Getting Her Secrets in Writing

The flowers are here--long-stemmed exotics drifting out of grand vases. So are the crudites, the pates and cheeses. There are bottles of wine--two reds and two whites. And a waiter in vest, dark pants and starched shirt, looping around the perimeter of Dutton’s Brentwood Books’ deep courtyard.

The friends are here. Old colleagues and new. Family--immediate and extended. So are the students with fresh notebooks. Here too is a steady rain that falls uncharacteristically from a heavy, early-September sky.

The surprise evening shower is the only thing that isn’t on writer Carolyn See’s checklist of what should be a part of a working writer’s arsenal. Her response:

“Let’s get rolling!” See cranks her right arm in the air and winds through Dutton’s covered breezeway. She threads through the thickening crowd, her black tunic and jacquard slacks flowing after her.

Her face set, focused, she’ll will the drops away. She strides to a table nestled beneath an overhang, already draped with bouquets, handwritten notes and brochures announcing upcoming readings, names starred and dates circled.

As the book signing begins, See inscribes each title page with her black felt-tipped pen, closing each greeting, “ ... xxxx, Carolyn.”

“I just love your little notes!” enthuses one lean, sun-baked man, who looks as if he could have climbed from one of the pages of her novels. Another in seersucker and stingy brim Panama jumps the line bellowing: “Can I have a kiss, Carolyn?! Come on, Carolyn!” All this could be a scene straight out of Chapter 5 of See’s new book “Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers.”

“Every writer needs an entourage ... so that when your book comes out and you start having signings, you won’t be quaking with terror.”

She squints as camera flashes fire, dabs her eyes when a face calls up a memory. But she’s quick to keep the line moving, with a light hand on shoulder and an “Enjoy yourself, dear.” There is order to all of this spontaneity. There is business to this art. She has built this willfully, piece by piece. And indeed, somehow, when no one was looking, the rain paused, as if between thoughts.

In “Making a Literary Life” (Random House), See, a hardy L.A. daughter, takes a detour from her long string of L.A. novels--most recently “The Handyman” (Random House, 1999), and “Making History” (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)--and departs as well from the realm of the straight-shooting memoir, “Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America” (Random House, 1995) to tackle the prosaic realities of the hard and hardly glamorous work of writing.

“I thought it would be easy” to convey what she knows about writing, says See, on another afternoon, padding around her sunny Pacific Palisades home. “It was terrible. I thought at first that the book should write itself, but, really, in fact, [writing is] like driving a stick or talking about how adrenaline functions or looking after your child.” Easy once you know how to do it, harder to explain.

Often when eager readers pick up a writers’ handbook, they come looking for the basics, plot basics, say, or dialogue tips. They may want exercises to unblock the block, or more to the point, a list of agents or magazines that might eagerly await a fat 9-by-12-inch envelope.

See’s volume contains some of that. There are humorously instructive chapters on writing regimens, point of view, scene building and the importance of a clear-eyed rewrite. “Often it’s very hard to sit in one place and read your own cruelly imperfect work. Tomato soup and red wine can dull the impulse to jump up. Pretty soon you don’t care how awful the draft is.”

But what separates this guide from others of its ilk is the plain-spoken and at times unconventional advice she imparts about nudging the universe. She would have a writer refine the art of throwing her own party, cultivating contacts, making himself visible. (“Write charming notes” to people you admire!) She presses the importance of taking a more active role in the work’s destiny rather than hoping the book “succeeds on its merits.”

She counsels confronting the business of writing, or as she softens it “the writing life”--understanding the balance, and finding ways to have a family life that “glitters as it is stable.”

The book, says See, who is also a UCLA English professor, a contributor to The Times and a book critic for the Washington Post, spun out of an all-too-familiar exchange: “The thousandth time someone called me up and said, my book is dying and I don’t know what to do. You walk them through it. They are very obdurate, you know. And they are sulky and crabby, and it’s your fault. But if you don’t know, you just don’t know. But it’s not like it’s arcane. “

This advice, says See, is intended as cheering section for people who wanted to write but somehow got sidetracked by life, or “folks who live in parts of the country where the idea of writing is as strange as crossbreeding a tomato and a trout,” she writes. “It’s about making your literary life wherever you live, whoever your family and friends may be.”

Much of it is about setting the intention (that would be Chapter 5, “Pretend to Be a Writer”) says See, winding through a neat, bright home alive with impressionistic glowing paintings of L.A.’s past and present--the old Dolores Drive-In and MacArthur Park Lake. Books to judge or review and books to simply linger through are separated in stacks. Those of her late partner, the scholar and writer John Espey, who knew the beauty of books, line the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

Stacked on a dining room sideboard are mailing lists, envelopes and invitations to upcoming book parties (that would be Chapter 6, “Hang Out With People Who Support Your Work”). Every flat surface seems filled with the encouraging faces of her children and grandchildren. She settles onto her balcony, which overlooks a sweep of hills that, as the light changes, could be in Greece or Spain or a backdrop for some fictional place she’s yet to fix on the page.

Being a writer, in See’s definition, is as much about integrating writing into your lifestyle--say, 1,000 words a day, five days a week--as it is about writing a charming note to a literary figure you admire. And doing such things for the rest of your life. It is about cultivating an image, seeing yourself as a writer, but not requiring those around you to suffer through your aspirations and proclamations, chapter and verse.

Though she says that “I started out as a writer with a chip on my shoulder ... a woman in a very bad mood,” her advice comes in a voice as lambent as morning sun. It can also be as blunt and revealing.

“It’s my experience,” writes See, “that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest .... It’s like falling in love. Only more so. It feels like something criminal....So think when you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakable wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it? Keep your longing to yourself.”

To help keep everything--from self-doubt to ego--in check, the book provides recipes for “magic” and prescriptions for surviving rejection that sound like Lucy Ricardo schemes--until you get to the punch lines. Several pieces sent to Atlantic Monthly editor C. Michael Curtis prompted an irritated reply: “Dear Miss See, I think that by now you’ve sent us everything but your family photograph album. I should think it would be evident that we’re not interested in the kind of things you write.”

Winded by the blow, she righted herself, then mailed a series of photographs of her grubby Topanga brood. A meeting and assignment soon followed. She now refers to Curtis as “Mike.”

Some might find parts of her advice hokum. See understands why. “I wouldn’t say you could make or have a literary life just by stringing together affirmations,” she says. “That chapter on magic can be taken in a frivolous way. But in the real world the chances of making it as a writer ... are as good as making it as a tap dancer, a magician or a movie star. To be a writer, you just don’t go through realistic channels. Reality is when you pay the rent. Get caught in traffic or your car breaks down. Really it’s an AM/FM sort of thing. You’ve got reality and then there’s the miraculous and the transcendent. And once you start, time stops.”

Being a writer is being grounded in both worlds. It is as much about self-invention as conjuring back-story, interiors and the well-drawn characters that inhabit your work.

Those charming notes? Well, they become your calling cards when you make your first trip to New York. That bracing rejection slip you received? Pop a thank-you note in the mail, she advises. Tell that editor you’ll write again. And do. “They say: No. I’m not dead yet, thank you very much.” Will they think you daft? “So what. So what. So what.”

All this, she knows, is blasphemous to some ears: “Carolyn cares more about the writing life than writing,” See says, serving up the scuttlebutt she’s overheard.

Students often groan at the notion of the “charming notes,” she says. I know I did when she mentioned them in a class I took from her years ago at Loyola Marymount University. As an undergrad given to epic daydreaming, the idea of thinking about writing notes to strangers--networking!--didn’t fit into my back-lit, soft-focused definition of “writer.” But students were--still are--assigned to trundle out to her readings (it was mandatory). Her teaching style requires students to become organized self-starters. And somehow, all the pieces--inner work and outer--fit together.

What See wants to impart is just that. That the writing life can be as much about serendipity as it is about strategy: all of it poetic.

Even so, she too finds herself at times beset by “What’s the use?”

It’s difficult protecting your heart as a writer. It’s even harder to survive the mountain of rejection on top of the workings of fate and luck. The competing voices indeed get awfully loud--financial crises, critics, pulped books, mortality.

She tries to take her advice, “but of course it’s hard.”

Indeed, shortly after “Making a Literary Life” arrived on the shelves, a reviewer gave it a particularly scathing critique. It rocked her, she admits. But after the smarting settled some, she put on her game face. “I sent him a dozen roses.” She won’t even speculate at the reaction. “So what. So what. So what.”