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

mother wanted to be a famous writer. It was a romantic daydream; I had a little bit of talent, a pretty good ear, some dedication. I see 75
    Dani Shapiro
    now that piano was my training ground—at least as important as any writing workshop. I was preparing myself for a lifetime of working with words. The phrasing, the pauses, the crescen-dos and diminuendos, keeping time, the creating of shape, the coaxing out of a tonal quality. All these are with me as I approach the page.
    When you have written something—whether part of a story, a poem, an essay, an opening for a longer piece, anything that feels like it might be a keeper—listen to it. What does it sound like? Read your words aloud. Even if you look like a crazy person, it doesn’t matter. No one’s watching. Pay attention to the way the language moves. Is it creating the effect you’re after? I think of some of Nabokov’s sentences, or the end of Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Fluid sentence-rivers, carrying us along on a current of commas, faster, faster until we are nearly breathless. Or the atonal juxtapositions of Don DeLillo’s. Or the clean, stac-cato beats of Hemingway, a period like a knife jab in the gut.
    What instrument does your language call to mind? A cello?
    An electric guitar? An oboe? Are you writing a concerto? A symphony? A lullaby? Listen and you will begin to hear the rhythms of your own voice.
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    Still Writing

Five Senses
    A character is taking a walk—say, down a winding path in the countryside. That character is lost in thought. We get memory, wistfulness, longing, regret. This character—let’s call him Joe—is on his way to his girlfriend’s house. They’ve had a fight and he’s hoping to make up with her. He’s thinking about how he’ll apologize to her, what she’ll say, whether the day will turn out well. But in the meantime, Joe is walking. His good city shoes are caked with mud from the previous night’s rain. A bumblebee buzzes in the nearby honeysuckle. The scent wafts over him, reminding him of a happier time with the girlfriend, a picnic they took last summer. He has a slight sniffle. His nose is running. He stuffs his hands deep into his pockets, looking for a tissue, but instead finds a wrapper from a fortune cookie. His stomach rumbles. He wonders if she’ll offer him anything to eat.
    For us to feel Joe’s essential humanness, we must have access to his body. This is one of the simplest ways to bring a character to life on the page, and yet we so easily forget. If we inhabit his body as he walks down the path, things will happen in the writing: the bumblebee, the honeysuckle, the fortune cookie.
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    Dani Shapiro
    His musings will be associative, connected to the corporeal present. After all, what else is there? We see, smell, taste, hear, and touch. The senses are gateways to our inner lives.
    A friend once told me about a walk she took through Wash-ington Square Park in New York City on an early spring day.
    It was a route she took regularly, from her home to her office, but on this day she stopped dead in the middle of the park, overcome by a panic attack. What had happened? Why that moment? Her heart raced and she tried to catch her breath. It seemed the world was dissolving around her. When she was finally able to sit down on a park bench, she realized that the quality of the air and the sunlight were precisely the same as they had been a year before—a year to the day—when she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She had made a full recovery and until that moment she hadn’t remembered that it was the anniversary of her diagnosis. But her body remembered.
    The light, the air. The breeze against her skin. A street band playing in the distance. Her body brought her back to that place of terror, to a time that her mind resisted.
    Write the words “The Five Senses” on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above