It isn’t often that you get to meet a writer whose work you have read, admired—and yes, quoted—for more than a decade. For me, that writer is Dani Shapiro. When her book, Still Writing, came out in 2013, I consumed it in one sitting. Her candor, her confessions, her sense that writing is hard, but also worthwhile, spoke to me. And it still does. If you’ve taken my classes, you’ve heard me quote Dani in Still Writing.
Dani writes memoirs, novels, essays, Op-Eds. She wrote her latest novel, Signal Fires, over the course of 15 years, setting aside what ultimately became an award-winning project when she ran out of runway for the chronology she envisioned for the story (she started at one point in time and worked her way backward). Then, years later when she was cleaning her closet during the pandemic, she found 100 pages of the all-but-forgotten manuscript.
Dani’s experience of writing (and then really writing) Signal Fires speaks to the messiness of the craft. It speaks to the idea that some projects just aren’t ready yet. And it helped encourage me to stick with my own book project, which has been brewing—mostly in my mind—for more than a decade.
How Dani Does It
During Dani’s book tour for the paperback release of Signal Fires, I had a front-row seat (okay, mid-auditorium seat) to watch her “in conversation” with my friend Melissa Harrison at the Dallas Museum of Art (thank you, Melissa!).
Dani said the experience of writing memoir is different from fiction. With memoir, the material is often difficult, painful. In a recent Family Secretspodcast, she quoted Andre Dubus III (who I met at an intimate Tufts alumni gathering in honor of his memoir Townie) “The question in memoir is not what happened. The question in memoir is what the f*&$ happened?”
So how does Dani make dinner? How does she get through the day seeming like a not-tortured person? “When I’m working on memoir, I go to a place inside of me that is very, very small, and when I get there, it expands and becomes the world that I’m swimming in, the air that I’m breathing. And then, at the end of the day, I come back out and that world shrinks down to a size that’s manageable. And I make dinner and live my life.”
That’s not the case with novels. When Dani’s writing a novel, it’s a playground. “It feels like I’m taking a sidestep into a fictional world, and that world feels as real to me, or perhaps more real to me, than the actual world,” she said.
The Act of Discovery
Whether you’re writing fiction or memoir, there must be a level of discovery. With memoir, you know something about the story you want to tell, the perimeter of the story. But you must learn something about yourself along the way. “That’s the most satisfying part creatively of writing a memoir,” Dani said.
Joan Didion seems to agree. In her widely-quoted essay, “Why I Write”, Didion writes: “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Novels also require a slow unveiling, a process of discovery. But when you’re starting a novel, there is no perimeter. You may not have a clue what the story is about. The whole world is up for grabs—and that can be both liberating and oppressive.
A Winding Road
Dani had a more seamless beginning than a lot of writers. She wrote and sold her first novel while she was still in graduate school. But that doesn’t mean that writing books doesn’t challenge her. “Every time I start a new book, I feel like I don’t know how to do it,” she said. “Because I don’t. I don’t know how to write the next book.”
Even with memoir, while you may know what the story is about, you still have to decide what to leave in, what to leave out, and how your personal story will connect with readers. “You’re not writing an autobiography. You’re writing about a story carved out of a life, which is why it’s possible to write more than one memoir,” Dani said. She should know. She has written five.
In addition to choosing which window you want to look through as you tell the story (you can’t look through two windows at once), you need to recognize the right time to tell the story because in memoir, the relationship between the writer and the story is the story.
“The story you would write about a particular event at age 30 would be a different story than the one you would write at an age of 50, and it would be different story still at age 70 because our memories, and our relationship to our stories continues to evolve,” she said. Writing memoir allows you to trap a particular story between hardcovers, even while it continues to evolve in your mind over time.
It’s no wonder that Dani has a strong and growing fan base. Signal Fires has been optioned for TV and Dani is writing the script. At the same time, her husband, Michael Maren, a filmmaker, is working on the adaptation of her memoir Inheritance.
From Left: Amy Pengra Button, Yours Truly, Melissa Harrison, Dani Shapiro
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