Doing What Comes Naturally

My 12 year old daughter, who has a flair for things artistic, recently told me that she can only write when she's "emotional."

"Why is that?" I asked. She told me that the words only flow when she's wound up about something.

I get this. When I was 12, I wrote only when gripped by unbearably strong emotions. Fortunately, this happened every hour or so. In my twenties, the hormonal storm subsided, along with my productivity.

A lot of what makes writing good - the structuring, the editing, the organizing - is entirely unnatural. It needs to be learned. It can be practiced even when your inspiration is minimal.

If you're no longer 12 (alas!), you can wait a long time for inspiration to flow naturally. When it won't, why not focus on the unnatural stuff? I think of writing exercises as being akin to gardener's work. What's natural may bloom more easily once you've cultivated your skills in an entirely unnatural way.

Rules

As you may have noticed, I love making them up. I'm not as big on following them. Your personality, like mine, is rooted in how you relate to rules.

Ready for a test? Which one of the five answers below best describes you?

Rules are:

1. Helpful guidelines for stupid people;
2. The basis of civilization as we know it;
3. Valuable in direct relation to who made them and why;
4. Always capable of being turned to your advantage;
5. What rules?

Made your pick? OK, here's what you should be writing:

1. Novels
2. Non-fiction
3. Plays
4. Self-help
5. Poetry

Make sense? Good. Remember to send me my commission.

My Youth in Pizza

How many slices? Hundreds? Thousands? Like kisses, few are individually memorable. The Bronx pizzas of my eary childhood are lost in the mists of time. Only a handful (plateful?) of others offer themselves up for recall.

1. Mike's Submarines, Montreal, 1975. I was 11. I had never seen mozza that artificially elastic. Appallingly, I was expected to eat it with a knife and fork. Worse was in store. I had to take off my shoes on entering suburban homes, use a "serviette," and attend a sex-segregated Sunday school. Hello middle-class Canada, good-bye preppy/bohemian NY.

2. Portofino Pizza, Vienna, 1979. 15 years old. My best friend was an orthodox Jew. The pizza wasn't great, but (accidentally) it was kosher. We felt utterly grown up as we sipped our cheap wine. Three topics of conversation (boys, school, the future) in endless rotation.

3. An unnamed counter, Rome, 1981. 18. I threw countless dorm-room parties at my boarding school. As these reached full-tilt, and often just as some boy was starting to hit on me, I'd head out into the cool winter night, wearing my grandfather's green jacket.

The place was 2 blocks up the hill. Standing room for three customers. Two men, shirts pasted to sweat-soaked backs, heaving massive slabs of ai funghi from the ovens. 800 Lira/100 grams. Then I'd go back and let the boy keep hitting on me. This rarely turned out as well as the pizza.

4. Gino's, Kingston, Ontario, 1985. 22. A dozen toppings graced the Gino's special. My boyfriend and I substituted pineapple for sausage, and got anchovies on (my) half. After months of phoning in this order several times a week, we discovered that Gino's was only 2 blocks from campus. Gino was so tickled when we made our first order in person, he gave us free drinks.

That boyfriend has been my husband for 19 years.

There have been many pizzas since. Some were memorable. But you remember the slices of your youth with a sharpness and sweetness that the others never achieve.