Crash Course Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Half-Title Page

  Also by Robin Black

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  I. Life (& Writing)

  Something We Share Something We Don't

  The Dark Ages

  My Default Man

  Agoraphobia Writing and Me

  Father Chronicles Embracing Cordelia

  House Lessons I

  Autumn 1972

  ADHD I

  A Life of Profound Uncertainty

  On Not Reading

  Rejection Summer Conference Style

  The Dreaded Desk Drawer Novel

  My Parent Trap

  ADHD II

  The Art of Ripping Stitches

  On Learning to Spell Women's Names While Men Buy My Novel For Their Wives

  In Which My Mother Suggests That I Murder Her As a Marketing Ploy

  Shut Up Shut Down

  Material

  Father Chronicles To the Extent That He Was Able

  Varieties of Fiction

  II Writing & Life

  Twenty One Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started to Write

  The Collaborative Reader

  The Final Draft What's Love Got to Do With It

  How Not to Query

  Line Edits I

  Living in the Present

  If Only The Imaginative Wealth of What Didn't Take Place

  No Fool Like a Bold Fool

  Give it Up

  House Lessons II

  Revising Reality

  The Success Gap

  The Literary Birds and Bees

  In Defense of Adverbs Guardians of the Human Condition

  Line Edits II

  The Subject is Subjectivity

  Tales of Sorrow Tales of Woe

  House Lessons III

  Giotto's Perfect Circle

  Line Edits III

  Father Chronicles The Persistence of Demons

  Empty Now

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR CRASH COURSE

  “Crash Course is an exhilarating hybrid, part memoir and part literary analysis and part craft book—Black has created a new form, one that implicitly and explicitly explores how art and life are helically intertwined. Her essays address the death of parents and the vulnerability of children, what surprise and failure can teach us, and what love and courage look like, in life and on the page. Crash Course will be an oasis for writers at every stage, and for lifelong readers thirsting to explore the vortical intersection of life and art. Black is one of my favorite writers, and it is a joy to watch her craft the ultimate craft book. Black’s essays are beautiful and hilarious and searingly honest articulations of ‘questions both unavoidable and unanswerable’—the questions we have to keep asking, to go on living, and to go on writing.”

  —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

  “I wasn’t more than two pages into Crash Course when I pulled out a pen and started underlining like crazy. In these essays, Robin Black is simultaneously a wise teacher, an encouraging mentor, and that friend who gives you the real dirt on what the writing life is like. Crash Course is an invaluable resource and reassurance for any writer.”

  —Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You

  “Robin Black is an astonishing writer. There’s no one I trust more to offer wisdom about writing as both a craft and a way of life.”

  —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

  “Crash Course is at once both deeply compassionate and full of a kind of Nabokovian complexity that turns discussions of craft into meditations on art and existence in general. Unstinting, unsparing, and ferociously honest, this book reassures in a way that empty reassurances never could. Black has stared into the writing life’s darkest abysses and come out triumphant, full of authentic wisdom that actually inspires. Crash Course has the power to give you a precious gift: to pick you up and make you want to get to work.”

  —Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves

  “Crash Course is not only one of the most entertaining and insightful books on writing I’ve ever encountered, it’s perhaps the most useful. It wasn’t long before I started jotting down, in the table of contents, the people I needed to share each essay with—the colleagues and students I needed to grab by the collar and say, ‘Look, here it is! That very thing you’ve been needing to read: She went and wrote it!’ ”

  —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Hundred-Year House

  “Crash Course is the book that should be in the hands of every writer, aspiring or established. It is packed with such wisdom, humor and raw power, I know I will keep returning to it. Robin Black has had the courage to rip open her soul and reflect upon a life’s experience, and the unflinching generosity to share it with us.”

  —Shilpi Somaya Gowda, author of The Golden Son

  Crash

  Course

  Also by Robin Black

  If I loved you, I would tell you this

  Life Drawing

  Crash

  Course

  essays from where

  writing and life collide

  Robin Black

  Engine Books

  Indianapolis

  Engine Books

  PO Box 44167

  Indianapolis, IN 46244

  enginebooks.org

  Copyright © 2016 by Robin Black

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  Also available in eBook formats from Engine Books.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-938126-71-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016934879

  For Annie

  (Best. Teacher. Ever.)

  With Infinite Love

  I. LIFE (& Writing)

  Something We Share,

  Something We Don’t

  The only person in my home who thinks about words more than I do is my younger daughter. Here I sit, struggling day after day to find the language I need—because I chose to be a writer and that’s what we writers do. And there is my daughter, struggling through her every waking hour to find the right words—because she has an expressive language disability and she has no choice.

  For many years, that distorted mirror-image flickered just outside my full attention, like a light in my peripheral vision, present but indistinct. And then one day, writing at my desk, I couldn’t think of a particular word, a word that meant precisely what I needed it to mean but also carried some hint of otherness, as so many words do. I wanted to capture the precision and the nuance. I was frustrated with myself for being unable to snatch it from the place where such perfect words hide, obscured by ones that are almost the same. And I was enjoying the chase.

  In the midst of this, my daughter came home from school, from first grade. After a hug, she said, “Mommy, can I have a glass of…of…”

  I waited to see if she would get it. I had been warned that if I kept finishing all her sentences, it would grow more difficult for her to do.

  “…of…of…”

  “Milk,” I supplied.

  “Right.” She nodded. “Milk.”

  •

  We suspected from early on that something might be amiss but I didn’t have the right word for that either. Just a lot of strange stuff, was how I thought of it.
She didn’t crawl until she was over a year. She didn’t repeat the sounds I made, in that way most babies do. She took no delight in rhymes, even at three and four. Her speech resisted syntax, seemed incapable of organizing itself into conventional structures. Her utterances had a persistently telegraphic quality. I caught myself supplying words for her as though she were elderly, a little senile.

  My daughter was four years old on the day that she and I sat outside on our back step. I was armed with a sheet of white paper, a box of markers, and the determination to make some headway this time. I drew a C. “The C makes a kuh sound,” I said for the gazillionth time. “Kuh. Like cat.” I drew a hasty cat face next to the letter. I repeated the word: cat. “Now what sound does a C make?”

  She looked at me with such genial openness, so unmistakably unpressured to respond, and I understood as I never had before: Everything I had just said—including the fact that I had asked her a question—was meaningless to her.

  In a perfect world, she would have been tested the next day and all the appropriate interventions would have started that week, but her pre-school discouraged me. She was still well within the range of normal, I was told. Children learn to read at different ages, I was told. My older two children had been exceptionally early readers and I was holding her to too high a standard. I was in danger of pathologizing a perfectly “normal,” intelligent child.

  Intelligent, yes. She was—and she is—extremely intelligent. But “normal”? I really didn’t think so, not the way her teachers meant it. Still, I didn’t rush her off to be evaluated. Who was I to argue with the experts? And I wasn’t in such great shape myself back then, subject to crippling bouts of depression and anxiety after a late pregnancy loss. My confidence in my own judgment was low. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was seeing gloom and doom everywhere. Maybe I was, as the school implied, being somehow unfair to my child.

  And anyway, wouldn’t it be nice to think they were right?

  The months crept by, while my concerns about both of us ebbed and flowed. Her development; my emotional health. I would speak with her teachers, and they would tell me to calm down. I would tell myself to calm down, then have a panic attack about something else. I would convince my husband that there was a problem, then turn around and tell him I was just taking my anxieties out on her. My daughter was five before I made real progress in addressing either of our situations to any real effect.

  That fall, she entered kindergarten and I began attending a fiction-writing workshop—picking up on a pursuit I had let fall away for many years. As soon as I started writing again I felt the potential for an internal, emotional balance that had long eluded me. Situating myself among words, arranging them, feeling them flow through me as I conveyed my understanding of the world, brought a profound comfort and a sense of new purpose to my life.

  My daughter’s kindergarten experience was a different story, though. While I discovered a welcoming home in language, she encountered only barred doors. By November, her school was ready to allow for the possibility that something was “atypical” in her development. They thought that she probably should be tested, after all.

  We parents, we shine our children up like jewels to highlight what is strongest, most capable in them. Even with all my anxieties, I had been doing it for years. Finishing her sentences, translating her telegraphic utterances. Smoothing her way, trying to. Smoothing her into a different child. Polishing, polishing. Not knowing it, not really, until I watched her testing through a one-way mirror, the process reversed, the glowing, smooth layers stripped back, the rough edges, the fault lines revealed.

  We were told that she had an array of language-related disabilities, including an almost complete lack of phonemic awareness, the quality that enables people to distinguish sounds from one another, the quality that makes you able to understand that the word cat is comprised of three sounds. Kuh-ah-tuh. It was going to take extraordinary measures for her to learn how to read, endless interventions for her to converse effectively. And a lot would depend on her, we were told. On how hard she would work.

  That was fourteen years ago. In the time since, our respective relationships to language have been ever more clearly defined. I began publishing stories in 2003, went for my MFA, started teaching, and have now published books, while my daughter’s travels through school have revealed more and more linguistic hurdles she needs to clear. The list of her challenges is long, the ways in which each seems to strengthen the power of the others, fiendish.

  And we now define ourselves, both of us, by our relationship to language. Ask me “What do you do?” and the answer is “I’m a writer.” Ask my daughter the same question, and the answer is “I go to a school for kids with learning disabilities.”

  Something we share; and something we don’t.

  When my books sold, in 2008, I waited to feel the joy that famously accompanies such news, and it never arrived. I was glad for the sale, but in a decidedly muted way. Everyone else seemed so ecstatic for me, while the whole thing had nothing to do with what would really bring me joy. “There’s only so happy I can be,” I told close friends. “This doesn’t make my child’s problems any better. It’s just something good that happened to me.”

  The unspoken phrase: and that can never happen for her.

  What if we were talking about a sport? What about the woman who decides to become a professional runner just as she learns that her daughter will always walk with a cane? What about the trophies she collects? Are they displayed on a shelf? Hidden away? Does her daughter wait for her, cheering, at the finish line? Or does the mother extinguish her own dreams, for fear of saddening her child?

  Sometimes, I feel as though I have stolen something that by rights belongs to her. That there is a certain reasonable quotient of pleasure from language to which each of us is entitled, and I took her share, leeched it off of her somehow. Saved myself when I should have saved her. I wept when my galleys arrived, not for joy as we authors are scripted to do, but from a terrible deep sorrow, a grief in me that glistens perpetually with guilt.

  That’s not of much consequence, though. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I make of this imbalance of ours. It matters what my daughter makes of her life. Now. Later. My role is a supporting one in her story, though I wish that it weren’t. I wish I could sacrifice everything to make her life easier. Because in that story, the one in which I star, my computer bursts into flames and the pages of my books dissolve, the words dancing their way toward my child, who inhales them deeply, allows them to fill her, and easily, easily breathes them out.

  But my daughter is the heroine here, heroic indeed as she battles the forces that have senselessly weighted her with these struggles. And I am a writer who has faced, again, again, the painful irony of what I do, and has chosen, again, again, to do it anyway.

  “I think I should write a novel for kids your age,” I told her one day when she was twelve, thinking, I suppose, that she would feel more included in the work I do, maybe trying to demonstrate that I can amend my inclinations to suit her reading skills.

  She shot me a fast, piercing look, and shook her head. “No way,” she said. “I’m the one in this family doing that. I claim it. The novel writing thing for kids.”

  And there it was. Briefly. That joy I never otherwise feel. Joy, because whatever I may perceive as mine not hers, my daughter rejects the notion that everything pleasurable about language belongs to me. Joy, because she has no hesitation in staking her claim.

  “I look forward to reading it,” I said. “It’s all yours.”

  And I returned to my keyboard, once again.

  The Dark Ages: Before I Wrote

  It’s strangely easy for me to forget now how miserable I was over the period of many years when I so, so wanted to write, but could not. My late twenties, my thirties, a time I don’t like to think about, much less talk about, not because doing so brings back the unhappiness but because I am embarrassed.

  You see, I wasn’t nobly unhappy,
or quietly unhappy. I wasn’t graciously unfulfilled, strategizing with my husband in reasonable tones about possible changes I might make. I was a tantrum-throwing mess. I was a shoe-hurling, pan-slamming, screaming—literally screaming—nightmare. Not all the time, not even frequently; but regularly, and memorably, for sure.

  There was a hotel room in Aspen, a family vacation, my three children motionless as I railed. “I hate everything, everything. I hate everything. I just can’t take it anymore. I hate everything, absolutely everything!”

  I don’t know why the dam broke there, on that mountain, that day. I don’t know why it broke in my own kitchen on seemingly random afternoons, or in the car on otherwise unremarkable Saturdays.

  But this I do know: I did not hate everything. I hated myself. A lot. I so, so, so, so wanted to write. I so, so, so, so wanted to write. I had wanted to since taking a creative writing class in college, at the age of nineteen. I had discovered then how powerful and oddly soothing an act it could be for me to make stories up and type them onto the page. I dreamed of making it my career. And yet, for fifteen years, more than that, every time I made a start, I stopped. Not because I disliked the result. I thought I might be pretty good if I could just keep going, but I didn’t keep going. I quit. I always quit. And I didn’t understand: How could a person simultaneously want to do something so much and be the only thing standing in her way?

  For so long, that question seemed to belong to me and me alone, the way my eye-color does, the way my profile does, the way a blood-type once learned is a fact about oneself, immutable. This was my personal, solitary dilemma.

  I don’t remember ever using the term “self sabotage” to describe this phenomenon until after it stopped being my greatest skill. In fact, I remember a sensation of such infinite unhappiness that very likely I would have rejected anything as compact as a single term to describe it. And I remember slipping from wanting to write to wanting only to stop wanting to write, for the longing not to outlive the possibility.