But there is one scene, late in the movie: Yuri and his lover, Lara, in the dead of winter, have fled to the icy ruin of a dacha while awaiting their fate, where they wear great turtlenecks and make love and eat hearty meals that materialize out of nowhere. One night, Yuri, unable to sleep, finds pen and ink and leaves of paper and sweeps dust from an escritoire. The balalaika music swells; he dips the pen in the ink and draws LARA in elegant Cyrillic letters at the top of a page. He glances back at beautiful Lara, asleep, then furiously begins to write. It’s the first and only time we see him write, a rare burst of Zhivago-passion, and we immediately cut away. Lara awakens in the morning to find the floor littered with inky, balled-up, abandoned pages, and one perfect sheet of paper with a perfect LARA love poem resting on the table.
It’s a beautiful, romantic image — yet he’s still no hero to me. So he wrote one poem, and a love poem, at that — where’s the sword, the glorious battle, the noble death, the contribution? I like the writing at dawn, the wolves howling on the steppes, and those Cyrillic letters are pretty — but it’s clear to me that Dr. Zhivago is far more vital, effective, revolutionary, heroic, as a doctor than as a writer. At least that way he saved a few people’s lives.
At college, I heard if you had a Creative Writing “emphasis,” you were excused from courses in both Chaucer and Milton, neither of whom I found comprehensible. But you had to submit “original creative work” to get into those writing courses. You can do this, I told myself. On your own, without stealing or stealth. Writing something “creative” can’t be worse than reading The Canterbury Tales. I sat at the IBM Selectric my grandfather bought me for college (his old manual typewriter had long since disappeared, alas) on which I tapped away my English lit papers at two in the morning and waited. I got a drink of water, a cup of tea, a bottle of beer. I got up to pee several times. Perhaps the Selectric was at fault; I found lined paper and experimented with a series of pens (expensive fountain pen I’d been given as a high school graduation present, a felt-tip that looked too intimidatingly like permanent marker, a Bic ballpoint whose scratchy letters looked too frail), a variety of pencils (No. 2 Ticonderogas were too soft, harder leads wrote too thin and faint). Chaucer and Milton loomed and smirked. I got up and put on a linen blouse. You’re Lily, you’re Louise, I told myself. Make Julia proud. Prove yourself to John and Eugene. Write a silly lily love poem, how hard can that be? I waited for the montage, the thirty seconds of typing that would Save the World.
I can’t remember the moment of writing. I know I didn’t plagiarize another apple/dapple poem — I wasn’t that stupid, these were college professors, not my gullible love-blind mother. I suspect I tricked myself, told myself this was not a “submission of original creative work,” it was just another school assignment not to flake out on. But I must have written something, cobbled together some meaningless anecdotes into a story, strung iambic phrases into a poem, because I wound up in enough writing workshops to become, emphatically, a Creative Writing person.
I wrote the bare minimum I could show up and get away with, to lessen the risk of being exposed. A sentence took forever to compose; I was floored by the casual flood of pages and pages and pages my fellow students seemed to generate with ease. I tried to pay attention in these workshops, but I was too scared to reveal my idiocy, my fraud, by commenting much on other students’ superior, real, earned work or engaging much in the theoretical discussions of craft. I did learn something about narrative arc, and the definition of aubade; I learned the difference between a metaphor and a simile, and that adverbs were lazy; I heard somewhere that Sylvia Plath used to read thesauri like dime-store novels, so I took to doing that, too, and highlighting obscure polysyllabic words with a shriek of fluorescent yellow. I learned a writer needed to create one’s own writing space, something like an altar, I supposed, with sacred objects on one’s desk like a rock or shell and quotations by Virginia Woolf and Flannery O’Connor pinned to the wall, so I did that, too. I kept sneaking into the club; the bouncer kept waving me in. Each time I was accepted, there was the relief, then the fear — now that I’m here, I have to write. And, having written, the judgment will come, the exposure. Dash will tell me It’s not good enough. The people in charge of running the world will tell me I and my work are not liked. Perhaps I was no longer a plagiarist (my mother wasn’t going to show up on campus waving that unearthed book of children’s poems), but I was still going to be found out, any second now. I took to writing my paltry short story and poetry assignments one hour before they were due, which left me a loophole: Of course it’s terrible; I wrote it in only forty-two minutes! Better you try to fail — you’re more assured of victory. Effort wasn’t just inelegant, it was terrifying; it left you vulnerable, your soft naked underbelly exposed to the blow.
At least I had my professors to look to, this time — they were actually Real Writers, with many real and written and published books, the first writers I’d ever met, dazzling in their mere existence. But I was far more curious about their lives than their writing. One professor was an Irish writer of beautifully rendered novels I wouldn’t come to appreciate until ten years later; another was a charismatic local guru, an earth mother to the Los Angeles community of fiction writers who offered writerly pearls to us students but whose only advice I latched on to at the time was the importance of sending thank-you notes to everyone you meet on engraved, writerly looking stationery. She also insisted that to be a writer, you must write at least five hundred words every day. She was adamant about this one, but I hoped my nice new stationery would get me past the Border Guards.
For our final class with the Irish novelist, he invited us to his home in Malibu; our workshop trooped out to find, yes, a house on the beach, lunch laid out for us on the brick patio, ham and baguettes and wine and cheese, a house with overstuffed white furniture and honey wood floors and charcoal sketches on the walls by, I assumed, famous artist friends of the writer, and shelves, shelves, shelves of books. We all drank a lot of wine on this most perfect, inspiring afternoon; the Pacific Ocean, the saline breeze, the halfhearted wine-infused literary conversation, the honey ham and honey wood floors, and the whisper in my ear: This can all be yours, this is the writer’s life. Of course it was — just look at Lily and Dash, at Louise and John and Eugene. They’re out there, strolling the sand. The sex and the wine and the consoling ocean rush and crash, the smell of salt, the floor-to-ceiling books making a fortress of your home. Such an alluring lesson. So apparently possible.
But my two professors, between them, had written well over two dozen books. They must have each written at least five hundred beautifully rendered words a day for years; they’d earned it. I’d written, for all intents and purposes, nothing. And tick tick tick, I wasn’t a kid anymore, whose wild fantasies are endearing; at some point soon I was going to have to offer evidence. Real evidence. I was going to have to write.