Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

I wrote the bare minimum I could show up and get away with, to lessen the risk of being exposed. A sentence took forever to compose; I was floored by the casual flood of pages and pages and pages my fellow students seemed to generate with ease. I tried to pay attention in these workshops, but I was too scared to reveal my idiocy, my fraud, by commenting much on other students’ superior, real, earned work or engaging much in the theoretical discussions of craft . I did learn something about narrative arc, and the definition of aubade ; I learned the difference between a metaphor and a simile, and that adverbs were lazy; I heard somewhere that Sylvia Plath used to read thesauri like dime-store novels, so I took to doing that, too, and highlighting obscure polysyllabic words with a shriek of fluorescent yellow. I learned a writer needed to create one’s own writing space , something like an altar, I supposed, with sacred objects on one’s desk like a rock or shell and quotations by Virginia Woolf and Flannery O’Connor pinned to the wall, so I did that, too. I kept sneaking into the club; the bouncer kept waving me in. Each time I was accepted, there was the relief, then the fear — now that I’m here, I have to write. And, having written, the judgment will come, the exposure. Dash will tell me It’s not good enough . The people in charge of running the world will tell me I and my work are not liked . Perhaps I was no longer a plagiarist (my mother wasn’t going to show up on campus waving that unearthed book of children’s poems), but I was still going to be found out, any second now. I took to writing my paltry short story and poetry assignments one hour before they were due, which left me a loophole: Of course it’s terrible; I wrote it in only forty-two minutes! Better you try to fail — you’re more assured of victory. Effort wasn’t just inelegant, it was terrifying; it left you vulnerable, your soft naked underbelly exposed to the blow.

At least I had my professors to look to, this time — they were actually Real Writers, with many real and written and published books, the first writers I’d ever met, dazzling in their mere existence. But I was far more curious about their lives than their writing. One professor was an Irish writer of beautifully rendered novels I wouldn’t come to appreciate until ten years later; another was a charismatic local guru, an earth mother to the Los Angeles community of fiction writers who offered writerly pearls to us students but whose only advice I latched on to at the time was the importance of sending thank-you notes to everyone you meet on engraved, writerly looking stationery. She also insisted that to be a writer, you must write at least five hundred words every day. She was adamant about this one, but I hoped my nice new stationery would get me past the Border Guards.

For our final class with the Irish novelist, he invited us to his home in Malibu; our workshop trooped out to find, yes, a house on the beach , lunch laid out for us on the brick patio, ham and baguettes and wine and cheese, a house with overstuffed white furniture and honey wood floors and charcoal sketches on the walls by, I assumed, famous artist friends of the writer, and shelves, shelves, shelves of books. We all drank a lot of wine on this most perfect, inspiring afternoon; the Pacific Ocean, the saline breeze, the halfhearted wine-infused literary conversation, the honey ham and honey wood floors, and the whisper in my ear: This can all be yours, this is the writer’s life. Of course it was — just look at Lily and Dash, at Louise and John and Eugene. They’re out there, strolling the sand. The sex and the wine and the consoling ocean rush and crash, the smell of salt, the floor-to-ceiling books making a fortress of your home. Such an alluring lesson. So apparently possible.

But my two professors, between them, had written well over two dozen books. They must have each written at least five hundred beautifully rendered words a day for years; they’d earned it. I’d written, for all intents and purposes, nothing. And tick tick tick , I wasn’t a kid anymore, whose wild fantasies are endearing; at some point soon I was going to have to offer evidence. Real evidence. I was going to have to write.

Write what?

JULIA

People in Vienna are really doing something to change the world. You must come. Then you’ll know what to write about.

Maybe that was it — I just couldn’t write right now . Because I hadn’t found anything to write about . Maybe writers really must go away somewhere, like Dash and Julia told Lillian, like John telling Louise she needed to run off to Moscow with him; writers must pack up their bags and wander off into another world, a foreign world, for focus, inspiration, adventure. Jack Nicholson went off to the mountain hotel, but took along his wife and child to go crazy on; perhaps you have to go further away from the familiar, be a stranger in a strange land, escape from your own insular little world and be absorbed into the more important world of others. Be both alone and, at the same time, with a cast of strangers.

Sophie’s Choice proved it. 103Young Stingo, at the beginning of the movie, is a fresh-faced Southern boy on a bus to somewhere, and we hear his inner thoughts:

STINGO VOICEOVER

I had barely saved enough money to write my novel, for I wanted beyond hope or dreaming to be a writer. But my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and a stranger to death.

(I note that he doesn’t say he wants to write ; he wants to be a writer . I find this very comforting.)

Stingo wanders into foreign-to-him, post — World War II Brooklyn to write his novel and meets up with Sophie, a gorgeous Polish refugee, and her brilliant boyfriend, Nathan, in their big pink Victorian boarding house. He’s a stranger in their strange land, with a small pocketful of cash to finance the writer’s voyage of discovery and a case of Spam to live on. We await the arrival of love and death. Sophie and Nathan accept him immediately as a Writer, giving him a book of Whitman to welcome this “young novelist from the South.” Stingo does write for us (manual typewriter, rumpled clothing, furrowed brow, slow-growing stack of pages), but it’s another mere montage of writing, a musical interlude intercut with Sophie and Nathan’s comings and goings, and the trio hanging out together. It’s another writing striptease, the appealing appearance of sweat without the strain of sore muscles or psyche.

Sophie and Nathan’s blind, unjustified faith in him is splendid. “You will move mountains,” Sophie assures him. Stingo is slightly uncomfortable with this.

STINGO

You don’t know if I’m really talented. You haven’t read anything I’ve written.

SOPHIE

Well, I don’t ask you about that work, what it’s about, because I know a writer, he likes to be quiet about his work.

Which launches Stingo into confession:

STINGO

It’s about a boy, a twelve-year-old boy.

SOPHIE

So it’s autobiographical.

STINGO

Well, to a certain extent, maybe it is. It takes place in the year his mother dies.

SOPHIE

Oh, I didn’t know your mother died.

STINGO

Yeah, when I was twelve.

At least we know what he’s writing about. So, clearly, he didn’t need to go away from his own life to find material; he only needs his spirit awakened.