Flightily Must I Write

randomhouse:

“If you are interested in publishing, you’ll need to develop a thick skin because you’ll get rejected. Then, when you are published, no matter how many good reviews you get, you’ll get some stinkers, even some scorchers. People won’t always get you. Or they’ll get you wrong. Or they’ll get you right and praise you to the skies to boot, but if you’re a real writer, you’ll be too neurotic to take that in; you’ll be feeling for the pea in the mattress. And of course, all this business about developing a thick skin is just useless prattle: you don’t have a thick skin because you’re so sensitive, so you’ll have to suffer. But this is a good excuse for a martini with another suffering writer.”
-Elizabeth Berg

It’s Good Prose Month, over at Biographile.

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“If you are interested in publishing, you’ll need to develop a thick skin because you’ll get rejected. Then, when you are published, no matter how many good reviews you get, you’ll get some stinkers, even some scorchers. People won’t always get you. Or they’ll get you wrong. Or they’ll get you right and praise you to the skies to boot, but if you’re a real writer, you’ll be too neurotic to take that in; you’ll be feeling for the pea in the mattress. And of course, all this business about developing a thick skin is just useless prattle: you don’t have a thick skin because you’re so sensitive, so you’ll have to suffer. But this is a good excuse for a martini with another suffering writer.”

-Elizabeth Berg

It’s Good Prose Month, over at Biographile.

(via twcwelcomecenter)

Source: randomhouse

Didina –the beloved and desired one; that’s what her mother had named her. Lying in bed that oppressively humid evening, Dina felt neither beloved nor desired. Instead, she felt sticky —suffocated. She knew that the covers had conspired to swallow her whole, but she could not let it happen. She shifted her weight, seeking a comfortable position. Dina cursed her spindly long legs; they made stretching out hopeless. She was a thin, small woman, save for her legs. Early in her marriage, her husband had regularly joked that her long, well-rounded legs were meant for a sculptor’s model, and Dina often caught him eying them longingly. She had never minded the attention garnered by her appearance; rather, she had been flattered that her husband found her so desirable. She longed for that kind of attention to be lavished upon her once more.
Just as Dina allowed her mind to settle, she heard a loud moan as her husband rolled over, draping his arm over her waist carelessly.
“Arthur? Are you awake?” Dina turned to face him. He was not awake. Dina was aware of her husband’s arm atop her hips, lying there inert and uninterested. She longed once more to be yearned for, to be craved and loved passionately. Love between she and Arthur had become precise, clinical, and dreary. It had become habit. Dina wished Arthur was awake; she was anxious and restless. It was his fault. She felt very heavy –heavy and ugly. She felt the covers smothering her again. She had to get up, or she might not make it out alive. Sneaking out of bed with the utmost care, Dina made her way through the silent house toward the back deck. She carefully guided the door open and slid outside, where she stretched out decadently on one of the lawn chairs that littered the deck. Cautiously, she lit a cigarette. She closed her eyes and let the warm summer air caress her small, tired body. Through small puffs of smoke she peeked out at the stars, observing their unaffected pose with a stinging feeling of envy. Another puff of smoke escaped her lips, climbing upward in lazy wisps towards the flickering stars.
Arthur hated that she smoked. She had promised him that she would quit but –for some inexplicably devious reason –she never made an effort to do so. It often troubled her that she was so pleased by her latent defiance. It was once that even a trace of frustration would crumble Dina’s resolve and leave her begging Arthur’s pardon; now the thought of Arthur’s sleepy, handsome, face contorted into a mask of disapproval filled Dina with alarming satisfaction.
When Dina opened her eyes again she found that the stars were falling out of focus, and the air was settling upon her delicate frame like so many blankets. When things fell into focus once more it was morning. Arthur was staring down at Dina’s wilted body as she began to stir. She greeted his stern gaze with an apologetic smile, and began to sit up.
“What are you doing out here?” Arthur surveyed the scene crossly, until his eyes fell on an abandoned ashtray. His face hardened. “Were you smoking?”
“And if I was?”
“You’d be a fucking fool.”
“Call me foolish then.”
“You and those damned cigarettes,” Arthur scattered his aggression with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I just don’t get it, Dee.”
“Have I even once asked you to make sense of my vices?” Dina brustled noticeably, drawing her feet to the chair and propping her chin on her knees. Arthur knew fully well that this position belied the inherent accumulation of spirited rhetoric that it preceded. Soon… oh yes, here we are: she’d begun her digression.

“You shouldn’t act so mystified, darling —have you seen the world we live in, lately? Every pedestrian is a perambulating puff of smoke. In universities and cities, people are only connected by their smoke, and their gadgets. I’m sure people are working on waterproof cigarettes at this point, so they can smoke in the shower.” She crossed her arms around her knees, at last looking Arthur in the eyes. “And anyhow,” she admitted grimly, “I’m not nearly so bad —I only have one or two, or three, smokes a day… rather, ‘a night.’ I like smoking at night better: the smoke burns differently.”

“There you are, acting philosophical about goddamned cigarette smoke. That’s not even a real excuse! If you truly —”

“Excuse?” Dina spat the word out of her mouth like a slur. “Do I owe you that? Did I say I was excusing myself? I was thinking out loud, or explaining, I suppose. If I wanted to hunt for an excuse, the closest to ‘true’ as it gets is that I like the smoke, and the closeness to fire. For some reason I can’t give proper words, the singeing smell of fire feels like home.”

“But this isn’t the smell of fire, it’s the scent of cheap tobacco. It smells like shit. It makes you smell like shit.”

“Artie-fart, how do you know that?” Stretching her legs onto the glass tabletop, inertia propelled Dina’s apologia. “Do you know what real fire smells like? Have you sniffed the purest scent of flame? I know you haven’t,” she laughed, pointing at his face, “or else that perfect nose of yours wouldn’t look so —”

It was Arthur’s turn to interrupt.

“Cut the cutesy shit, Dee. You’re deliberately avoiding the point. And at this point, you’re hardly making sense.” Something in that last phrase triggered something inside of Dina, urging her to prod all the more.

“Yoooou and your sense of ‘sense!’ Aren’t we paternalistic today? I wasn’t waxing philosophic when I said that fire feels like home. It’s a bizarre sense; it feels hard-wired into me, and it’s been there as long as I can remember. For me, it makes all of my senses align in some ineffable harmony. It doesn’t matter so much what burns; just that it is —it is burning bright —sends some deep, spasmodic force through my bones. But the urgency only lasts as long as the flames themselves… and once the embers die, so does the feeling —they must vanish to the same place, the fire and its force.”

This eloquent soliloquy scared the ever-living shit out of Arthur. So Dina was a pyromaniac —and maybe always had been? Had she ever set anything big on fire? Jesus, would she set their house on fire? Who the hell could tell? He frowned at the deck’s slats, almost envisioning the entire surface alight. Hoping to erase these hysterical thoughts, he closed his eyes. When he willed them back open, they focused upon Dina. She was staring at the spot he’d been surveying, looking tragic. Embarrassed by his wife’s confession, he started to trace spiralling doodles in the ashes atop the frosted glass tabletop.

“So, babe, are you telling me that you have a problem with fire? I know some doctors in Manhattan that specia—” Dina’s lipless grimace indicated that Arthur should stop talking. He had completely missed the gist of what she was saying.

“Artie, I don’t need a fucking doctor to tell me that I’m anxious, or that I vent my anxiety through smoking cigarettes or lighting candles or shit like that and if you are thinking that I’m some crazy Left-Eye bitch that is going to burn your sneakers in the bathtub, stop it. I’m not a pyromaniac, and I’m not going into New York City to see some shrink.” She bounced out of her seat and stamped angrily inside, wishing that she could ever talk to Arthur without him recommending some doctor or website or solution to things she’d never even thought to be problems. Did her husband think her so inept, or else insane, that she needed medical care?

As she approached the sliding glass door, Dina hears Arthur inquiring, “What the fuck is Left-Eye?”

Flightily Must I Write

I write for myself --for my self.

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"I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore."

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