going on?  Had I lost my touch at the form? Was my idea too half-baked?  800 words, I reminded myself.  Like a blog post.  But it wasn’t a blog post.  It was an essay for a national magazine, an essay I was getting paid for.

Hm.  Was that the problem?  Not getting paid, but that I hadn’t gotten paid in so long that I’d forgotten how it felt?  Oh, I’d made money here and there on a reprint or a short piece but nothing big enough to justify a schedule C.  Embarrassing to admit, yes.  These days, anyone can start a blog and call herself a writer.  Nothing wrong with that.  I’m always encouraging, even mandating, that my students call themselves writers regardless of publication.  So what’s the problem?  I came out of the gate as a freelance writer with beginner’s luck.  I published a lot of pieces, and then I wrote a book and got depressed and took care of my dying mother and wrote another book and got depressed again and took care of my dying father… and, well, life happens, right?  During those years, editors moved on, connections weakened, confidence rose and fell.

I’m thrilled to be back in the game, in this 800-word way.  I hope that this piece, when it is handed in and if it meets with editorial approval, leads to more personal essays and a feature article or two.  I’ll let you all know.  But in the meantime, hold a good thought, please.  I have no double I’ll finish it—I just want it to be good.

What form or genre of writing have you done, moved away from, and come back to?  What hurdles have you faced in doing a new (or not-so-new) kind of writing?

First, I’d like to give a shout-out to three colleagues with recently published books:

• Lana Dalberg, BIRTHING GOD
• Judith Newton, TASTING HOME
• Monica Wesolowska, HOLDING SILVAN

I’ve mentioned all three on Facebook, and Monica guest-blogged here a few months ago, but I must mention them again here.  If I can bring even one new reader to any of these books, which deserve many, I’ll be thrilled.

Last month, the phone broke – literally, in two pieces, on the floor.  Uh-oh.  Does Verizon even make a clam shell model anymore?  Had the time come to jump on the smart phone bullet train, to join the 21^st century?  Would I create yet a monster checking email at stoplights and walking down the street hunched over my own texting thumbs?

Reader, I capitulated.  I got an iPhone 4 for only $39.  Yeah, it’s fun.  Yeah, I’m one of those people checking Facebook on the bus, although not for long.  Staring at a small screen on a moving bus makes me as queasy as sitting in the backseat of the Ford Torino on the twisty road to Stinson Beach once did.

As predicted, I check my email more often, just to see what’s there, you know—to delete the spam and make sure no fires need putting out.  Yesterday, a new name sat in my inbox.  The subject line gave the title of my book.  I clicked the message open.  A woman I’d met briefly had written to say that she’d just finished reading my book.

Seeing those words in her email, and typing them again here, thrills me anew, even though my book’s been out in the world for six years.  Someone read my book!  Isn’t that all we ever want as writers, when you get right down to it?  Bestsellerdom, front-page New York Times reviews, movie options, translations into languages we’ve never heard of—all fabulous, I imagine, but what really matters?  Reaching readers.

She’d had to find the book—not too hard, true.  But still! She made the effort!  She had several nice things to say, about how my book touched her—but what stunned me came at the end of her note.  Keep writing, she wrote.  Keep living.

My book, in part, describes depression.  Major debilitating depression, the kind that made me hide my kitchen knives (I knew I’d remember where I’d hidden them; I just couldn’t bear seeing them any more for the thoughts they prompted in me) and spend hours curled on the bathroom floor.  I emerged from that place ten years ago and, while I’ve had dips since, I’ve never plummeted into anything as bad as that fourteen-month-long hell again.  Thank God.  And, yes, I mean it literally.

But with those two simple words, Keep living, I feel the enormity of what her email told me.  Not just its acknowledgment of the toll of depression and loss and addiction but its tone of connection, of intimacy.  A near-stranger was moved by my words, enough to share with me some of her own story.  Wow.  I’d been battling a late-afternoon energy slump.  I had been debating whether I really wanted to go to the gym or whether I should just hole up in a coffee shop and eat something loaded with sugar.  Reading those words on my smart-phone screen didn’t just prod me to make the healthy choice (groan) or remind me of why I write; they reminded me of why I made the choice to, yes, keep living.

**

My new class started this week.  I’ve taught this course for twelve years.  I could do the first night blindfolded.  And yet, as I entered the classroom I felt that tingle of what my former therapist used to call “good anxiety.”  Twenty faces stared at me.  Would I meet their expectations?  Would I – could I – help them become better writers?

I often feel, three-quarters of the way through the first night of a new class, scattershot.  I’m following a lesson plan, I’m staying on point, but the air in the stuffy room and the heat of twenty bodies makes me feel flushed, flustered.  My skin shines and itches.  I made my hands a lot, I drop the chalk, I smudge eraser dust on my dark pants.  I’m used to all that, but it never feels calming.  Nor should it, I suppose.  There’s too much adrenaline in the room, too much  anticipation—my own and theirs, upon hearing that I will expect them to read aloud and share their writing and write every day.

I work alone every day, for up to four or five hours.  I futz over sentences and phrasing.  Thinking on my feet in front of a room of strangers, even with my hair askew, has no room for revision.  What you see is what you get.

I feel less scattered, now that I’ve written this.  If I had more time, I could revise and fine-tune, home in on that main idea, the way I tell my students to do.  But I think I’ll leave this post as it is.  Jumping all over the place, okay.  But underneath that, something else:  connection.  That’s what, after all, keeps us living.

A scary number of years ago, I worked on a literary magazine in New York City.  Turnstile was a labor of love, a nonprofit corporation with a volunteer staff.  Nine of us, seven of whom worked together for the same book publishing company during our weekdays, met on Tuesday evenings and weekends to hammer out the details of editorial vision, selection process, type faces and lamination, 501 (c) 3 status, and who’d take care of bookstore and library sales.  We were lucky and idealistic and focused.  We put out nine issues in six years, obtained grants, and published work by excellent writers, many of whom had never been published, a few of whom went on to become well known.  I pick up an issue now, and I feel pride and a kind of longing for those days of pizza and cheap beer and galley proofs, of arriving at our rented mailbox (“Suite 2348”) every week to pry out the manila envelopes of story submissions, 99 percent of which we sent right back.  I pick up the issues now with pleasure and amazement. We published good work.

Over the years, people moved on.  New jobs.  Marriages.  Divorce.  Babies.  Grad school.  We got tired of staying up late to key in manuscripts and impatient with the new editors who joined merely to eat cheap pizza; sure, they brought along a six-pack, but it seemed the extent of their contribution.  Turnstile came to end.  Happily, before the quality diminished.

Recently, one of us posted to Facebook that our inaugural issue, Winter 1988, with the startling black-and-white cover photo (especially nice in that glossy film lam), went on sale for $240 (original price $6.50).   Several of us chimed in jokes.  Who knew?  All those back issues a nest egg!

When I first moved to New York, my first landlady told me that “everyone here has a day job, and then they have what they really do.”  The waitress who writes.  The waiter who acts.  The legal proofreader who sings jazz or opera.  The of-counsel attorney who spends weekends studying koine Greek.  The printing salesman-cum-woodworker.  Etc.  Seven of us, for six years, put out a magazine.  No, every day was not joyous in 1988, nor was every issue put out in a haze of constant camaraderie.  But we did it.

That makes me happy.

Fast forward to 2013.  February 20, to be exact – just the other evening.  A corner bar in downtown Hayward, site of a lively release party for Arroyo Literary Review.  Standing room only, with fresh-faced editors and eager grad students.  Five of us read, and it was a wonderful evening.  I thought of Turnstile, and in a way that I hope doesn’t sound patronizing (though I can’t help but notice that I am now old enough to be the mother of the Arroyo editors), I felt a torch had been passed.

The folks at Arroyo are doing things right – T-shirts and gift bags, launch parties and funding from matching grants.  And what really made the evening, and the issue:  the writers sharing the pages, some of whom got on stage to read.  Okay, yes, I was there – but so were others, and that’s what matters.  I was wowed by Lucy Lang Day’s observations on Fra Angelico and miniskirts (not together), by Daniel Langton’s moving poem on aging and the green of trees, by Michael Larkin’s skillful move from the humor of purchasing condoms to a parent’s fierce love, by Ethel Rohan’s piercingly sharp short fiction.

That makes me happy, too.

So, please:  Read literary magazines.  Buy them.  Support them.  Submit to them.  A complete list for writers can be found at newpages.com.  Stalk your local newsstand (if you  have one), bookstore, garage sale.  Subscribe.  Chime in here to tell us about your favorites.

And find that thing, if you haven’t already, that you “really” do.

#2:  Website problems all fixed now.  Thanks for standing by.

Or, rather, my characters have.  One of the most direct ways into inhabiting character and discovering details that lift a story beyond “mere” narrative has always been, for me, what that character does with her day.  How she makes a living, and what kind of a living it is.

Growing up, I felt little parental pressure about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Oh, my dad used to tease me about becoming a dentist, so I could support him and my mother in their old age.  And my mother would mistily say, “Whatever you want to do,” while dropping not-so-subtle hints about becoming a wife in Greenwich, Connecticut—about as far-fetched and appealing to me as Dad’s suggestions of dentistry.

As a kid, I liked to make lists and fill out questionnaires.  The little boxes and the order they implied calmed me.  Lists would grow into fantasized roll calls of the classrooms I’d oversee as a teacher.  I always enjoyed imagining my pretend students’ names, however, more than I entertained lesson plans.

In high school, I romanticized marine biology.  Spending all that time at the beach!  Wearing Irish-knit sweaters, of course, and accompanied by a big shaggy dog and a handsome shaggy man.  I liked Mendel and his peas, the neat logic of big “B” and little “b” explaining my blue eyes and my brother’s brown—but I wasn’t quite cut out for the scientific method, with its patience and testing.  I liked gathering a few details, observing, and ta-da:  conclusion!

Lawyer?  Yes, that was suggested but never seriously considered.  My dad worked in law, after all, and not until many years later did I come to see how skillfully our dinner-table conversations had prepared me for the critical thinking of an attorney.  At the time, though, the profession felt dry and out-of-reach, not at all appealing.

Graduating with a BA in English and French in the early 1980s meant answering, almost every time I turned around, “What will you do with that?”  Law school or a PhD were the two options—that, and writing copy for pharmaceutical labels, as the representative who came to Career Day for English Majors announced not very convincingly.  I went into publishing, where I worked as an editor and wrote stories on the side.  Stories about layout designers and beekeepers.

Despite those childhood lists and roll calls, I had not pursued teaching in any serious way until grad school, when I was given a class to teach.  In that first Intro to Fiction class, I talked about the importance of occupation in character development.  A story may or may not center on a character’s job, but it helps to know what it is.  Gas station attendants will look at the world differently from how beauticians or computer scientists do.  The job you give to your character can yield all kind of details—important for verisimilitude, yes, and so rich in terms of image and metaphor.

Careful!

Heavy-handedness lies in wait, just around the corner.  My novel features a photographer, and I try to avoid what a writer colleague calls “the cooked-up feeling that professions often have in novels.”  Too many references to light and shadow, development and framing, and my character’s job feels inorganic, authorial, pretentious.  My device rather than his sensibility.  The two are linked, of course:  Christopher could never be a lab technician or a phone-sales rep, and neither could I. And yet.

I’ve been lucky, to choose the work I do and to enjoy it.  I’d like to think that those jobs that I would (or could) never do aren’t off limits for my characters.  Why shouldn’t a hedge-fund manager or a pimp or a Wal-Mart cashier or a Formula-One driver populate an as-yet-unwritten story?  Taking on a job on the page outside my own experience seems—like fiction itself—a way into empathy for and engagement with the world around us.  Maybe, Dad, I’ll even become a dentist.

What occupations have felt most natural to their characters, in your own work or the fiction you’ve read?  What comes first for you, the character or the occupation?

It helps to have an answer at the ready. I’ve stumbled too many times through vague and embarrassingly rambling answers—uh, life? Relationships? People? Ideas?   Implied in the question “What do you write about?” is the notion that we write about one thing.  Which might be true in some large thematic way, but isn’t very helpful in seven seconds.  How handy to have at the ready a specific, non-limiting answer.  “My last book was about beekeeping, but I’m now researching the mating habits of seahorses.”

Seven years ago, when I was working on a book proposal, I struggled with the “book hook” for what would become The Water Will Hold You. What, in the juiciest, most precise way, was the book about?

Prayer.

Too vague.

Depression and loss.

Too depressing.

Coming back to life.

Too whoo-whoo.

I came up with “Coming to prayer as a skeptic.”  I had to get the word “skeptic” in there, to balance out the word “prayer,” to make it clear that I was not a fundamentalist.  From that, I got the subtitle and, in the seven years since, a way to answer questions about my memoir without having to mumble.  My own elevator speech.

So now, after years of watching people’s eyes glaze over when I described my novel-in-progress as being about responsibility and how we love each other, I say, “It’s about a mother who kidnaps her own child and moves to a new town to start life anew.”  This is exactly what I said at lunch yesterday, come to think of it.

So yes, having a brand is helpful, the other writer and I agreed.  But then she shared with me the advice she’d heard, that a writer shouldn’t change her hair style too drastically, should stay recognizable and consistent.

Take a woman’s right to change her hair, and what’s next?

Whenever I pick up a book, I look for the author photo.  What am I looking for?  Have I ever put aside a book because the writer looks too hip? Too square? Too fill-in-the-blank?  Actually, uh, I have…. But I like to think I’ve eventually come around and based my judgement on the words inside the cover.  Consider Mary Gaitskill, who went from prim dark pageboy bob (in contrast to what one might have expected from her edgy stories) to white-blonde Pixie cut for Veronica.  I doubt that doing so hurt her sales or reviews.

Last night, at a launch party for Louise Aronson’s terrific new collection of stories, A History of the Present Illness, I ran into another writer friend whose book will be out this fall.  Katy and I didn’t talk about branding, per se, but she mentioned that’s it’s time to get her author photo taken, to gear up for publicity (what to wear?), and she admitted feeling at a loss.  “This is dressed up for me,” she admitted with a grin as she gestured at her jeans, blouse, and leather jacket.  “I don’t do hair and makeup.”

My author photo was taken by my cousin, in a crowded food hall at the Ferry Building.  The shirt I’m wearing was slightly ratty at the sleeves, but you can’t see that in the photo.  Yes, I’d blow-dried my hair to better than usual and I’d stopped at the Nars counter at Saks to have someone who knows how put some makeup on me.  (Yes, it’s the one in the upper right-hand of this page.)

I’ll continue to use this photo for years, I imagine, as long as I’m lucky enough to have books coming out—until I go completely gray.  But I reserve the right to change the cut.  After all, the writer drives the brand, not the other way around.  Many brands change their logos.

Yikes.  Did I just compare writers to cereal companies?  Did I really refer to my physical self as a logo?

Not every book has an author photo, of course—nor does it have to.  In a world in which the writer is expected to put herself out there through social media, many of us prefer to let our books out in the world without joining them on stage.  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Let the work speak for itself.

Wise, some say.  Career suicide, according to others.  Personal choice, after all.  Putting ourselves “out there” is a fraught, complicated venture.  Do what you’re comfortable with.  At the same time, making ourselves uncomfortable goes with the territory, doesn’t it?

Maybe, in the end, this is another benefit of having a brand:  We can answer the question quickly, we can reveal ourselves cogently, we can pull back the curtain on what matters and then duck back behind it, to re-enter the messy, inarticulate foundry where the real work happens.  And where we don’t have to fix our hair.

Don’t worry.  I’m not leading into a list of what I hope to achieve in 2013, at least not in terms of pages written, pieces published, books read, or pounds lost.  I am, however, going to write about what I want more of in 2013:

Enthusiasm.

I have a complicated relationship with the emotion, dating to an early humiliation on the schoolyard involving bunny ears.  Every since Halloween 1967, I’ve had to be careful, lest I show too much enthusiasm and wind up scarred by ridicule.  I’ll spare the details, but the event had lasting effect—I loathe costume parties—and racked up many dollars in therapy.

I don’t mean to sound flip; perhaps I’m just guarding against too much, well, enthusiasm.  But as I get older and perhaps wiser (or at least more resilient), I welcome the sheer pleasure of enthusiasm—in the best, most generous way.  When a friend gets an agent, and then a book deal.  When I see my husband’s face break into a smile.  When I help a student who brings his or her full self to the page.

And this week, brand-new into the new year, here’s my first big enthusiasm:  a TED talk about the power of verb tense.  A colleague forwarded the link, and I encourage all of you to click on it right away (well, not RIGHT away.  Finish this post first,please).  In it, Phuc Tran talks about the dark side of the subjunctive:

Any writer, any reader, knows the power of grammar—as Joan Didion famously says, “All I know about grammar is its infinite power.  To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”  Any writing teacher looking to show the weakness of the passive voice needs only point to “Mistakes were made.” Constance Hale, author of the recent Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, speaks winningly about how each sentence tells a story with the verb as the narrative engine.

Ever notice how, when you feel passionately about something, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve heard or read on the topic, you can always hear and read (and think) more?  Your friends and your partner and your students may roll their ears the umpteenth time you go into the redemption at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or wax rhapsodic about the structure of “Roman Fever” but that doesn’t lessen your thrill when the unbearable grandmother sees the Misfit for who he is or when Mrs. Ansley moves ahead of Mrs. Slade.

Phuc Tran’s observations about the subjunctive and the imperative (and how the usage thereof affects our ways of thinking and being) made me tingle with that kind of excitement.  Verb tense matters!  Words matter!

Most writers—most writers in English, that is, or any language rich in what Tran calls “the probable, the possible, and the contrafactual” (i.e., the subjunctive)—write out of a kind of subjunctive thinking.  Regrets, what ifs, second thoughts—these things find their way onto the page, into imagining alternate lives and scenarios.

Fictional doors swing open, but in our daily lives, subjunctive thinking can close off opportunity.  The imperative keeps us on track.  Instead of I’d have finished my novel by now if I hadn’t gotten sidetracked back in 2008, I’d be wise to lose the “if,” to drop the “should”s.  My novel—and my psyche—would be better served by “I didn’t finish it and here’s what I’m going to do about it.”

Oops.  I just used “would” twice.  Let’s try again:  I’m revising my novel. It is what it is.

I first heard this idiom—now clichéd—from a contractor, explaining some situation behind my walls necessitating more time, plaster, and billable hours.  The pipe burst.  The water created damage.  It’s happened.  Let’s deal with it.

Pipes aside, if, would, and should protect from the risk of too much unbridled enthusiasm.  Words like those, artfully placed, guard against the plummet of disappointment.  Maybe, back in 1967, if I hadn’t shown up on the playground as the only kid in costume, wearing pink bunny ears and a black leotard and pink tights and a little nosegay of cotton balls stuck together as a tail, the story would have gone differently.  But it didn’t.  My classmates laughed at me. It felt awful.  And if I hadn’t felt so excited beforehand,…

Ah, but I did.  And what joy to feel and share excitement, again and again.

What excites you, this first week in 2013?  What enthusiasms are you discovering or nurturing?