Solution for Generational Warfare: Empathy

I have horrible neighbors.  They’re crabby, they complain loudly about completely irrelevant things – like my friends parking their cars on the street when they come to visit – and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get a smile out of them.  They’re older than my parents, and there’s a soft spot in my heart for older people.  I miss my grandparents, and I’m always searching for positive older influences for my boys.  How I’d love for them to have a sweet elderly neighbor that they could go visit every now and again.  These are not those neighbors.  My husband says, “to hell with those old coots!  What are they going to do to us?  We own the house next door!”

While it’s true that they can’t fire me or call my landlord to complain (I’m the landlord!) or force me to move out, it bothers me tremendously that the people who share a property boundary with me find my family so incredibly distasteful.  They sneer at my children when they run and chase each other in the back yard (their house sits on a hill and overlooks our property), they talk loudly about how our dog is a nuisance (she’s a 3-pound Yorkshire Terrier we rescued after the flood), they leave copies of the Association’s by-laws in our mailbox with sections highlighted and sticky notes that say, “just making sure you have a copy of this.”

I wrote them a very long and passionate letter about how we’re good, honest, hard-working people who happen to have two toddlers and another baby on the way.  I told them I envied their lovely lawn and their retirement time and how one day I hoped my property looked as tidy and well-groomed as theirs does.  Then I reminded them that everyone they know is fighting a hard battle and asked for their kindness and respect.  In the letter, I told him that I feel out of sorts, and I feel oppressed, and I feel so sad that I can’t make them empathize with my situation, however silly they think it might be.

They called an “emergency HOA meeting” in response.  Oh, my neighbor is the VP of the HoA. He’s proposed imposing fines for street-parking, excessive  noise, and pets “not under the control of their owners.”

This left me thinking about something I heard on a political talking-heads show.  “If you’re going to engage in generational warfare,” the pundit said, “you’d better side with the generation that always votes.”

I think my neighbor assumes I won’t come to the meeting.  He assumes I won’t be searching out every single swing set in the neighborhood and making sure every family under 60 shows up.  He assumes that because I’m young and busy that he can push me around simply because he’s older, he has a position on the board, and he shows up.  Well, he’s wrong.  If I’ve learned anything from my students, it’s that when you kick a hive, you get a swarm.  And he’s kicked my hive one too many times.

I’ve been driving around in the boat of a minivan that makes me feel bloated just dreaming up ways to dismantle the HoA by-laws, and I have a pretty good argument put together.  I’ve also been fantasizing about what kind of HoA-approved shenanigans would get the better of that old goat.  I’m really a fan of letting my husband’s Appalachian roots show for a few weeks.

And this morning, while I was sitting in a restaurant having breakfast with my two-year-old, it hit me.  I feel like a teenager all over again.  I feel like that mean old seventh-grade math teacher – Mr. So-and-so, the one with the permanent scowl and impossible temperament – is out to get me once again.  Or I feel like I did when the pack of popular kids decided to throw dog-food at me n the hallway during my freshman year.  I feel trapped, just like I did when I was in middle and high school.  I couldn’t change schools, couldn’t change teachers, had no control over my own daily schedule, and I had to live my day side-by-side with people who I felt hated my guts for no rational reason.

Being the pleaser that I am, I tried all sorts of things to get those hateful people to like me.  I showed up to school with cookies for mean teachers.  I volunteered to do homework for cruel popular kids.  I was even more miserable when my attempts to make peace were ignored, ridiculed, or used against me.  It made me feel hopeless and powerless.  So instead of standing up for myself, I retreated into myself, into my journals, into my writing.

Those terrible experiences made me the reflective, kind, empathetic person I am today.  They also steeled my spine against people who might act in a cruel way toward my own children.  And while I tried the nice way – cookies and friendly gestures, and a well-written letter, now it’s time to get my dukes up.

As I was leaving that restaurant with my little boy this morning, a group of WWII veterans stopped to say hello to him.  He shook their hands and said, “Oh, hi!” to each of them.  They were delighted.  They cooed over him, patted his head, and commented about how he was “cute as a bug.”  One old guy in a US Navy ball cap with the name of his ship embroidered on it pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed my son a dollar bill.

“OH!” he said, “Dink you!”

The old guy patted his head and said, “now don’t you spend that all in one place.”  Then he turned to me and said, “I’ve had a tough morning, but that little fella sure did cheer me up.”

My heart melted.  I missed my own grandparents, of course.  My granddad was a Navy man aboard the USS Fessenden during WWII.  But more than that, I felt so angry that I couldn’t replace my jerk neighbors with these sweet old people.  If empathy is the lubricant that keeps the generations happily coexisting among each other, why is it so difficult for some people to muster?  How can it be so hard for my neighbor to remember back to a time when his life was just beginning, when his children were young and his days were filled with worries and errands and bills.  How is so hard for some people to find kindness for those right next door?

I just hope my kids aren’t missing out.  I’d love for them to have a neighborhood where they’re appreciated for the charming, smart, delightful young men they are.  Generational warfare serves nobody.  But a pat on the head, a dollar in the pocket, and a hug from a little boy can turn a dreary day around.

A Literary Promise and A New Baby!

New Baby House is on the Way!

August 31, 2011, 3:02pm – I make this promise:  I will finish Ruby’s story before March 1st, 2012.

“Nice,” you may say.  “Who cares?  You haven’t finished her story in 17 years, what’s another year?”

You probbaly didn’t say that.  And if you didn’t, thank you.  That’s Mildred speaking, my inner editor.  She’s a doozy, that Mildred.  And though I try to follow my own advice every day about imagining her inside a giant Monty-Python style catapult and launching her into the stratosphere, she’s one tenacious octogenarian.  She keeps coming back for more nasty down-with-Kristen talk.

And I have a secret: Mildred is calling for reinforcements.

A baby, to be specific.

Little did I know that right about the time that Ruby started telling me her story, I was growing another story.  The story of my new baby, who is due to be born on March 19th.

Oh, how excited I am!  Baby socks and baby clothes and tiny poems about tiny baby fingers!  Late nights and early mornings with milky breath on my cheek.  Long walks in the pram, yards of white linen pressed into pleats around the bassinet, twirling tiny wisps of hair between my fingers.

And no time to write about Ruby.

So March 19th, or whenever new Baby House decides to arrive, will be baby time.

And until then, Ruby, it’s all about you, baby girl.

Here’s how we start, just as I tell my students.

1.  Outline.  I have pages and pages of Ruby’s story outlined.  I’ve poured over the details just long enough to start changing them.  That’s a key indicator that it’s time to crack into prose-writing.

2.  Back-stories.  I have motivations and histories for all of my main characters crafted and completed.  Even if I never touch them, it’s proof to my own doubting nature that I know my characters inside and out.

3.  The promise.  If I say it out loud, I’m going to hold myself to it.  And there may be a fair amount of guilt and nagging from my husband and my mother and my writerly friends.  I welcome it.  And so does Ruby.

Strangely, my first chapters won’t be the first chapters in the book.  Those first pages are far too important and too delicate to bludgeon with my first prose attempts in this novel.  The first pages call for a light hand and strong, present voice of a character who has lived and breathed for quite some time.  I’ll start in medias res, in the middle of the story, and work my way outward to the ends.

And the most important part of getting Ruby written is to write every day.  To write madly as if my hair were on fire.  To write as if this story is the last one I’ll ever tell.  To write as if today is the last chance to redeem my word-starved soul.

Because it is.

Now off to write.

Missing: Lost and Found

August 4th was my grandmother’s birthday. She would have been 85 today had she not passed away nearly three years ago. And I find myself struggling again today, wishing I could just pick up the phone.

But that’s where life is right now – in flux. I have been kept from my own writing by circumstance and by my own body – so worn out and exhausted that it demands I sleep. But I can’t sleep. And I can’t write. And despite my best efforts to launch my inner editors, quash my worries, and focus on restorative decisions that make me feel happy, I’m left staring at walls.

My husband is away on business, and the kids spent the night with my mom last night. I had several hours to myself in my own pretty house. A meatloaf cooled on the stovetop. I watched an Elizabethan film that my husband would have instantly vetoed. I mopped the kitchen floor without two wild boys running through the clean, smudging the shine. And as I was washing the dishes at my sink, there she was. My Mammy. Or her memory, at least.

I hadn’t realized her birthday was right around the corner. Or at least, I hadn’t said it out loud. And I’m fairly certain that her presence was triggered earlier in the evening by a giant smudge on my living room wall where Shephard, who had been standing in time-out for ages, had wiped a long, spaghetti-colored handprint. I found some Pine Sol and a paper towel and scrubbed it and realized I was “warshing walls” as she would have said.

It did not escape me either, in my night of solitude and rest, that my grandmother was never alone. And rarely rested. Her evenings were spent watching the news or a movie, but she always had sewing in her lap. If she sat at the table with a cup of black coffee, she had a pen and paper handy to make a list of things to do that day. If she shopped, it was with a purpose. And a budget. And I was being positively indulgent last night.

It also does not escape me that Ruby, the character in the book I haven’t been working on, talks as my grandmother might have spoken when she was a teenager in Lebanon, Kentucky. They’re like bookends to me now – a child and an old woman – both specters who haunt me, relentless in their urging. Mammy who never tired. And Ruby who has never had her story told.

Had my grandmother been a writer, she probably would have published hundreds of books, applying her unflagging work ethic to the art and the craft of word-smithing. And if Ruby were a wall to warsh, I would have done it already.

But she’s not. She’s a story. And I’m just so tired that I worry I don’t know where to start.

I wish I could pick up the phone and call my grandmother. I’d ask her about how her old Kentucky Home smelled at the start of springtime, when Ruby’s story starts. I’d have her tell me about walking and riding a bicycle around town. I’d ask her to tell me about someone in town she didn’t trust. Or didn’t like. I’d have her tell me what her mama used to to cook for supper on Saturday nights.

It seems incredibly cruel that when someone dear passes away, not only do you lose their physical bodies, but also their phone numbers, their birthday cards, their reassurances. Somewhere, it seems to me, there should be a consolation prize for loss. A once-per year phone call from Heaven where she could say something, anything. I’d settle for a chiding reproach about why I don’t call more often.

To Ruby, I’ll start writing soon, girl. I promise.

And to Mammy, Happy Birthday, you old thing.

Our Antagonists are our Helpers

“He who struggles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.” -Edmund Burke

Today in class I’m teaching my young novelists how to write effective antagonists. It’s a challenge for young writers. They have a tendency to write good vs. bad. Black and white. Right and wrong.

But what I tell them is that the best antagonists have humanizing motives. Antagonists in our real lives are rarely madmen hell-bent on ruining our lives for no more reason than to see the pleading and fear in our eyes. Monsters in the real world do those awful things we fear. But they do them for a reason.

I keep returning to the awful shootings in Norway this past week. The shooter took out dozens of people in a drug-fueled rage in keeping with a racist diatribe he’d written and published on the Internet.

But why? He wanted to address the media. He wanted more attention for his crazy ideas. And he was afraid that if he didn’t take extreme action, his country would fall victim to anti-Norwegian sentiment. He didn’t just wake up one morning and decide, out of the blue, to go on a rampage. He had a motivation, as all antagonists do.

Now, do I endorse this action? Of course not. But if I were writing an antagonist who was a fictional version of this real-life boogey man, I’d have to spend some time working on his fears. Figuring out his motivations. Making him somewhat sympathetic. Luckily, I don’t want to write a story about this wack-job. Because the more we know about a person, the more likely we are to empathize with them. And honestly, I’d like to go on forever without empathy for this guy.

Of course, I didn’t use this example with my students. But I have been thinking a lot lately about how the antagonists in my own life – often my own fears and worries – sharpen my skill. Theoretically, when I’m faced with a problem that seems insurmountable, I sit down and figure it out. At least, that’s what my protagonists do.

But in reality, before I can figure anything out, I need to freak. Totally and hopelessly. I need to identify the worst case scenario and convince myself that it will happen. I need to alienate my band of loyal and loving companions and stare into the abyss alone. I need to convince myself that I will fail miserably.

Because my antagonist is never just the external bad guy. My real antagonist is myself.

Yesterday, I had a high-noon showdown with myself. I’d made two of my favorite people cry, I could feel the panic setting in, and I knew my own personal duel was just around the corner. In the past, I might have let my antagonist have the upper hand. If I can get myself really hysterical, I have a much better chance of being defeated by the demons within.

But yesterday, circumstances forced me to be even and calm all day. And when I found myself battling with all sorts of phantoms (a hospital administrator, my mother, my husband, a newspaper reporter, the mail lady), I grabbed my pen and started writing.

There on the page before me was the real battle I’d been avoiding all day. Me vs. Me.

And you know what? After much struggling and internal wrestling, I won. No, not the monsters in dark places me. The protagonist me. The one who wanted a plan and needed to be sharper and stronger and better for the big mountain climbing expedition I have ahead of me.

And knowing these challenges are setting me along a path to be better for myself, better for my family,and better for my students is a giant weight off my shoulders.

Thanks, antagonist.

Listening

Ruby was born about seventeen years ago. She was quirky and witty and she spoke in an accent that sounded a lot like my grandmother’s. She had a tough life and didn’t have the advantages that my own kids now enjoy. I loved her take on her small life. I loved her so much that I wrote her for nearly three years, though I never figured out her story. Ruby was my constant traveling companion. I knew what she’d order at a restaurant, or what she’d say if she were insulted, or how she’d handle an awkward conversation. Ruby was my own better half, the girl I always hoped I could become one day.

Ruby stopped talking to me after a number of disparaging comments from a very self-assured group of writers in an advanced fiction class at Tufts University in Boston. They were all juniors and seniors. While I was technically a junior, it was my first semester away from home as an 18-year-old student, and despite my prolific writing career to that point, I was really impressed at how old the other students were. And how curt they were. And how biting their comments could be.

I was also really impressed with their third-person POV stories. And the names of their characters. And the audacity of their bourgeois protagonists. Because they were Yankees, I had decided very early on that they were better educated. Some of them asked if I wore shoes in the summer in Nashville (I said I did, but the truth is that I avoid shoes when it’s hot). Very few would give up their forced façade of elitism to be friends with a girl whose hair and accent were both out of control.

So I shut Ruby up. Quick-like.

I switched my subjects from dog-fights and messy divorces and front-yard bathtubs to more refined things like women wasting away in domestic solitary confinement. I judged my heroine too simple to describe the finer points of the Italian paintings I was learning in my Renaissance Art History class. She was too full of hollers and hills to ride the subway. I couldn’t scrub the dirt from under her fingernails. So I wrote about high-brow protagonists who were over-educated, under-stimulated, and taken for granted (Hello? Mister Freud?).

For the next seventeen years, if I had tried to write in first person to save my life, I don’t think I could have done it. I missed Ruby terribly, and I thought about her all the time. But I had said some pretty awful things about her when I abandoned her for my glamorous new protagonists. I couldn’t blame her for holding a grudge.

On Wednesday, I was sitting in the dentist’s office waiting for my husband to finish his cleaning. In a flash of inspiration that non-writers might confuse with schizophrenia, I heard a voice in the back of my head. Chills ran down my spine. The hair on my arms stood on end.

It was Ruby.

After a full year of writing again, of working the academic and legal junk out of my creative veins, of teaching kids to write what they know, of pontificating about writing and education and the power of the pen, I think I’ve earned her respect again.

Ruby, I want you to know that I’m listening. Go on and tell me your story, baby girl. I promise I’ll never laugh at you again.

Quit, Already!

Yesterday, a very concerned parent told me that her daughter was overwhelmed with the project, a common issue for any writer reaching 10,000 words in her manuscript.  She might not have spoken to me at all, except that I saw her lurking a little bit in the corner, and I asked if she was ok.  She said her daughter was overextended, overscheduled, and over-stressed. Her mother told me of a grueling weekend where the family wrestled with the thought of taking the student out of class.

In fact, there were divisions among the family.  Groups of people thought that the pressure of writing a novel quickly could break the girl, and other factions thought that if she wanted to write a novel, then this was her opportunity to do so, and she shouldn’t shy away from a challenge simply because it’s hard.

Anything worth doing is hard.

But what struck me wasn’t the conversation, the dialogue between family members, or even the fear in the young woman.  I was struck that at no point did any of the adults involved call me.  Or another student in class.  Or Beth, my co-teacher, who is incredibly approachable.

And it occurs to me that if a parent or student or invested family member cares enough about their young writer enough to argue about whether or not she should learn to express herself in a healthy way, they should reach out to those who are writers as well.

Writers know fear and anxiety and self-criticism better than any group on the planet.  Ok, so maybe I’m a bit biased on this front, but I believe that the introspection and empathy that fully-invested writing necessitates also results in, more often than not, a type-A personality in the writer.

I told the mother to give me two hours with her daughter in class.  If she wasn’t excited about her work and ready to dive back in, she was welcome to walk away.  But I feared a much more impactful consequence of deciding not to finish the task at hand.  I was afraid that her daughter would believe that she was a failure at being a writer, and that her perception would cloud her self-esteem for years to come.  So I did what any self-respecting (and fearful!) writer would do: I talked to her.

And do you know what I learned?  She’s just a teenager. 

There was no murky muck lurking in her brain.  She had no impossible fears to conquer.  She wasn’t racked with guilt or worry or anxiety.  In fact, she’d expressed a little worry after our last class, which sent her parents, family members, and interested parties into the debate of the century.  Am I surprised?  In a word, no.

So I ventured out on a limb at the beginning of class and told everyone to quit, already.

Their shocked faces stared at me in disbelief.  Mouths hung agape.  Brows furrowed.  Someone shook his head slowly.

I said, “This is too hard for you guys.  You’re just kids.  You shouldn’t be burdened with the pressure of writing a novel.  And you’d probably rather just be running around this summer, spending time at the pool, and relaxing.  So why don’t we all quit already.”

“Are you kidding?” one student asked, outraged.

“You need to talk to your doctor and get on some new medications,” one kid said, pointing his finger at me.

The whole class shook their heads, said “no way!”

When I told them that they’d just proven my point, that this project wasn’t too hard, and that they were doing exactly the right thing for their brains, for their hearts, for their minds, and for their dreams of becoming writers, they all cheered.

One boy sighed his relief and said, “oh my gosh, I’m so glad.  You scared me to death!”

Read that again.  I scared him to death.

Merely telling a young person that he couldn’t achieve a goal he’d held in his heart for himself was enough to raise his fear level, freak him out, and push his internal panic button.

He wasn’t scared or nervous before class.  He wasn’t unsure of himself.  None of them were!  And then I said they couldn’t do it.

As parents, we teach our children, even when we don’t think we’re teaching.  They overhear our conversations, they intuit our emotions, they soak up our fears and dreams for their lives.  And what my student’s very well-meaning and loving mother did was magnify an emotion in her daughter by discussing it, worrying about it, and projecting her own fears onto her daughter.

During class, this student had marvelous things to say.  I worked her into my lesson plan, using her name as an example character, and by the end of the first half-hour lecture, she was grinning, giggling, and ready to write.

I sent her mom an email after class and I took my own advice.  I told her how proud I was of her daughter for taking on the challenge, how proud I was of her for supporting her daughter, and how excited I was to be a part of this journey.

I’m happy to say that my student has gotten back into her novel-writing groove.  But I have learned an incredibly powerful lesson in this exchange.  Kindness is empowering.  Encouragement can conquer incredible fear.  And communication can both wreck and rebuild a writer’s confidence.

I am so thankful for that parent for helping me redouble my efforts to hug students, stick my hand out for high-fives, and tell them, genuinely, that I’m proud of their work.

Positivity breeds optimism, and optimism feeds our dreams.

Writing What I Know

A writing teacher’s favorite adage: write what you know.

I’ve found that few teachers – or writers for that matter – actually understand what that phrase means.  I know lots of things.  I know about raising two baby boys, I know about being married to my best friend, I know about being abandoned by my father and the heartache of losing grandparents too soon.  I know about hot summer nights in the South, and I know about walking to work in a Chicago blizzard.  I know about being an older student who goes back to law school.  I know about teaching. I know about doing my taxes.  And I know about cooking dinner.  And I know about a million other things that I’ve experienced in my lifetime.

So does that mean that my writing is restricted by those experiences?  Or that I can only create characters who have walked those same steps?

In a word, no.

Because writing what you know isn’t about writing the events that you know as they happened.  It’s actually about emotional truth.

Let me illustrate.  One day before a spelling test when I was in second grade, I was taken to the hospital complaining of chest pains.  My mother panicked, of course, and told the doctor she feared I had heart trouble.  After a few routine checks, he declared me healthy and gave me a new nickname, “Sarah Bernhardt.”  I felt ashamed, and worried that my friends and family members would think of me as the girl who cried wolf.  Or, worse yet, that they would think I was a devious child, prone to dramatic outburst, seeking approval or attention.

For years I carried these worries with me, like a pack animal laden with unnecessary supplies.  I minimized my concerns, buried my worries, and kept my mouth shut more than I would have liked to.  That is, until the day I was riding in a subway car in Chicago and I felt the world crash into my chest and bury me like a corpse.  I grabbed at my heart and panted, felt my head spin in circles, and when I finally reached my stop, I ran up the stairs and all the way home where I collapsed into my husband’s arms, sobbing.

It was a panic attack.  And while I had struggled with anxiety for much of my life, I had never felt the crushing weight of a full-blown panic attack until that moment.  At least, I didn’t realize that I had.  And as I was sitting in the waiting room of the hospital, I recalled the day that I was unprepared for my spelling test in second grade.

Whatever the details of the fictional universes I create, I know I can write honestly and convincingly about the feelings of anxiety, of pressure, and of panic.

And I don’t just have to write about girls whose expectations of themselves are too high.  Or of students who find themselves facing a test that they don’t know how to navigate.  I could, quite convincingly, write about a tiny fairy who is caught in a mason jar by a happy child out collecting fireflies.  I could imagine myself in her place as the lid is screwed on, feel the crushing pressure of the glass walls closing in around her, and balance the weight of my own panic attack on her tiny wings.

Even though I’ve never been a fairy trapped in a jar, I’m writing what I know.

Today I got news that a friend of mine took a job in a city far away.  She’ll be selling her home and moving away in less than a month.  I’m thrilled for her, of course, because she’s getting exactly what she needs at this point in her life.  But again, I felt the walls closing in, the panic starting to build, the pressure growing.  And I told myself what I tell my students every single day: write it down.

So the character I have created to explore these feelings of loss won’t look like me.  Her loss won’t deal with a friend moving away and getting the job of her dreams in the town she probably never should have left behind.  But I will use the emotional truth that I know to infuse my fiction with honesty, with reality, with the seed of my own knowledge.

Because I know friendship.  And I know love.  And I know yearning.  And I know writing.