This morning I woke early, at 6:45, buzzing with excitement. I had a great radio interview yesterday, and something in this act of communication with the interviewer—of being connected through my writing, my novel—still seems newly magical. It also leaves me slightly unhinged, a bit too excited, excitement tipping into anxiety.

I walk my daughter to school, practicing Spanish with her, still carrying a brimming, unfocused energy. Today I am not working my day job as an editor; it’s a writing day. So when I get back from dropping her off, I put on my sneakers and go for a walk in the park, a shrubby grass oasis with a concrete loop, raised up on a slight hill above the noisy boulevard bordering our apartment building. This park used to be a drug zone. Though no longer dangerous, it’s still pretty deserted. Now it’s just me and a few dog owners, someone doing tai chi, and oddly, wonderfully, a girl in a bright yellow fancy dress and black parasol reading in the early morning light.

For me, writing is a physical activity. I feel it in my body—when it is going well, and when it is not. So I have to work with my body in this kind of push-pull way, at once inquisitive and compassionate and sometimes firm. First I walk, then I begin to really move, my breath coming easier. Faster and faster, around the loop, my quick worried mind slows, and as action replaces thought, I can glimpse a different thought pattern, one that arises effortlessly, and the thoughts that now float to the surface are more porous and trustworthy, and when I can string enough of them together, I will feel I can start writing.

When I get back to my desk, I make some notes. I am not yet officially working on this material. Still, I feel a strong compulsion to get this down. This very early stage of writing is the most fun for me. It feels like a love letter to a future world, a future self, or a future reader. Writing in this stage can feel like dipping into a stream and pulling out a fish, wriggling, slippery, fresh, a bit wild—how often I throw it back in! Now there emerges a character I have been wondering about, he appears to be falling in love with his physical trainer—I am shocked at this thought. (After all, he is married.) What will this mean for the rest of the story…the rest of the (dare I say it) book…still years away? This is the kind of writing I have been doing over the past year in the midst of a thousand other things, cheating on my other tasks; I do it furtively, joyfully. My writer self stealing scraps of time from my author self.

So now it’s almost noon and my list of tasks still awaits, but I am feeling renewed by the writing time I allowed myself. The anxiety has shifted more into excitement, that balance righted for now. I dive into my list. I move each item easier today because of the play time I allowed myself, and also because I have the glow of the good interview in me. This part has been surprising. Before publishing Girl Through Glass, all writing was an internal process. Of course I had imagined readers—fantasized them—but even the fantasy felt blurry, not quite real, like an undeveloped scene that no matter how hard I worked on it never got any deeper. The future readers of my unpublished novel were linked with such hope, guilt, and shame, and a kind of blind willful act of faith. They were projections, ideas, ideals, that were totally contingent on my state of mind. But I am now interacting with real readers in so many ways—and it is a privilege. I also understand now that there is a kind of beautiful completion to this part of the publishing process and some part of me thrills to it. On the agenda is a long interview for a literary magazine–twenty in-depth questions for which there are no simple answers.

After I make myself lunch (arugula and avocado salad), I take it back to the computer and graze as I dig into the interview. This interviewer is a professional dancer as well as an editor, and she brings a professional’s knowledge to her reading and her questions. Each interview is its own adventure and this one brings out layered responses. As I try to answer her questions, I realize again the challenge and gift that publishing a novel puts before you—to fold back on an intuitive process that has me sifting through my memories, looking for signposts to analyze: had I meant to make Maurice a villain? These kinds of in-depth interviews, these deep readers, teach me about my own novel. It all makes the novel seem less like a static thing and more of an ongoing process.

I work on the interview deep into the evening, plunging again and again into memory and questioning, and only making good headway when I allow myself to be okay with the truth of this moment, with not knowing the answers fully. As dusk falls, I get a text from the parent who has my daughter for a birthday sleepover: a photo of my daughter painting a clay peacock at a pottery studio, where they were earlier in the afternoon. My daughter’s face is so absorbed and intent; it makes me smile. It’s strange and good to have this time today, to have all these rare hours, to be working so deeply. It’s almost 9 o’clock when I wander out to the living room and ask my husband, a cartoonist, still at his drawing table even as dark has fallen, if he’d like to get some dinner. I’m famished.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Tracy O’Neill’s The Hopeful. It’s the unflinching story of a girl who is obsessed with ice-skating to the detriment of all else. After a terrible injury ends her promising career as an Olympic-bound figure skater, we follow her psychic collapse and eventual healing. The rawness of the voice and the sheer emotional honesty of this novel left me moved and speechless at times.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Oh, the best advice anyone gave me was from Grace Paley. She said, “Just keep writing.” And that simple bit of advice has been so crucial over the years. Remembering it, and trusting it, even in the darkest hours, has taught me to trust the writing process over all else. So to move forward, sometimes blindly, is to believe that the process of writing has its own intelligence.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Probably just that I move so much when I am writing. I pace, I stretch, I do yoga poses. But when I am really going, really in it, I can sit for a long time, which always feels like the greatest physical feat of all.

~

By Sari Wilson:

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

July 1, 2016: Sari Wilson

Sari Wilson’s debut novel, Girl Through Glass, opens with a look at New York.

The garbage bags pile high on the sidewalks. The city shudders and heaves under the heat. The newspapers are filled with accounts of people being shot at night in darkened cars. Pride at New York City having its very own serial killer competes with the fear of going out after dark.

Then on the second page, after a space break, we discover what can be found inside the big, dark world of New York.

Inside the world of asphalt and concrete, there is another world. Things that look like they are made by someone’s hands: grosgrain ribbons and spiderweb-thin hairnets and soft leather slippers. Down the crumbling school corridors and cracked sidewalks, these delicate things can be carried like talismans in jeans pockets or book bags.

Girl Through Glass is rich in these images of things to be found inside other things. For example, one section of the novel is entitled “Pearls.” These images lead us ultimately to the real story–the girl to be found inside the woman, an idea I’ve been obsessed with for years. When we grow up, what becomes of the girl we were?

Her grandmother had given her a Russian nesting doll for her tenth birthday. The dolls painted on oblong wooden eggs. The women get smaller as the eggs get smaller. Each woman rests inside another woman until the last tiny woman stands there wobbling on the table.

Sari told NPR that Girl Through Glass is based on the personal, that ballet was once her life and that when she hit puberty, the dark side of things revealed itself and ultimately she left the world of dance. This novel is her attempt to take a closer look at what happened, and it’s perfectly structured for the story it has to tell, using two alternating narratives, each told in the present tense. The Mira narrative is in third person and takes place in the seventies, starting with Mira at age 11, while the Kate narrative is in first person and takes place in the present, with Kate as a professor and dance historian. Each narrative has a very different feel–Mira’s full of hopes and dreams and Kate’s full of reality. From Kate,

My focus splits and I see both this Felicia, this adult of the mysterious jobs and fluttering hands and crystalline skin, and also at the same time the girl whose earnest, pleading eyes and careful ringlets I admired so much until I understood the effort involved in creating them.

Who we were, who we are, and how to make sense of it. While I was reading the novel, I felt as if I were watching Mira, not as if I were watching a performance, but as if I were looking for clues, looking at her through glass.

Come back on JULY 1st to read how SARI WILSON spends her days.