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

future, anywhere but here, and suggests that the real skill in meditation is simply noticing that the mind has wandered. So liberating, this idea that we can start over at any time, a thousand times a day if need be. I see many parallels between the practices of meditation and writing but none are more powerful than this. Writing is hard. We resist, we procrastinate, we veer off 109
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    course. But we have this tool, this ability to begin again. Every sentence is new. Every paragraph, every chapter, every book is a country we’ve never been to before. We’re clearing brush. We don’t know what’s on the other side of that tree. We are visitors in a foreign land. And so we take a step. Up the stairs after the morning coffee. Back to the desk after the doorbell has rung.
    Return to the manuscript.
    It never gets easier. It shouldn’t get easier. Word after word, sentence after sentence, we build our writing lives. We hope not to repeat ourselves. We hope to evolve as interpreters and witnesses of the world around us. We feel our way through darkness, pause, consider, breathe in, breathe out, begin again.
    And again, and again.

Tics
    I’m upstairs working when I hear a strange thumping sound coming from below, and I can’t resist investigating. Any excuse to get up and stretch. I follow the sound to my dining room and catch sight of a blur of red slamming itself against the window. A cardinal is hurling itself at its own reflection in the glass. Does it think it’s fighting another bird? Or mating?
    The poor thing keeps at it. Slam. Then back to the tree branch.
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    It must be dazed but it doesn’t learn its lesson. Slam . Wings fluttering. Black eyes, black beak highlighted against the red.
    Slam. I want to help it but know I can’t.
    Things we do repeatedly are evidence of our own nature.
    These might be physical gestures: twirling hair, drumming fingers, biting nails. We might pour ourselves a glass of wine at six o’clock every evening. We might talk to ourselves or sing in the shower without even knowing it. We might have actual tics: a throbbing muscle under one eye, a shoulder that lifts involuntarily. When it comes to the writing life, we have these impulses, too. And—unlike our friend the cardinal—we can learn something about ourselves and our process if we pay close attention.
    When I finished my novel Black & White, it had been through multiple drafts and close reads, but it wasn’t until the book was in production that I received a note from a copy editor. “Do you realize,” she wrote, “that the word muffled appears eleven times in this manuscript?” Muffled . The copy editor referenced the pages on which the offending word appeared. Sounds were muffled. Feelings were muffled. How had I not noticed? Muffled is not a word I use regularly in conversation. What had happened? How had I not caught this, in read after read?
    The more I thought about it, the more I understood. And fortunately I still had time to do some small but important 111
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    revisions—which didn’t have to do simply with removing the muffled s, but rather, with realizing that each time I unconsciously repeated the word, I was not close enough to the interior life of my main character. She had been her mother’s muse as a child—posing nude for a series of provocative photographs—an experience that continued to haunt and define her life as an adult. If you had asked me, while I was writing Black & White, if there were any direct autobiographi-cal components to it, I would have told you no. But in fact I had been a child model myself. As a three-year-old, I was the Kodak poster child at Christmas, displayed on billboards all over America. And though the experience wasn’t nearly as traumatic as the one I gave my main character, it was strange and confusing to be the Orthodox Jewish Christmas poster child. Those feelings were buried for me. Muffled . Those places in my manuscript—that