Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life - Softcover

BRET LOTT is the author of the novels A Song I Knew by Heart, Jewel (an Oprah’s Book Club Selection in 1999), Reed’s Beach, A Stranger’s House, The Man Who Owned Vermont, and The Hunt Club; the story collections How to Get Home and A Dream of Old Leaves; and the memoir Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. He lives with his wife in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was recently named editor of The Southern Review.

Genesis

I am sitting in the sanctuary, a few rows from the front, to my left my mom and dad, my little brother, Timmy, in Mom’s lap and sleeping, to my right my older brother, Brad. Brad and I have just received these thin blue books, every kid in the service passed a brand-new copy by men in gray or black suits standing at either end of the pews, stacks of these books in hand.

The blue paper cover is bordered with green grapevines, tendrils working up and down either side with bunches of grapes here and there; at the top and bottom of the cover those tendrils meet sheaves of wheat in the same green ink.

The pastor says it is the book of somms, and I wonder what that is, look at the words in black ink centered a little high on the cover. I sound out the words to myself, The . . . Book . . . of, and stop.

P-S-A-L-M-S. How does that, I wonder, spell out Somms?

But even if I don’t understand, this is the ?rst Bible—or piece of it—I have ever gotten, and I don’t want to lose this book. I want to keep it.

So I take one of the nubby pencils from the back of the pew in front of me, nestled in its tiny wooden hole beside the wooden shelf where attendance forms are kept, and beside the larger holes where the tiny glass cups are placed once we’ve emptied them of grape juice.

And I begin, for the first time in my life, to write my name by myself.

I start at the upper-left-hand corner, just below the border, but the first word trails off, falls toward that centered title in black as though that title is a magnet, the letters I make iron filings. They fall that way because there are no lines for me to balance them upon, as I am able to do with the paper given me by my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Pasley.

I finish that first word, feel in my hand the cramp of so much strenuous, focused work, and hold the book away from me, look at it while the pastor rolls on.

There is no place for the second word, I see, the last letter of my first name too near the first of the title.

This is a problem. I know the second word must follow the first on the same line, a little space needed between them. Mrs. Pasley would not approve. This is a problem.

But there is space above my name due to its falling away, a wedge of blue field that might, if I am careful enough, be able to hold that second word, and I write, work out the riddle of letters without lines, letters that will line up to mark this book as mine, and mine only.

Then I am finished, and here is my name. Me.

The first time I have ever written my name myself, alone.

Later, on the way home, my older brother, Brad, will look at the book, say, “Lott Bret. Who’s that?” and laugh at my ill-spaced effort. Later still I will write my name again on the cover, this time with a blue pen and holding the book upside down. The words will be a little more jaunty, full of themselves and the confidence of a kid who knows how to write his name, no problem at all. Beneath this second round, though, will be the lone letter B, a practice swing at making that capital letter as good as I can make it.

Later, I will be baptized into the church at age fourteen, a ritual it will seem to me is the right thing to do.

Later still, in college, I will be born again, as Christ instructed Nicodemus.

And later even still, I will have written entire books of my own, created lives out of the whole cloth of the imagination. I will have created, and created in my name.

But on this Sunday, the pastor still rolling on, these two words themselves are enough.

Only a kid’s scrawl. My own small imitation of God.
Before We Get Started

Let me begin this book on the nature and aim of words by saying that I won’t be talking about those glamour words we all get to use now and again, the ones that set our pride spinning at our actually using in a sentence. Abrogate was one of those words I used that, once I’d actually employed it correctly in a sentence, made me lean back and put my hands behind my head, kick my feet up on the desk, and beam at my intelligence. Another one I love is the word limn, which I’ve used a number of times for what I hope was good effect. Once, in a review of a perfectly dreadful novel that centered on hidden incestuous relationships, I had the great good fortune of putting together the phrase “the most Byzantine jamboree of family flesh possible.” That was a glorious occasion, I remember, and I remember, too, me smiling at the monitor for a good five minutes about that. Byzantine jamboree. That was fun.

But I won’t be talking about those words here. The kind of words I’m talking about are those trench-warfare words, those grunt-work words we oftentimes don’t give a second thought because we traffic in them day in and day out, truck them in and offload them like they were so many yards of gravel being used to rough-pave the road for the brilliant parade of paper floats our ideas and ambitions and intellect will be once this story is done.

Byzantine jamboree. Man, that was fun.

No. I’ll be talking about a, the, and this. Those few small words we couldn’t care less about because they are, like the poor, always with us.
But before I begin holding forth on even that much—those three numbingly nondescript syllables that together only use up three vowels and three consonants—I need to tell you about how I used to live behind a guy who used the term no-brainer way too often. He was a doctor—a gastroenterologist—and because doctors know everything precisely because they are doctors, it was never any surprise to me that everything he encountered was a “no-brainer.”

And because he used it so often in our everyday exchanges—from the “no-brainer” it was for him to buy a two-year-old Lexus instead of a new one, to the “no-brainer” it was deciding to scope a patient complaining of blood in his phlegm—slowly the term crept into my own lexicon, until for a while I was walking around saying it just as much as he was. It’s a fun term, I found out, infectious for its sharp little shorthand expressing your own acumen and eloquence at once.

“Can I get a transverse Mohawk?” my older son, Zeb, once asked me. Really.

“That’s a no-brainer,” I told him. Meaning, I hoped he understood, no.

“That’s a no-brainer,” I said when Jacob asked if he could ride his bike alone to Wendy’s for lunch one Saturday back when he was in the third or fourth grade. He’d have to cross Highway 17 where Mathis Ferry Road intersected it, six lanes without a crosswalk.

But I’ve since kicked the habit—or almost. Because, finally, I hate that term. There’s something about it that smacks of condescension, something in it that implies everyone else is an idiot who can’t assess and discuss things as quickly and accurately as you.

Which leads to how I’d like to begin this book: with a moment a few semesters ago when I almost blurted out, “That’s a no-brainer,” to a student in class.

This was toward the beginning of things, during the critique of one of the first student stories, all of us doing the old workshop shuffle: what you like, what you don’t, what works, what doesn’t, what’s at stake, what’s missing, blah blah blah, all in the hopes not just to put a Band-Aid on the story at hand but to try to speak of the larger notion of writing ?ction. There was a particular point I wanted to make about the way the student used a noun and its synonyms, and how its usage called into question the verisimilitude of the entire story, because it called into question the authority of the writer herself.

Within one page of a story told in the first person, the narrator had referred to her mother as her mom, her momma, and her mother. I pointed this out to the class as being a matter of consistency of both point of view and of voice—that is, in order to get a first-person narrator nailed down so that the reader can begin to get to know the character and thereby come to whatever experience the story might o¬er, the writer needs to use language consistently, in this case decide whether the narrator calls her mother “mom,” “momma,” or “mother.” Of course there are lots of different considerations that go into making such a blanket statement: What if the narrator is fragmented herself, is unreliable and so does not in fact know any kind of consistency in her own voice? What if her mother is to her three persons at once, a kind of matriarchal holy trinity? What if she calls her “momma” in dialogue, but thinks of her as “mother” when relating the story here on the page? What if what if what if? Certainly extenuating, qualifying circumstances are always at work. But the story we were reading carried with it none of those free passes to arguing with the teacher.

I made this point about the noun and its usage, and made it pretty well, I thought. Hey, I’d been doing this for a long time. I’d made this little speech enough times before. They’re getting it, I thought.

And then I glanced to my left to see a student with her nose wrinkled up, as though smelling something false. She wasn’t one of those kinds of belligerent students, either, those sorts who think they know something going in and so rebut everything that comes out of your mouth in order to hold together the sad and tattered last shreds of the nomad’s tent their understanding of writing has become. Those students you hope and pray will not darken your door because when they do, the semester can stretch out before you like the Hundred Years’ War. No, she was a fine writer, seemed sensible, and so I asked her, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t see why that matters,” she said, and shrugged, still with her nose wrinkled up.

This was when I very nearly said, “That’s a no-brainer.” Instead, I caught myself, and went on to beat her and the rest of the class about the ears with the blunt instrument of my further instruction, as I am wont to do when somebody doesn’t get what I want them to get.
I’m going to pause a moment or two here to quote a little piece of a lecture I gave during the first residency I spent teaching in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Vermont College, back in 1994, this in the hopes of illuminating why this particular moment in my teaching life—an undergrad’s pooh-poohing my point about nouns—was one that carried a bit more weight than it might otherwise seem.

The lecture was on the architecture of Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams. But the section I’m going to quote doesn’t have anything to do with her book; instead, it’s a passage I hope will relate the sort of self-deluding snobbery bred by looking at words as though their examination one by one were beneath us. Or at least beneath me.

When I was in grad school at UMass Amherst I took a seminar in Virginia Woolf from Lee Edwards. There were about ten or eleven of us in there, and it just so happened that that semester there was a centennial celebration of Woolf’s birthday down at Pembroke, a three-day shindig at which plenty of papers would be presented on what was becoming, in no small part due to Lee Edwards’s teaching capabilities, our favorite writer. We decided to go down there for a day of the festivities, and piled in two cars, drove all the way to Providence. We got lost once in town, finally found the right building, and walked in, all of us, on a panel already in progress. I don’t remember who the heck the presenter was talking up there, but it soon became obvious to each of us that we had no clue what she was saying, only that it had to do with The Waves. When she finished, the crowded room applauded enthusiastically and we all sort of looked at one another, shrugged.

The next presenter stood and began reading her own paper, this one about the use of personal pronouns in To the Lighthouse.

That was when we stood as a group, and ?led out. Once in the hallway, we shook our heads, perplexed at the lifeblood being sucked out of books we loved happening just inside the closed doors behind us. We found a pub down one or another street, and all sat at a table, and talked about the books we’d been reading for class, why we loved them, why not. Then, disillusioned at the proceedings but glad for each other’s company, all that talk, we piled back in the cars, drove on home to western Mass.

The talk, of course, let me and each of the others simply come to know more fully those books, and how and why and when they moved our hearts. Hearts moving, by the way, the reason any of us ought to write.

Well, okay. I’ll give myself that last line. It seems true enough, these many years later, that moving the heart is the reason we ought to write. But I can’t help but think how smug I sounded, and how unwilling to learn I was, not just back in 1983 when we did all that, but as near to now in my own history as when I gave that lecture, in 1994. Because the longer I write—and this is the one sure thing I know about writing—the harder it gets, and the more I hold close the truth that I know nothing.

I can’t help but think of how smug I was to very nearly blurt out to that student, “That’s a no-brainer.”

Because, if you want to write, there really is no such thing as a no-brainer. Flannery O’Connor wrote, “There’s a grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” I think what she’s saying is that if one begins to see the world and its dilemmas and desires and questions and heartbreaks and, yes, noun forms as being no-brainers, one has begun to lose the necessary wonder at and reverence for what is eternally unfolding around us that it takes to be one “upon whom nothing is lost,” as Henry James exhorted writers to be.

Wonder and reverence, I want to say before I get started, are the twin dynamos that generate the art of writing.

To look at something without wonder and reverence—to see things as being no-brainers—is to dismiss deliberation; dismissing deliberation eliminates the possibility for reflection; to eliminate reflection is simply and fully and sadly to reject the possibility of discovery. Of course the difference between a and the and this is a vast one. Of course words matter. Of course we must choose carefully.

But why is there such a vast difference? And given the endless valley of bones the same old words used again and again and again by writers far superior to ourselves truly is, we writers no more than buzzards picking over the same words used by Faulkner and Melville and O’Connor and Hawthorne and Welty and Baldwin and all of them—given all those words, and our pitiful little attempts at recycling them in the hopes we might create our own Holden Caul?elds or Lily Briscoes or Boo Radleys, attempts that most often result not in literature but in the same sort of recycling that goes on in the lower intestines of those same buzzards—well, given the same words as always, why must we be so careful?

Why do words matter so?

And in thinking about the why, I have been led deeper and deeper into this whole thing called writing, and deeper and deeper into what it means to be a writer altogether, until I have arrived here, now, writing this thing down for you and me both, discovering as I sit here that there is, finally, too much to say about this topic. Before I get started here, I want to say that everything—everything—regarding writing gets right down to the di¬erence between a and the and this. The more I think about it the more I am convinced that there really is nothing else to talk about.

Because all things are informed by the word one writes next, and the one after that, and the one after that. All things come down to the di¬erence between one word and another. All things: point of view, tone, c...