The Writing Muse

When my husband said he thought I ought to try my hand at writing a novel, it was as if he had shoved me into a dark room and asked me to describe the furniture. I had always been able to compose a pretty sentence, but had never, ever, for one single, solitary moment thought of writing a story or poem or essay without being required to for an English class. I thought of writers as magical beings who from the cradle were touched by the writing muse. Ordinary people weren’t writers. And, anyway, wouldn’t the urge to become a writer manifest itself as soon as you learned to scribble your name on a piece of paper?

My husband had been a war journalist, had even attempted a novel of his own when we were first married, typing away on an old Remington in a corner of our apartment’s small bedroom in the evenings, me tiptoeing around so as not to disturb him, him not allowing me even a peek at what he was writing.

“No good,” he said after a year of typing, and threw the coffee-stained, cigarette-bit sheets of paper in the garbage.

What did he see in my little essay about my sister’s heart attack and surgery that gave him the idea that I could write a novel?

I argued with him. Did he know what he was asking me to do? Did he understand that I was a contented person, happy in my domesticity? Didn’t he realize that we knew no one who had ever written a book and gotten it published?

“You need some excitement in your life,” he replied. “Anyway, I have nothing to read.”

“But what should I write?”

“About something you know.”

I had read a gazillion books, had no idea how to write one and didn’t really think I could do it. I was sure that it would turn out to be a failed venture, a “Look at me, I’m writing a book” hallucination.

I began my writing career in the summer of 1979. During the week I read Stenotype notes for a court reporter, plinking away at my brand-new Lanier word processor, turning out pages and pages of deposition testimony, sturdy words flipping across white paper beneath my fingers – vernacular, slang, idioms, imbroglios of confusion and obfuscation as attorneys sculpted questions in order to scalpel truth from lies, explosions of temper as witnesses fell into sentence traps, climbed over their own words, denied the obvious, everything stripped raw, nothing left but pure, unadorned drama. On weekends I sat out in the yard in a lounge chair, one of my husband’s yellow legal pads on my lap, and began to write what I thought was a mystery, although I didn’t read mysteries and didn’t know that there was a discrete, classical template for the genre. That was the first mistake, not writing about what I knew. The second mistake was that I had the notion that the depositions I had been typing all week had nothing to offer me, that ideas and inspiration came from somewhere else, that if I concentrated really hard, the heavens would open and story lines would skid down sunbeams and smack me in the head. The third mistake was that I was writing variations of what I had been reading all my life, and I was doing it without metaphor, imagery or beauty. I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what constituted voice or style. I just wanted to get something down that wouldn’t embarrass me when my husband read it.

Some more history: During World War II my father left his bookkeeping job and went to work at Todd Shipyard in Long Beach, which qualified us for a war worker’s house in a housing tract on land that interned Japanese farmers had raised beans on before the war. The house cost two thousand dollars: a stucco box with two bedrooms, one bathroom, the whole of it a chalked square sitting dumbly in a sea of weeds. There were no stores, no school, no churches, no synagogues. I took a bus to a grammar school that had been built in 1910 and was so overcrowded by war workers’ families that the local feed store was pressed into use for classrooms. I met my husband when I was eleven and he was thirteen. I was mad about him even then, but I was so shy I darted away if he so much as looked at me. He says now he always knew he would end up marrying me.

Nina Vida copyright 2009