Yes, Virginia, Thank You.

As the end of my first post-MFA year approaches, I consider my frequently frozen fiction muscles and wonder why I keep coming back to the keyboard, fingers stiff, mind blocked. Apparently I don’t need to be successful in producing new material to keep trying. I do need a room of my own, yes, Virginia, thank you. And a lot more.

Virginia Woolf famously said that to write, a woman needs a room of her own. I am a lucky, lucky woman who has enjoyed a room of my own ever since I decided to write about ten years ago. And this is what I have to say to Virginia Woolf: A room of one’s own is a good start.

To write, a woman—this woman—needs drive, a bit of confidence, support, and not a little discipline. She needs friends who apologize when they call during her writing time. She needs granola bars with chocolate chips and both a lamp and an outlet next to her chair.

She needs room to pace inside, and a good place to take a long walk outside, get some damn air. When she’s tired of her writing desk she needs to put her dirty feet on the sofa and she can’t act surprised and get all fussy when she finds melted chocolate in the sofa cushions. She needs to keep her water glass full. And given that she has this vaunted room of her own, she really really really needs to stop cluttering every other room with her writing scraps, her books and literary journals, her color-coded spiral notebooks, her pens, her story ideas scribbled on the backs of ragged envelopes. Her stained latté cups.

She needs a cranky cat who turns loving and insistent just when the ideas are beginning to flow. How else would she know when she’s really on to something?

Here’s what she doesn’t need: Over-sized paperclips in vibrant, metallic colors, binder clips shaped like stars and hearts (also in pretty colors), purple and green ink pens. Index cards in nine shades, both pastel and rich, depending on her mood. She doesn’t need Facebook. She doesn’t need a prominent place on her desk for a file folder decorated like somebody’s acid flashback and stuffed with rejection slips. And although it pains me to write this… she doesn’t need lattés.

***

I once taught a continuing education course entitled something like “How To Write Your Stories.” I knew my students would come with wide-ranging goals. I would get would-be memoirists, short story writers, and middle-aged ladies wondering what to do with all the genealogical data they’d been digging up. I might get hopeful poets and essayists, grandmothers who wanted to write picture-books for the grandkids. My hope was to energize them. Launch everyone on a project, enlist class support, send them off with a solid beginning. The first day, as they were all getting seated and before I’d checked my class roll, I wrote a quote on the blackboard.

“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”     —William Blake

I turned from the board with a triumphant smile to be greeted by wide eyes and open mouths, uncomfortable shifting. Someone gasped. I put out my palms as though I could block their disapproval. “No, no, no! Blake isn’t actually encouraging infanticide, ha ha ha… heh.” The nervous giggling was particularly bad. So after my stupid beginning I did a smart thing. I stopped my tittering and said, “Please, read it again, a couple of times. And then tell me—Does anyone find this quote inspiring?” 

A long, quiet moment passed while I searched the room, looked for a friend. A 50-something lady with beautiful white hair and a very serious expression leaned forward in her chair, focused on the board with narrowed eyes. And then she raised her hand. First just to her shoulder, then… pause… all the way up. I smiled but not too hard, not too toothy—mustn’t look like a baby-strangler. I asked her to introduce herself, then explain why she found the quote inspiring.

The brave lady with the beautiful white hair did my work for me and we were off and running. I don’t know that everyone completed the project they began in that class but I do know they left the final session happy, chattering, clutching notebooks. Launched. 

My point is that to write, a woman needs encouragement from people who don’t love her. And she needs inspiring quotes.

*** 

She needs a thick skin so that when her father remarks that some people write and work full-time she can laugh and agree that yes, some people do. So that when she opens the rejection slip she actually feels hopeful because there might be an encouraging note on it! So that when there is no encouraging note, still, her primary concern is remembering to write the title of the rejected story and today’s date on the slip, to file the slip with its allies, to log the rejection in her computer file where she tracks her submissions.

She needs a thin skin so that she hears everything and absorbs more than is good for her. So that the worries she takes to bed soak up so much of her energy that somewhere around dawn they burst the constraints of petty reality and morph into dialogue and scene. So that when friends ask if she’s sent out any stories lately she has to bend over her drink to hide the blush. The blush will return when she gets home and that heat in her face will compel her to turn on the computer, do that final edit, pick a few magazines that might want her story.

She needs to remind herself, often, that she’s in it for the words.

*** 

To write—to stick with the hope of writing well—a woman needs to question every word choice, delete too much and regret it, start a new draft. She should think too hard about everything that happens to and around her, feel sick when others just shrug, then bring all that drama and bullshit to the page but make the histrionics real and when she’s brave enough kill the bullshit. But before the killing she needs to remember: It’s okay to write bullshit. It’s fun to write bullshit. Writing bullshit keeps you going.

Too often she needs to laugh at the wrong moment and then feel really stupid, she needs to get outraged and be far too loud in this small room, with these blinking people. She needs to take foolish risks and be very sorry, then suffocate her sorrow with Doritos.

She needs to love her own work only a little less than she hates it. 

To write—to keep writing—a woman needs to linger over her darlings before she executes them, she needs to commute a death sentence once in a while, marvel at what her words are doing to one another. She should pick a favorite sentence in every story, bury an inside remark on page 2 that only her husband will get. She needs to skewer her mother in ways Mom will never notice, then feel rich in smarts and superiority. She needs to accept praise because there will be plenty of indifference.

She needs to spend whole days hiding but while living in corners she will laugh, hard, at her own jokes. At 3:00 am she will shift her pillow, try to make it cradle her stiff neck, and wonder if that last joke was over the top, too snarky, exposed her intent in a way that insults the reader. She chuckles, decides yes, over the top. But funny, so funny! Tomorrow, she thinks, as she dozes off. Tomorrow she’ll fix it.

                                                                

Post Script: My apologies to any readers who happened by this last month to discover nothing new. I’ve been devoting all my Hunger Mountain time to doing contributor interviews for our new issue. I made a good trade. Check out these author “visits,” which are linked to each publication. Soon there will also be a page in the Art + Life section with links to all visits. Enjoy!

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*Contact Claire with any suggestions for Hunger Mountain’s Art + Life section at hungermtnal@gmail.com. Or you can send her a message on Facebook.