Biggest Regrets

The following list of regrets, which has been posted on The Manchester Guardian site and on a lot of other sites, prompted me to think of my life as a writer and to answer the last question on the blog, which is:

What's your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."

RH: I’ve been a good student, a good teacher, a good husband and father, and a good writer, but I haven’t been a very responsible citizen. On the one hand, I’m sorry about that; on the other hand, I found my vocation as a writer and one I’d found it, I stuck to it and did what I wanted to do. No regrets there.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."

RH: I’m not at all sorry I worked so hard, and that’s probably because both teaching and writing are vocations, not jobs.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."

RH: Not a problem. As a writer I spend most of my time expressing my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."

RH: I do regret that I’ve let my writing get in the way of nurturing old friendships. No excuse for that. I’m trying to remedy that now. I used to think that if you wrote a letter a day you’d get a letter a day, but I couldn’t manage to write a letter a day. And now it’s all electronic mail, though I did send two handwritten letters this year, and I received two handwritten letters in return.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

RH: I’ve been pretty consistently happy over the years, but I’d be a little happier now if I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to spend time trying to “manage my career.” O well.

Just live.

            The other day my editor’s assistant at Bloomsbury asked me how many more books I had in me. This got me thinking about my life as a writer. I retired a little bit at a time, first on a “bridge” program and then doing some teaching as piecework, but now I’m out of the game. That’s OK most of the time, but classes have started at Knox without me, and that’s a little sad. For years I relied on teaching as an important and even necessary source of meaningful work. But now I’m on my own as a writer. So far so good, but for the first time in years I don’t have a novel in progress. There’s still work to be done on The Confessions of Frances Godwin, and I’ve finished a novella (very hard to sell, as my agent reminded me, though he hasn’t read it yet), but there’s nothing big coming up on the horizon.

            “Just live,” I tell myself, and that’s what I tried to do this weekend. I read; I went to an excellent reading by Peter Orner, I played my guitar and recorded a Doc Watson song and, after years of trying, got it to sound the way I wanted it to sound; I cooked down ten pounds of tomatoes and made sauce. This sauce is so good that we hoard it and in fact still have tomato sauce left from last year. And now Sunday morning, I’m writing down these thoughts about writing. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Write about writing, and maybe even write about writing about writing, as I’m doing right now.

 

 

             

       Put on a turtle neck this morning for the first time since last winter. Feels good. Fall is the best time for a writer. Not too hot, not too cold. Maybe I’ll try to be like Raymond Carver. Here’s the end of a Carver poem that I say to myself every morning as I’m in the shower:

I hate to seem greedy–I have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least,

And go to my place with some coffee and wait

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

My lovely wife has already made the coffee. It’s in a thermos on the kitchen counter.

Literary emotions: FEAR

Literary Emotions: FEAR

For the reader:

            The difference between real emotions and literary emotions is often unclear. “Fear” is an exception. The Fear we experience when reading a good thriller can one of the most intense of all literary experiences. Consider the warning on the back of Lawrence Block’s All the Flowers are Dying: “Extraordinarily suspenseful… Those with weak hearts may want to try some other novel altogether.”

            And yet when we put the thriller down, we are no longer afraid. What we experienced was not real fear but vicarious (substitute) or virtual (pretend) fear. We enter into the fear of the character who is about to be tortured or who is tied to the railroad tracks (empathy), and we pity these characters too (sympathize), though the distinction between empathy and sympathy is often difficult to maintain in practice.

            It’s always possible, of course, that this literary fear may carry over into real life. A reader of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” for example, might develop a lingering and very real fear of being buried alive. But this is the exception.

For the writer:

            What is the challenge for a writer? Actually, fear is one of the easiest emotions to evoke in your reader. All you have to do is conjure up an empty office building in the middle of the night; have your protagonist pick the lock of an office door and start going through secret files; then add footsteps in the hall and the sound of a key in the door. Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, who has a set of lock-picking tools given to her by a burglar whom she defended, often finds herself in this position. Or have your rookie protagonist cop mention several times, early on, that she needs new batteries in her cell phone. Remind us that she knows perfectly well that she should call for backup before doing something dangerous; have her lose her flashlight; and then have her poke her nose into the abandoned warehouse in a dangerous part of town where she thinks the bad guys might be hiding out (And you’ve got Linda Wallander in Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost.) It’s hard to go wrong.

Literary emotions: NOSTALGIA

             Nostalgia’s gotten a bad name, but I think it’s one of the most important literary emotions. The Greek word nostalgia means pain for home, longing for home, and that’s what I experienced yesterday morning, the morning of our fiftieth wedding anniversary.              

             Early that morning my wife and I and Caitrine (who’d come from St. Louis) and Rachel (who’d come from Chicago) and the dog (who came from the animal shelter) walked over to our old house on Prairie Street, now the home of our middle daughter, Heather, and her family. We loved that old house and couldn’t have sold it to anyone other than a daughter. My wife and I lived there for over thirty years. Our daughters grew up in that house, which we bought for $18,500 in 1970. Two of our dogs lived out their lives in that house.

            When I need a house in a novel, this is the house that comes to mind. I find it almost impossible to imagine any other house, hard to imagine a house without a Baccarat crystal chandelier in the dining room, and so on.

            My editor’s assistant at Bloomsbury had asked me on Friday how many more books I thought I had in me. I didn’t know. I had just emailed a novella called The Truth About Death to my agent that morning, and my agent had reminded me, almost instantly, that nothing is harder to sell than a novella. But then on Saturday morning I thought, maybe I could write a novel about the house on Prairie Street. But then I thought, I’d already written that novel; I’d better think of something else.