Cafe Kitsune Paris, with book from Librarie Galignani
When I go through a dry spell in my writing, I find it helps to think in fives. Instead of beginning the day with a scene from my novel-in-progress, I begin with a quick exercise: write about five of something. Five books I love, five cities I’ve lived in, five dates, five meals…anything.
In her excellent and esoteric blog Writer’s Notebook, NorCal native and Paris expat Summer Brennan explains the origins of the Five Things post.
“There seems to be something about the number five that helps to give a satisfying structure, at least to the writer, if not to the reader,” Brennan writes.
With that inspiration, I’m sharing my own five things: Five Things I Love and Five I Can Do Without. (I considered calling this post “5 Things I Love and Five I Loathe.” That would have been a catchier title, but a dishonest one. There’s nothing in this list of fives I actually hate. I began with the idea of very strong preferences. Here goes: Five Things I Love, and their less lovable counterparts.
Coffee not Tea
I have a secret bias. If someone reveals that they drink tea instead of coffee, I automatically mistrust them. I don’t think they’re morally corrupt, necessarily, but I question their common sense. Fair or no, I associate tea with china cups and doilies. Ruffled lampshades. Dusty sofas in floral patterns. I secretly suspect that the majority of tea-drinkers can name the lesser royals and perhaps even recall their more questionable moments in haberdashery. (I do have dear friends who drink tea and exhibit none of these characteristics, and I fully admit my bias is not based in fact). By contrast, in my mind, a coffee drinker’s lamps give good light. Their linens are unfussy. They like to get stuff done.
Give me coffee (I wrote a whole book about it)—the stronger the better. Black, not doctored. Give me energy and focus, the noise of the coffee grinder, the oil of the beans, the straight-to-the-brain olfactory joy when you pour the ground beans into the filter basket. Give me the heat, the first bitter taste, the burn in the throat, the electric charge. Give me a really good drip machine.
Best coffeemaker ever: Technivorm MoccamasterDeux Magots coffee in Paris
I should mention my husband drinks neither tea nor coffee. He is strictly a hot chocolate man. Once, when he edited one of my novels, he replaced every mention of the male protagonist drinking coffee with the male protagonist drinking hot chocolate. Despite reservations, I let it stand. Several layperson reviewers objected. “No grown man drinks that much hot chocolate,”they said. For some readers, the prevalence of hot chocolate in the novel created a problem of verisimilitude, a corruption of the fictional dream.
I will quote one of the reviewers, who calls herself muppetbaby99 and who writes a great blog called Doubleplusgood where she does wildly entertaining “live readings” of novels. She posted about The Marriage Pact for several days in July of 2017, right after the book came out. On the matter of hot chocolate, she had this to say:
I think Michelle Richmond must own stock in a bunch of different ‘hot chocolate beverage flavouring chemical’ companies due to sheer number of times she mentions/describes HOT CHOCOLATE in this story. She must be getting a kick-back from Nestle
If I were the type of writer to correct readers on matters of the possible, I would have responded, “But there are men who drink that much hot chocolate. I am married to one of them!” Of course I am not that type of writer. Readers are, after all, entitled to their opinions. May they all be so lucky as fall in love with a man who is man enough to drink hot chocolate instead of coffee or tea.
P.S. I don’t own stock in Nestle BUT we do have an entire cabinet full of Benco, the French equivalent of Nesquik, which my husband buys by the case whenever he goes back to Paris.
A Few Things I’d Tell Myself, If I Could Go Back in Time
[aesop_image imgwidth=”70%” img=”https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*XLmcXfNNFlaZwp9-D3_Y_Q.jpeg” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Somewhere in Vermont, sometime in the 90s, a few years past the age of 22″ captionposition=”center”]
If I were 22, I’d tell myself that all of those journals I painstakingly kept, scribbling away with colored pens while Enya’s voice spilled out of the boom box, would just end up gathering dust. I’d advise myself to get on with the business of writing fiction instead. I’d tell myself to study some really good stories, like the works of Grace Paley, instead of wallowing in Anais Nin, who always made me feel as though I was not having quite enough sex (although, in retrospect, I was probably having plenty).
A record of one’s days is relentlessly and uselessly Jungian, while a pile of unpublished stories is an education, an apprenticeship, a step in the right direction. I’d tell myself that the sentences I thought were so pretty, with all the linguistic flourishes, were actually just really long. I’d tell myself that there would come a time when I would prefer Steve Forbert to Enya, In n’ Out to Wendy’s, Ismail Kadare to Anais Nin. I’d tell myself that the only passions of my youth that I would still be passionate about in middle age would be solitude, books, and writing.
I’d tell myself that the apartment that came with my internship with Whittle Communications in Knoxville, Tennessee, would be the last free apartment I’d ever have, so I ought to enjoy the two bedrooms, large kitchen, and brand new furniture, none of which I had to share. I’d tell myself that when I did start sharing an apartment, with a fellow former intern at a subsidized housing complex across the street from a police station, I should keep it cleaner. I should make greater effort to spend time with my roommate, a nice girl from Ohio, who was a lot of fun.
[aesop_quote type=”pull” background=”#848484″ text=”#848484″ width=”content” align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”I would tell myself that I would never outgrow my intense need for solitude.” parallax=”off” direction=”left”]
My desire to be quiet and alone, punctuated by brief bouts of longing for conversations with strangers, would never waver. I’d say, “When you were 11 years old, you preferred to be alone. Now, at 22, you prefer to be alone. When you are twice as old as you are now, you will still prefer to be alone. Not existentially alone, not alone in life, but alone in the moment. It is your nature; embrace it. Don’t feel the need to go out just because young people ‘go out.’ If you want to stay home and write, stay home and write. There is nothing wrong with that.”
[aesop_quote type=”pull” background=”#282828″ text=”#848484″ align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”I might say, “Less makeup. More sunscreen.” And “Cable-access news is on its way out, faster than you can say pleated jeans.”” parallax=”on” direction=”left”]
I’d tell myself not to worry, that I would not always be poor and uninsured, that I would not always have to pay for necessary surgical procedures on my Visa card or agonize over the purchase of a pair of shoes from Payless. I’d tell myself that the cheap shoes, like the credit card surgery and the tanning salon job that paid $5 an hour and the cable-access news job that paid nothing, were minor bumps on the way to a more comfortable existence.
Oh, I’d tell myself to stop after the third beer and the second shot. Definitely, I’d probably tell myself that.
When the elderly gynecologist patted me on the knee suggestively and whispered that I had a pretty cervix, I would assert that I had every right to slap him. There were a lot of people I should have slapped in those days, but, having been raised in a Southern Baptist church where teenaged girls were referred to as “righteous foxes,” I was conditioned to graciously accept shady compliments from men in positions of authority.
I’d tell myself to end the engagement to the sociopath sooner, and to be kinder to the next fellow, who was and is a very good man. I’d tell myself that the sociopath and the very good man would both soon be a matter of history, anyway, because in a couple of years I would walk into a stuffy classroom in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on the first day of my MFA program, and meet my life head on. I’d tell myself that this would be a good time to forgo the small talk and quote Grace Paley instead: “Hello, My Life.”
I’d tell myself to keep the shoes and the dress I wore on that irreversibly significant day, and to throw away a lot of other stuff, instead of carrying it with me from apartment to apartment, house to house, for many years, watching it expand, sponge-like, to fit whatever space I lived in.
That the shortest decade I would ever experience would be the one between my son’s birth and his tenth birthday. That on a spring day in 2015, the boy who once felt as light in my arms as a loaf of bread would look up at me and say, “I bet I can pick you up.” And then he would pick me up. And I would realize that the next decade would move even faster than the last, and I better hang on and practice “being in the moment,” a skill for which there would one day be many helpful apps.
Braum’s Ice Cream in Fayetteville, 1995; wedding in Yosemite, 2001; San Francisco, 2004; Little League, 2015
“What are apps?” my 22 year old self would surely ask. To which I would reply, “I really can’t explain it.”
[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#282828″ text=”#848484″ align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”I’d tell myself that the next twenty years would be okay. That all the places I couldn’t imagine going, I’d eventually get to.” parallax=”off” direction=”left”]
I’d tell myself that I would work in Beijing, and I would work in the Empire State Building, and I’d see the Northern Lights in Iceland, and I’d ride a bus through Patagonia to Ushuaia, the town “at the end of the world,” that I’d honeymoon in Budapest and take my kid swimming in Oslo’s public baths during a startlingly warm Norwegian summer, that I’d get lost on a mountain in a thunderstorm in Slovenia and be rescued by a troop of young boys who, many years later, would find me on a thing called Facebook, which was on a thing called the Internet, which predated those things called apps.
I’d tell myself not to lose the photograph my boyfriend took of me with my parents on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty in 1999, the last photo of the three of us together. In a few months my parents would be divorced, my boyfriend would be my betrothed, and we’d be on our way to San Francisco, the city of my dreams. In the photo, my parents, who have not yet told me about their plans to end their thirty-year marriage, stand on either side of me, and in the background, the Twin Towers rise up, so ugly and imposing, and yet, it seemed, so reassuringly permanent.
[aesop_quote type=”pull” background=”#282828″ text=”#848484″ align=”center” size=”2″ quote=”If I were 22, I’d say, “Don’t worry, you’ll keep writing.” ” parallax=”on” direction=”left”]
Because the need to write would never go away, and through every bump in the road that desire would keep me going. It would always be what I came back to, my parachute in case of tragedy, my planned soft landing. Well, if A, B, or C happens, at least I can write about it. Though, deep down, I understood that, in the face of real tragedy, it was quite possible that I would cease to write. Because words can only take you so far. Because there is such a thing as the unspeakable.
More optimistically, I’d remind myself that I was young: at 22, I couldn’t wrap my mind around that fact. At 22, I believed my time was very short, that I must do and experience everything as soon as possible. I’d tell myself that, one day, life would indeed be short, but for now, the road ahead was long and meandering, and scary and sometimes dangerous, and often not very easy, and yet, mostly wonderful. I would tell myself that the next twenty years would bring more happiness than I expected, less turmoil than I feared, and, blessing of blessings, nothing I couldn’t handle. I’d tell myself to stop worrying so much, and just get on with the ride.
This post was inspired by the #IfIWere22 tag on linkedin.
Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts while spring cleaning. I enjoy the format so much (particularly a podcast called The Heart of Organizing) that I decided to start my own podcast. It’s now live, and the first episode is How to Find a Literary Agent. In this 8-minute podcast, I talk about 5 things you can do to find the right literary agent to represent your book (hint: it does not involve giant indexes listing thousands of names and addresses).
Why is it so important to work with a good literary agent? Signing on with a literary agent is the first step toward publication with a major publisher. Most publishers won’t even glance at unagented submissions. Your agent will be your partner in all things publishing. She’ll get your book out to the right editors, negotiate your contracts, and serve as your liaison for foreign rights.
She’ll handle all sorts of rights for each book–audio, book club editions, reprints, and more. I’ve been with my own agent since 2004, and I feel so fortunate to have found her. Without her, I would have had a very different (and I imagine far less satisfying) writing career. Go here to listen to the podcast. If you like what you hear, you can click “follow” on the podcast page, so you’ll know when new episodes are added.
