The day after Thanksgiving break I’m sitting with my new baby on my lap: my almost 500 page copy edited manuscript.  Over the weekend, I couldn’t quite bring myself to peek at it, but my 17 year old son did.

He said, “Wow, there are red marks on every single page!”

I said, “I should hope so!”

He said, “I can’t believe they found so much to correct.”

I said, “The more they found the better!”

It’s the errors they don’t find that worry me–and every writer.

The famous computer scientist Don Knuth offered tiny monetary rewards to students who found mistakes in his text books and caught scads of errors.

Maybe I should do the same.  I could be the first novelist to offer a quarter for every typo.   But then my readers don’t need monetary incentives.  I’ve had some really embarrassing typos in my time, and people love telling me about them!   These are the readers who complete “The New York Times” crossword puzzle in ink each morning and polish off the Sunday Anagram before breakfast.

You know who you are.

Sometimes I’m tempted to say–actually the copy editor and I saw that one, but we left it in just for you, because we knew finding it would give you so much pleasure.
 

My friend Richard just sent me an article by Mark Peters called “A Happy Writer is a Lousy Writer?”  Thank you, Richard!

You can read the whole text here: 

http://www.good.is/post/a-happy-writer-is-a-lousy-writer/

But basically Peters is reporting on research by New South Wales psychology professor Joe Forgas that people whose mood is down write better than those whose mood is up.  Research shows that mild depression–nothing suicidal, nothing crazy, but slightly negative feelings provoke writing that’s more persuasive and more concrete.

Could be!  This may be why one of my novelist friends prefers to write on gray cloudy days.  Or why people who keep diaries often comment that they tend to write in them with they’re feeling low.  On happy days they have better things to do.

I know writing is an excellent activity when you’re in a brooding pensive mood.  However, I’m not entirely convinced that the best writing comes of feeling blue.
 
Depends on the kind of writing.  Depends on the writer.

When it comes to novels–as opposed to letters, essays, or long journal entries–I find that I do my best work when I’m happy.  In my experience, when you sit down to add a few stitches to a long winding yarn, you need to feel hopeful.  You also need a certain measure of peace.  Therefore what interests me is the connection between relaxation and creativity. 

A cryptographer once told me how he came up with the algorithm that brought him fame and fortune.  It was Passover after the seder.  He had drunk at least four cups of wine.  He lay on his couch and he felt completely relaxed and happy.  He was at rest, and the idea seemed to float down to him.

I’m sure melancholy inspires good writing.  Controlled anger can provoke excellent writing as well.  But at least for me, the best work and the best ideas come from a feeling of calm well being.  For this reason, I thought of a plan for my new book when I was enjoying a week in London wandering through art museums with no schedule and no responsibilities!

My new novel is about to return from New York on Wednesday.  The copy editor is done, and my editor says she did a “VERY thorough” job.  I’m so glad.  The more copy editing the better, as far as I’m concerned.  I’m not the best speller.  My comma usage is, well, somewhat eccentric.  And I wish those New Yorker magazine fact checkers could cover me every day.

Wouldn’t you love it if you had fact checkers following you around the way celebs have security?  You say something and your beefy fact checker with the shades and ear piece backs you up, “She’s absolutely right, and I’ve got three independent sources to prove it.”

Or if you’re wrong, they whisper discretely in your ear and you make the correction before embarrassing yourself.

This morning, I was just picking up The New York Times from the breakfast table when a hand slammed down to prevent me.  My fourteen year old son.  “Hey, I was reading that!”

“It’s mine too!” I protested.  “You don’t have to be so competitive.  What’s going to happen when you get married?  Are you and your wife going to fight over the paper, or get separate subscriptions?”

He answered serenely, “When I grow up there won’t be any newspapers, so it won’t matter.”

This is probably true.

I’ve been thinking about old and new media lately.  Last night I took my writing class on a field trip to Houghton Library.  Among other things I asked the librarian to find me a commonplace book, because I’d used the term,and my students didn’t know what I meant.

“A commonplace book?” they asked.

“It’s sort of like Facebook,” a student ventured.

The librarians were happy to show us an example, and since this was Houghton, the commonplace book they brought out was one of Emerson’s. 

How strange and beautiful to peruse his handwritten pages, his quotations, and newspaper clippings.  He’d carefully indexed his own work on the inside back cover.  No word search then.  Perhaps newspapers are going the way of the commonplace book, but the impulse to write, to report, to collect and collate remains.  And the need to select and arrange material is greater than ever.  To select what’s relevant and make good inferences is the goal of so much of our education, and the apogee of science and art.

I am reading Wolf Hall and I can’t remember a contemporary novel I’ve enjoyed so much.  Admittedly, I’m a sucker for tales of court intrigue, but I usually stick to history of the non-fiction variety. 

Hilary Mantel has done such a beautiful job opening up Henry VIII’s police state for the reader.  I love her descriptions.  I love the firelight, the tanner’s yard, the Cardinal’s bejeweled fingers, and above all, entree into Thomas Cromwell’s imagination.  He is a magnificently realized character: flawed, ambitious, pragmatic, complex and human.

Mantel’s dialog is particularly interesting to me.  She does not try for period speech, but she’s not blatantly anachronistic, either.  Her people speak in slightly archaic rhythms, but with clear direct modern language.  This proves quite effective.

A richly imagined book.  Highly recommended for a cold winter night!

Last night I read from The Other Side of the Island at University of Connecticut and had the best time!  What a bright bunch of students and what marvelous dedicated faculty.

I’m such a city mouse that I was surprised to wake this morning to the sound of a rooster on the Storrs campus. 

Here is a photo and an article about the event:

http://media.www.dailycampus.com/media/storage/paper340/news/2009/11/13/Focus/Students.Gather.To.Explore.The.other.Side-3831912.shtml

I’m one of those people who takes forever to get over jet lag.  I returned from London 5 days ago and I’m still falling asleep by 9 pm and waking up around 4!  This is just silly!

I must say, however, I like to watch the sun rise, and the sense of the day’s possibilities: read Wolf Hall, outline my next novel, make the kids’ lunches, clean the kitchen, sort out the recycling, mark students’ stories . . . all before breakfast!  Well, not exactly.  But it’s fun to sit by the window, watch the sky brighten: rose, orange, lilac, silver-blue, and imagine it’s all possible.

Well, Intuition did not win the Wellcome Trust Book Award, but I did have a glorious week in London, and I found out that English people say “Commiserations” when you don’t win something.  This is so logical–Commiserations instead of Congratulations–and somehow more elegant than the American Bummer!

Best part of the evening: chocolate mousse in chocolate shells topped by candied kumquat.  Delectable combination.  They were only about the size of my thumb nail, so I had to eat three.

YUM.

There is nothing better than wandering through a museum with no children pulling at you, no crowds jostling you, no tour guide and no time limit–except closing time.

Yesterday I spent the entire day at the National Gallery, just wandering through each room, lingering at any picture that caught my eye.

I found many strange and beautiful paintings, particularly in the
Renaissance galleries.  A traveling altar piece painted for Richard II
with tiny jewels in the halos of the saints.  A painting of Veronica
holding up a textured linen handkerchief with a startlingly realistic
image of Christ on it.  The Van Eyck “Marriage of Arnolfini” which I’d
studied in school, but next to that a portrait of
his own wife with the most amazingly textured linen habit on her head
and a strange inscription carved into the frame: “my husband
finished me in year of our lord X” as if her husband created her in
paint and her image could speak.

The Rembrandt self portraits, early and late, the two Vermeers of
girls at virginals, one looking more virginal than the other, the Ter
Borchs with their magical silks, but especially Rembrandt’s painting
of the woman bathing in a stream–I looked at that for a long time.
I’d read so much about it, that the painting grew and grew in my mind
until I imagined it was monumental, but it was so small and delicate,
far more beautiful in person, and the brush strokes not only loose and
assured, worked into the wet paint, but so fine.

There were Gainsbouroughs and Turners–great Turners suffused in
light–somehow concrete and mythological at the same time.  There were
Cezannes, and the heart stopping wall of Van Goghs, his true colors so
startling–the earthy red-gold of his sunflowers against the pale
lemon yellow background so much more shocking in real life than in
any print or illustration.

But I think my favorite painting in the whole museum was the Velasquez Venus:

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/diego-velazquez-the-toilet-of-venus-the-rokeby-venus

A girl of about 16 was sitting next to me on the bench along with her
mother.  The girl was sketching the Venus in pastel and she was very
very good, but she had to rub out her work many times.  A
humbling exercise to copy a masterpiece like that. 

All through the museum, artists were copying in pencil and charcoal and in pastels.  I loved watching them draw.  Visual artists are so direct when they approach the masters.  They are both humble and open in their attempt to understand great art with hand and eye.  We writers aren’t nearly so honest.  We maintain a myth of self-expression, and worry if we read too much of this or that.  We fear we’ll be unduly influenced or lose “our voice” as though one’s soul could catch a cold.  How silly we are.  We novelists would be a lot better off if we carried around sketch books and copied out sonnets.  We should look harder at the way good prose is made, diagram its sentences, and understand its joinery.  Why should critics have all the fun?  Writers should be better readers.  We should try to find out the secret springs in plays and novels, just as the girl on the bench tried and tried to work out the angle of Venus’ head. 

That girl was learning, even though each time she drew the line, she rubbed it out.