CHAPTER 1

Introduction

To live in the world of creation—to get into it—to frequent it and haunt it— tothink intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations into beingby a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.

—HENRY JAMES

If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, allof us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.

—RICHARD RHODES

Jean Cocteau, the French poet, novelist, playwright, painter, and filmmaker,once was asked what he would save first if his house caught fire. The surrealistand everyday madman answered, "The fire." What I think he was saying is that inboth our professional and our personal lives, what counts is passion—the fire.When I first began thinking about writing The Writer's Mentor, this anecdotesprang to life for me because so much about writing has to do with passion: thedrive and desire, the love and commitment, the turbulence and torment, the zealand mania, the choice and resolution.

In a gorgeous essay that won first place in a writing contest in California in1999, Leslie Cole refers to writing in the third millennium as an "Erotic Act.""The sound of a pen scratching out a thought on rough paper will be a majorturn-on.... The motion of a pen as it moves across paper will be the new tango,and the curve and fall of a graceful script will be compared to water fallingover stones.... It will be a map, a choreography of what is wished for."

The term passion may denote any feeling or emotion, especially that of apowerful or compelling nature (such as desire, anger, jealousy, devotion, orinspiration). To put passion on paper is first to fully embody an emotion andsecond to tame it through words. But in its essential form, passion means "tosuffer," as in the passion or sufferings of Christ on the cross and theirsubsequent revivification in "passion plays." (A form of playing with passion?)It is in this conjunction of meanings that I refer to "passion."

"Writing is easy," Madeleine L'Engle, the author of more than fifty books offiction and nonfiction, once told me—herself paraphrasing the famous, nowdeceased baseball writer Red Smith—"all you have to do is sit down at thetypewriter and sweat blood." I have heard similar aphorisms from other writersduring many years of interviewing such accomplished writers as Doris Lessing,Isabel Allende, Fay Weldon, Natalie Goldberg, Christopher Lehman-Haupt, MaxineHong Kingston, Ursula LeGuin, Gloria Steinem, Jean Shinoda Bolen, ColetteDowling, Andrew Sarris, Carolyn Heilbrun, Deena Metzger, Molly Haskell, OliverStone, Tess Gallagher, Betty Friedan, Susan Griffin, Marion Woodman, and RianeEisler. Nevertheless, those of us who are drawn to writing continue to "sweatblood" while creating art. We have a love/hate relationship to writing. We putour passion on paper.

No, good writing does not come easily. It was Nathaniel West who wrote, "Easyreading is damned hard writing." In an interview with John Berendt, the authorof Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he remembers an occasion thirtyyears before, when he was sent by Esquire magazine to record a conversationbetween novelists William Styron and James Jones. Styron asked Jones how he feltwhen each day he sat down to write. "It's like learning how to write all overagain!" Styron agreed. And the two proceeded to commiserate about what hard workwriting is.

Writing is hard work, and it's terrifying, to boot, but if you are compelled to"think intensely and fruitfully" and to express those thoughts in words, it canalso be one of the most rewarding ways to engage with yourself and the world.With much effort and good fortune you may reach the juncture in your writinglife at which you must write; because, if you don't, as Gail Sher describes inOne Continuous Mistake, "You will feel something terribly important is missingfrom your life—and nothing, including prayer, meditation, exercise, money orlove will make up for it."

Writing takes a single-minded effort. An effort that includes believing inyourself (not in those internal saboteurs: self-doubt and uncertainty); trustingyour own instincts (first learning how to access those instincts); becomingcomfortable with the uncomfortable (the complicated, grueling, solitary,sometimes boring) nature of writing; and making the existential choice to facethat insolent blank page every day. No one (except you) has any stake in whetheryou write or not. It's simply a choice that you make again and again. As RichardFord has written, "Writing is indeed dark and lonely, but no one really has todo it.... You can stop anywhere, anytime, and no one will care or ever know."And the sad truth is that you must be willing to write poorly in order toimprove. (And even then there are no guarantees.) "Nothing is art at first,"wrote Walter Mosley.

My interest in writing and publishing began when I was thirty-eight years old.For the sake of love, I'd uprooted myself to Los Angeles from Berkeley, where Ihad lived for nearly twenty years. I'd attended the University of California(receiving degrees in History of Art and Practice of Fine Art, Painting) as asingle mother, raised an only child, and owned and operated a restaurant. Ifound that, away from my familiar lifestyle and friends in Berkeley, I had tore-invent myself for my new life in LA.

Never before had I thought much about age, but suddenly, in Southern California,I felt obsolete and old. During that summer of 1986, 1 struggled to find peopletoward whom I felt some affinity. In my quest for role models, I soon discoveredthat there were countless other women on the same search—a search for identityand creative expression. As it happened, I found many of them through a womanwho was to become a close friend and my writing mentor, Deena Metzger, who livedin the mountains northeast of Los Angeles in Topanga Canyon. I began making myweekly treks to Deena's Wednesday evening writers' group. That's where it allbegan.

From conception to publication, it took me five...