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

I stop writing screenplays to sell and my agent stops calling. I spend my time shopping, spending the money I’ve stockpiled. I wait to awaken one morning to find all the work done, to discover those blank books packed full of a novel. Maybe Garp will creep inside my head and rewire the circuitry for me; maybe Zhivago will do it for me while I sleep.

I remember a lesson: Writers must go away to write. Fine; I will try, again, to be Stingo. I pack up my computer and rent an apartment in San Francisco on a six-month lease with the last of my screenwriting money. It’s a roll of the dice. I set up my writing space , spend a few more months hanging out on Alcatraz and sneezing in dusty Bay Area archives and libraries. I walk on the beach looking for Eugene O’Neill or a dreamy guy with a bucket of clams or someone to tell me I will move mountains . I fall back on eating cheese and bread and sitting in cafés, holding a variety of blank books and pencils and pens destined to fail me, and drinking far too much red wine. I don’t smoke, but I’m tempted to start, if only to maintain the illusion. I hang out in bookstores, but it begins to feel like chastisement: See, all these people wrote their books. I don’t remember anything I ever might have learned about writing in all those college workshops; I feel I barely remember how to type. I have my four years of accumulated research — this is perhaps worth an honorary degree in the history of Alcatraz, but that’s all. I have facts and figures, an idea, an outline, a metaphor, and characters I’m embarrassed to admit I’m hopelessly in love with. And I’m terrified for them, that their life is fully in my unworthy hands. I can’t even give them voice.

One morning I sit down at my desk. The bathroom is clean, the fridge is stocked with food. The dog has been walked. One sentence, I tell myself. That’s all you have to write. After one sentence, you can go buy a pair of shoes, take the dog for another walk, go to a movie, go back to your lazy-adverb, unproductive waste of a life.

I write my one sentence and hear:

DASH

I don’t know what happened, but you better tear that up. Not that it’s bad. It’s just not good enough.

Nathan calls me puling , mocks me as an artiste . Jack Nicholson, grinning, wants me to take over his axe and go nuts. Nobodies will line up to not buy everything I ever might write, forget about being translated into Apache. I should be a waitress or a fireman.

And where’s my fur hat with the money stashed inside — how am I saving Jews and political prisoners with this sentence? It isn’t even a goddamn lily poem; I’ll never topple a tsar. Garp was wrong, deluded; he was right to stop. I need to stop now, before I even really begin.

DASH

It’s not as if you’ve written anything before, you know. Nobody’ll miss you.

He’s right, I know he’s right.

NATHAN

What’s the worst that can happen? I might discover you can’t write.

I come back to one embarrassingly superficial thing; I told all my friends and family, when I left, that I was going off to write a novel. I’ve marched off to my room. And here I am, six years old, crouched on my pink organza bedspread and expecting ease . Expecting it to get done by magic, by montage. Wishing for a book of children’s poems I can steal an apple/dapple poem from; I’m crouched in a closet, hiding, too terrified to emerge. Not that anyone cares; nobody’ll miss me. This assignment was self-inflicted. But I can’t go back empty-handed. My one sentence is lonely, left hanging. It whispers another sentence in my ear, begging me to provide company.

JULIA

Work hard! Take chances! Be very bold!

Blink. I write the second sentence, and then I lose count. Blink. Four months later, I have a stack of three hundred and fifty pages and I can come out now, finally, into the light with a sense of having earned something. I’ve written my own apple/dapple poem. For the first time, I have done my job.

In 2000, the film Wonder Boys brings me terror and hope. 109The writer is back in his bathrobe, a pink chenille one at that. Grady Tripp is a one-hit wonder, a novelist famous for one novel, seven years ago, who is now stranded in academia and mired in a no-end-in-sight second novel (over 2,600 single-spaced pages, typed on a manual typewriter) in which his entire identity is invested; his wife has abandoned him, he’s sleeping with the Chancellor of his liberal arts college, he’s perpetually stubbled and stoned. It’s nice to see Michael Douglas playing authentically pouchy for a change, but I loathe the movie. It hurts to watch. The once-appealing-to-me archetype of the rumpled bathrobe — wearing writer-turned-Creative-Writing-professor has become too painfully relatable. Grady’s star student, James, is the cliché of the morose, freaky, suffering writing student (he recites movie-star-suicide facts and figures as a party trick and dismissively announces his brilliant story took him only an hour to write). Grady and James tell each other they’re special, that they’re unlike the rest of the other teachers/students, but they aren’t; they’re every annoying writer trope in the book. The movie spins off into self-consciously precious subplots about finding a stolen jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe, and hiding a dead dog, and whether or not Grady’s editor is going to seduce the sensitive James and/or publish his manuscript — as usual, a movie about a writer can’t spend too much time showing us the writer writing, or trying to write, because, as I now know, more than thirty seconds of that is so fucking boring you’d want to throw up or yell Fire! in that crowded theatre. Although this cloying, self-conscious wackiness is almost worse.

The movie really hurts to watch, however, because I’ve become that trope. My first novel, A Child out of Alcatraz, was well received and did “nicely.” I did it, good, and now I’m supposed to do it again. The pride of that first completed, achieved, written book was short-lived; the moment I sat down to write again, I was back on the floor of my closet in a paralyzed crouch, trying to whip up another apple/dapple poem and knowing I couldn’t, I could never do that again, it was too impossibly hard. And that first book was so easy , I don’t even remember the labor of writing — perhaps someone else did creep in and write it while I slept, and any day, I’m going to be found out. Grady keeps assuring his editor that his second novel is almost done — his mantralike lament to all obstacles is “I’m trying to finish my novel!”—and I know that song, too. (Again, I can’t go into bookstores, the chastisement is back: See, all these people wrote their second books. .) I know the Grady who freezes up after that beautiful, painless first book and can’t seem to do it again; I know the Atlas-like weight of that second book on your shoulders, how it becomes a massive globe that cracks your spine, cripples you into a perpetual hunch. It’s hard to rest on laurels turned dry and crisp with age; one touch too many, and they turn to dust.

And I’m supposed to be an academic now, too, the teacher of creative writing students for whom I’m supposed to set an inspiring writerly example. I’ve sat in those endless fiction workshops and mediated student feedback and personalities and tried to sound knowledgeable about parallel or fragmented structures and narrative arc and the layers of character psychology and putting pressure on the language and unpacking the story and stressing the need for everyone present to be critical yet positive and constructive; I’ve gone to those interminable faculty cocktail parties and made my dinner of those toothpicked cubes of cheese. I know the outrage you feel when a young student goes all starry-eyed over your (old) book, then offers up a casual and cutting criticism of your current (lesser) work; I know the threat of reading a morose, freaky, suffering student’s work and knowing it’s superior to yours. I know the awe of watching their hard work, their uncynical investment, their fearless and unabashed commitment. My writerly problem isn’t Grady’s — he’s logorrheic in print, while I can’t seem to break one hundred pages of anything — but I identify way too much with the terrifying suspicion of being washed-up, of knowing it’s all over. And, while I tell myself that Grady is obviously in his late fifties (although I think Michael Douglas is trying to play forties), and I’m still much younger, this ultimately depresses me — if you’re washed up at fifty-five, it’s one thing, but if you’re washed-up at my age. . well, that means you have a good thirty or forty years of being washed-up lying ahead of you, a long, pathetic, winding road.