My Artcar!

Nothing helps my writing like dabbling playfully in some other art form. This is the grandest scale on which I've dabbled. It's major cross-training.

For years, I've imagined having a car that's crawling with blue morning glories. I'm happy as can be with the outcome.

This portait of me and my personally hand-decorated machine was shot in a parking lot after a Mexican lunch by a friend with a car phone who says she shoots much better pictures with her real camera.

In addition to the value of the cross-training--and of course the sheer beauty of the artwork--there's an encouraging sense of satisfaction about setting off on an outrageous little undertaking like my Morning Glory Project and completing it. (Well, almost completing it: I still have the other side to do...and the clear coat. But I couldn't wait to show you.)

Powdermilk Biscuits

The research I'm doing just now on my biography subject is in the 1800-1903 period, and so I'm immersed in the language of that period.

One old-fashioned word I read this week leapt out at me: FAINT-HEARTED.

Now I'm a great fan of subtlety, of civility; I'm actually a rather mild-mannered person, not rowdy at all. Part of the reason I write on such a subject as boldness is to make sure I don't sink into a Henry James novel and never come out.

However, I feel sure that even the most deliberately low-key individual would howl at the accusation of being faint-hearted. Who would choose to have a faint heart?

With that in mind, if I look at particular daily behaviors of mine, like procrastinating about jumping into my writing, they could look suspiciously like a lack of courage and passion for what I'm doing. If I remind myself of that, I am immediately emboldened, immediately of stouter heart. (If I'm not careful, this research into 1900 will have me going around saying words like "ere" and "tarrying"and phrases like "happiest hours.") Ere I tarry further, I'll remind myself that my book writing time dwells among my happiest hours.

Does anyone else have a word or image that immediately impels them to do the thing that needs doing?

In Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, Powdermilk Biscuits give shy people the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.

Writing and Not-Writing on the QE2

Here is Part III in my mid-ocean writing crisis. Click to Part I and then scroll forward in time to read from the beginning.


Heavy seas woke us in the night, the room swinging. In the morning: a touch of seasickness, a staggering sweaty moment in the stairwell on the way to breakfast. I bought a pair of those little wristbands that are supposed to help. They did.

Then to a lecture on Wales, the country that is the theme of this crossing. Welsh historian Dr. Geraint Jenkins talked about how the people of Wales were for years not allowed speak their own language: they had English forced on them, and then began to adopt that foreign language. And yet, he said, they remained themselves. "We have our own personality and our own character ...Wales has still clung on." The Welsh have begun to reclaim their language.

...Which surely is what I am doing in my writing. I'm troubled, though, that I don't seem to have any choice in the matter. It is happening, no matter what I do.



Captain on the loudspeaker: we've traveled 644 miles since yesterday, passing the southernmost limits of the ice fields. "The QE2 will be steaming safely clear of the ice throughout the afternoon."
On a tour of the ship's galley, I met a novelist who intends to finish his new book on this six-day voyage. Peter Joseph--dark, intense, with typed pages protruding from his hip pocket. His novel is about Matisse's crossing these same waters on the Mauretania, titled Matisse in Deep Water. The QE2 is rich with good details for his story. "Are you a Southerner?" he asked, as we compared book notes. "Your accent is smothered," he said, "but it's still there."

Can Do: Expanding the Possibilities

The latest on my Morning Glory Project: This weekend I painted my car a fresh-snow white. Its old color was that of urban snow, pocked with black in every square inch of the roof and hood where tree sap had dropped and then gotten dingy.

So, I put on a new clean coat, forming the background for next weekend's application of glorious morning glories. (If you're new to this blog, please note my practice run on the file cabinet.Afterwards, on Monday, I kept telling people: I painted my car this weekend. Sanded, washed, dried, taped up, and sprayed, then sprayed again.People kept saying variations of the same idea: you can do that? Or: I didn't know that was something people did.The "you" referred to wasn't me; it meant "one." One can do that? The question reminded me: one can do a whole lot of things that might seem impossible. This floral-car project seems perfectly reasonable to me. Writing a novel quickly doesn't. Maybe I could rethink that.

(Part 3 of my writing crisis on the QE2 will appear on Friday.)

Part II of A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing

(This is the serialized story of a writing crisis/career decision that took place on a crossing on the Queen Elizabeth 2, prior to publication of my novel Sister India. I came out of it with more resolution and courage in my writing. Part I was published last week.)


The ship set sail at midnight; my husband Bob and I joined the other passengers crowded along the deck rails. With the feel of New Year's Eve, we watched the long Manhattan skyline slide past, the lighted towers of the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty with torch alight.

...Then to the cabin, which looked exactly as I wanted it to: in the style of the golden era of liners earlier in this century. The walls were wood-paneled; there was a dressing table with a round Art Deco mirror, a spray of blooming orchids. I could settle in, wrap up in one of the QE2 bathrobes we found in the closets and, at some point, take out my stack of manuscript. Pure indulgence: this was being a writer the way it would be if Lauren Bacall were playing the part.

First day: the sky bright, the wind brisk. The swells rolling past were an even blue, whipped at the top into whitecaps. Some young Italian boys were playing deck tennis with a couple of American girls. The ship had the feel of a summer morning in childhood: step out your cabin door and play. People were shopping at the shipboard Harrods, taking the waters in the lower deck spa, sitting before PCs in the computing class, listening to the chamber music quartet. Outside the ship's library, readers had settled into armchairs along a long sunlit corridor that looked out on the water. I walked, tried to see everything.

A lunch of cold lobster and fresh pineapple, followed by creme brulee. Bob was downstairs in the weight room working out; I drank a second cup of tea, looked out at the water. The manuscript I've brought is my memoir of a winter I spent in India during an outbreak of Hindu-Muslim rioting and bombing. It's a strange hybrid book: nonfiction, structured like a journal, yet written in scenes like a novel. My agent sent the first eighty pages to several publishers who rejected it, saying: "What is it? Where would you shelve it?..."

I'd thought after I published my first novel Revelation that everything would become easy. It hasn't. Market niches and "big" mass market books are a larger factor in what the major houses publish now. Perhaps more important, my own style of writing has, in fits and starts, gradually changed. After so many years of matching anybody's style, from Cosmopolitan to The New York Times, and doing it almost reflexively, I find I can no longer count on myself to whip out a few pages the way someone else wants it. It's a change that scares me: writing is the way I've always made my living.

Artcar Progress: A Practice Run

Update on the the Morning Glory Project: I'm testing my plan on a thrift-shop file cabinet before actually approaching my car with sander or spray paint can.

I've sensed the old Camry warily watching this progress, but I think this first practice attempt is looking pretty good. Though I'm going to get a new green; this one's a little murky. And I'll paper over a larger area, since the green misted the top white part a bit here.

I've also realized that doing this around both sides and back of my car is going to take longer than the Sistine Chapel. That's all right. (My husband tells me I like "Great Wall of China projects." I think that's a useful cast of mind for a novelist.)

Note: Part II of A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing will appear Friday.

A Mid-Atlantic Turning Point in My Writing

(This is the opening section of an essay I wrote a few years back about an Atlantic crossing on the QE2 that altered me and my writing, that gave me greater resolution and courage. The piece was published in The Spectator in Raleigh and won an honorable mention in literary magazine Rosebud's creative nonfiction contest. A Washington Post travel editor asked to publish it, but changed her mind when I told her it had come out in a local paper, and that I was writing about a subsidized press trip. I will be publishing this here as a serial. This is Part One.)






Even from the farthest reach of the dock on New York's 53rd Street, the Queen Elizabeth 2 was too long to photograph. I couldn't, with a wide-angle lens, get the whole ship into the frame at once. So I shot it by halves, the front and then the back, not sure what I'd do with two mismatched ship halves when I got home.

This ship, the QE2, is the last of the world's transatlantic liners. The Cunard brochure had described it as three football fields long. I don't measure things in football fields. I keep score in numbers of words, copy-inches, books. It's as a writer that I was heading to sea, and not only as a travel writer with a notebook, but as a novelist bringing along a manuscript that had been too long in progress. I was running late, by years, in getting another book out, felt pressed, frustrated, discouraged. I planned to look at the manuscript, away from my usual life, see where I stood with it. (Working aboard the QE2 was an idea that had also occurred to Francis Ford Coppola, Ray Bradbury, and other writers I would soon meet toting manuscripts on this voyage.)

But there was still another reason for my taking this trip: I am approaching the anniversary of my 25th year as a freelance writer, two and a half decades typing out of one little office or another in Raleigh, North Carolina. This crossing was to be both a celebration and, optimistically, the start of my career's second half, another 25 years. I wanted to spend a week living the writer's life the way it's supposed to be, working onboard ship in a grand, leisurely way ...And heading for new territory. My destination on this voyage was the country of Wales, a place I'd never been. One of my tasks there was to research an article on the struggle of the Welsh people to keep their language alive. I sympathized with their cause; after so many years of writing for publication, I'd come to wonder how much of my own voice was alive.

(Note: I'd love to hear from anyone who has had such a question about his or her voice...and how you've dealt with the issue. )

Today's Bold Proclamation

I'm hereby endorsing, supporting, and ordering bumper stickers to elect:
Al Gore.

He opposed the Iraq war early. He's in favor of the planet. He's for civil liberties and against the Patriot Act. I think he'll do as well as any on healthcare. These are the four biggest issues for me. I admire a great deal about Obama, Edwards, and Clinton. But every one of them has been at some point too hawkish for me.

And as for stopping global warming: it's damn hot here. Alarmingly hot. I say elect the guy today.

A Must-Visit: Dare to Be Fabulous

I just had a peek at a website with the enticing name of Dare to Be Fabulous. First let me mention that I've been feeling quite hit-by-a-truck today.

The art on the homepage alone perked me up enough so that I now have the strength to get out of the office and go to either a movie, a sofa with a book, or a hot tub. Any of those sound fabulous to me. I've just finished an enormous chunk of work done during the same three weeks in which we had both a small party and a houseguest for ten days. All three of these items are good and satisfying experiences, but at some point afterwards one needs a lie-down. This is it for me. Have a good weekend.