mbudhos's posterous

The Elusive Balance

Can one write too hard?  Work too hard?  And still not feel like you’ve done enough?

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve set this goal of finishing a long novel this summer, since this is the time when I can have uninterrupted time, five days a week.  And so, for the past few weeks, this is exactly what I’ve done.  To some extent, it has worked.  Unlike the rest of the year, when I am dashing and juggling an impossible set of responsibilities, I actually have enough time to go to not one, but at least two yoga classes, while getting work done.  Even a few swims, once the pool opened.  What a miracle!  And taking care of many of the niggling domestic improvements that are the bane and joy of house living.  And still sit at my desk!  The healthful sense of balance was achieved—I felt energetic both mentally and physically.

But this past week, something went awry.  I plugged ahead, but by the end, I was lagging.  I somehow never made it to yoga.  Forget swimming.  My sciatica kicked in and began to distract me.  My right wrist began to hurt.  I finished out the week feeling run down, headachy, not entirely pleased with the most recent passages.

There’s no doubt that when I don’t take care of myself, physically, and then drive myself to sit at a desk like a prisoner to my manuscript, it backfires.  Alas, I’m all too prone to this—I can easily talk myself away from all those replenishing activities--a walk, a bike ride, a call or visit to a friend–and instead guiltily chain myself to work.  Friends have commented on ‘my discipline.’ But it’s not always the best discipline because ultimately, if I’m not refreshed, or deeply rested, the work is not either. 

Endings & Best Laid Plans

 

My plan, this summer was to force myself to write to the end of my historical novel, a book I have been working on for a number of years, off and on, while I completed other projects.  It is most certainly my most ambitious book to date, if only because I am juggling multiple points of view, along with foreign and historic settings, politics, even technical information about sugar growing that I must make vivid to a modern reader.  My aim, this summer, was to bring this all to a head, especially since the end of this novel is meant to be very dramatic and also violent, a crescendo of so many parts, voices, themes.

 

Here is the challenge of these kinds of endings, or perhaps all endings: it is a kind of tidal wave that is slowly mounting, ready to curl, and yet one must also pay attention to the water particles. And yet one still builds, scene by scene, moment by moment, even as you are aware of these huge forces compelling the narrative forward. 

 

Summer is my best writing time, when I am home, puttering around my house, the children off in camp, and no teaching responsibilities fracturing my attention.  I had an image of getting deep into the space of this novel, and like a dream, it would mount and mount until I wrote to its dramatic conclusion. To my surprise, the ending, the denouement, a series of fast paced acts, is coming swifter than I expected.  There was no deep rumble in my consciousness, no mounting wave of creativity.  Mostly I find myself sketching out plot—one bad event and bad decision, leading to another, and hopefully mounting to tragedy.  This was somehow vaguely disappointing to me, and ran counter to my more romantic vision of the summer’s work.  But then I wondered that perhaps this is what I need to do—work more as an architect, a bit more cerebral—setting down the structure.  Then the deeper, unconscious swells will emerge once these decisions are made. 

I hope!

A Laboratory for Work & Living

The storm has passed.  The four and a half year old, who a short while ago was shrieking like a bird, demanding to play with the boy across the way, even though he has a different playdate, has somehow been persuaded to leave.  His almost nine-year-old brother has given up his grumpiness that he can’t buy sneakers on his own, and is off to a much-needed hair cut.  All courtesy of our au pair, who will ferry and soothe for the remaining afternoon hours.  Oh, but wait, the men who are here painting the front porch have discovered a rotting railing, so the carpenter must be called, to see about another repair.

Even with help, which I will admit we have in abundance, one must get used to riding the swells of crisis and noise that are a regular part of family life.  There is no simple room of one’s own.  There is just a ship that rocks and calms and then rocks again.  I often think: how is it that you can one minute be negotiating a screaming match between two slapping boys, or arguing that they can only get two cookies, not three, and then returning to the late 19th century Caribbean for a novel about a sugar plantation?  The two realities could not be more different.

The only way, I now believe, is to have a home base, and for me, a house with multiple floors and many doors.  Seven years ago, almost to a month, my husband Marc Aronson, also a writer and editor, pulled up our pup tent in Manhattan and camped down here in a suburb.  I never for a moment dreamed this would be my life.  I am an urban rat through and through.  The NYC subway is tattooed to my brain.  My husband was born and raised in Manhattan, did not even drive until his mid-thirties, and never understood why one needed a yard, when there was Central Park for playing.  For years I walked around the leafy, Mayberryesque town of Maplewood, feeling as if someone had unplugged my brain and body from its electricity source.  I was in a haze.  I could go on and on about why I am such a misfit here—even in one of the more cosmopolitan, heimishy, bohemian suburbs.  “You don’t live in the real suburbs!” I’ve been told.  But that’s the subject of an entirely different post.

On one front, though, I have to admit, it works: my writing.  I can’t even keep track of the reams that have been scribbled here, by the both of us.  When people ask, “Did you move for the kids? The schools?” I usually sheepishly admit, “No, for the office space.”  Our home isn't even the most practical: since neither of us grew up in a house, we did not know to ask for something called a den on the first floor (a room just for TV and playing, what a concept!) our kitchen still has the same impractical white linoleum tiles and a stove whose oven insulation is unraveling and probably dangerous.  But the day we first saw the house, we took the stairs up to the finished attic, saw the open loft space, glimpsed another room under the sloping eaves, sunlight pouring in through the lace curtains.  Our breaths caught in our throats.  We saw what could be made and done here.  Sucker Manhattanites that we are, we were sold.

Because I have a room, a little peach-walled study lined with books and papers, even a window seat that looks out on our small dappled lawn, I have a place of creation in my mind.  It really does work.  So I wander down the stairs and adjudicate some sibling crisis.  But I wander right back up again, sift around in some of the historical materials I’ve collected, and before I know it, I’m back in the world of sugar cane workers and angry Scottish overseers.  The interruptions are there, but the plunge back isn't so hard.  For a writer, or at least for this writer, a home becomes that grounding, that place from which all the complicated plants of living and working can flourish. 

My husband’s parents, Boris and Lisa Aronson, were set designers, and late in life left their rambling Upper West Side apartment and built a beautiful modern house on a cliff from which they worked.  To this day, there is still a hanging rope pulley where they cranked up the set models my mother-in-law painstakingly created.  Rooms there are plate glass and wood, studios, storage, living room repurposed accordingly over the years.  Boris called their house “a laboratory for work and living.”

That’s perhaps what we needed, here in our circa 1907 four-square home. A laboratory, from whence children can be raised and manuscripts written, all at the same time.