From My Name Is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout:
Often I might hear the faint echo in the gym of the cheerleaders practicing, or the bouncing of a basketball, or perhaps in the music room the band would be practicing too, but I remained alone in the classroom, warm, and that was when I learned that work gets done simply if you do it. I could see the logic of my homework assignments in a way I could not if I did my work at home. And when my homework was done, I read -- until finally I had to leave.
... [L]ater in high school I still read books, when my homework was done, in the warm school. But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone. And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone! (But it was my secret. ... I took myself -- secretly, secretly -- very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn't know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.Lucy after first meeting Sarah Payne, the writer who will become her teacher:
I like writers who try to tell you something truthful. I also liked her work because she had grown up on a run-down apple orchard in a small town in New Hampshire, and she wrote about the rural parts of that state, she wrote about people who worked hard and suffered and also had good things happen to them. And then I realized that even in her books, she was not telling exactly the truth, she was always staying away from something. Why, she could barely say her name! And I felt I understood that too.Sarah Payne on a panel:
"It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author."Sarah Payne in a private conference with Lucy during a weeklong workshop in Arizona:
"Listen to me, and listen to me carefully. What you are writing, what you want to write," and she leaned forward again and tapped with her finger the piece I had given her, "this is very good and it will be published. Now listen. People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. Such a stupid word, 'abuse,' such a conventional and stupid word, but people will say there's poverty without abuse, and you will never say anything. Never ever defend your work. This is a story about love, you know that. This is a story of a man who has been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter's hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone's marriage going bad, she doesn't even know that's what she's doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You're not doing it right."
Lucy on lessons learned:
Sarah Payne said, If there is a weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows. This is where you will get your authority, she said, during one of those classes when her face was filled with fatigue from teaching. I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I fell that people may not understand: It was all right.And:
Now I think of something Sarah Payne had said at the writing class in Arizona. “You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
