Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro

They remind me that my work is changeable. That there is play in this thing I’m doing. I’m a child, finger-painting. This color?
    Why not? There is joy—rather than industry—in putting pen to paper. A sense of possibility, discovery.
    For the past dozen years, I have used a particular brand of spiral-bound notebook—dark blue, the insignia of a prep school I did not attend emblazoned on its cover. I’ve become a little obsessive about these notebooks. They can only be found in one bookstore, in my in-laws’ hometown. Whenever I visit, I stop by the prep school bookstore and stock up. I carry home armloads of them. I live in fear of running out, or—horrible thought—that they might be discontinued. Why these notebooks? They’re nothing special to look at. I have no connection to the school, other than its location in the town where my husband grew up. The reason I’m attached to them is simple: the first time I randomly happened to write in one of those notebooks, the work went well.
    We are, many of us, superstitious creatures. We think there may be reasons our day flows in the right direction. A favorite necklace, a penny found on the sidewalk, a crystal we tuck into our pocket, a private mantra—we may rely on talismans to help us along. But I’ve never heard a writer feel that way 104
    Still Writing
    about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.
    Pick a notebook, any notebook. If you compose well in it, you will become attached. Choose a pen that feels right. It could be a beautiful, expensive fountain pen, or any old BIC.
    Whatever feels good in your hand. Okay—this is your notebook, and this is your pen. Balance the notebook on your lap or set it on a table. And wherever you are in your work, start there. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the sound the pen makes as it moves across the page. Now, doodle something. Write a few sentences. Scratch them out. Write a few more.

Change
    I had just published Slow Motion when Jacob was born. In the first sentence of that memoir, I refer to my parents’ car crash as the event that divided my life into before and after. What 105
    Dani Shapiro
    I didn’t know—I was in my early thirties and single when I began the book, in my midthirties and engaged to be married when I finished—is that a life containing only a single
    “before and after” moment is indeed a fortunate one. “My life closed twice before its close,” said Emily Dickinson. After my father’s death, I carried those words around in the back pages of my Filofax for years. I intuited the truth in them, though I couldn’t have yet imagined how a life could close twice—or even more—before its close. I thought it was kind of like a one-per-customer thing.
    But then, when Jacob was six months old, he developed seizures that led to a diagnosis of a rare and nearly always cata-strophic disorder known as Infantile Spasms. Seven out of a million babies are diagnosed each year with this disorder, and only 15 percent of them survive. Most are left blind, physically impaired, or brain damaged. As I sat in the doctor’s office hearing these dire statistics about the infant I was holding in my arms— pain engraves a deeper memory— everything I cared about in the world was distilled into a single moment. Looking down at my only child on that late autumn afternoon, I knew that if he wasn’t okay-–if he wasn’t part of that small per-centage of babies who make it—that my life would be over. I believed the loss of a child would be the only pain from which it would be impossible to recover. And