Why We Write Read online

  Terry McMillan

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come to Vegas with me?” my husband asks for the second time this morning. I don’t want to go, for two reasons. First of all, it’s not like he’s inviting me for a hot and heavy weekend where I’ll get to wear something snazzy and we’ll see a show and casino-hop and stay up late and make love and sleep in and order room service….

  —Opening lines, Getting to Happy, 2010

  “I write because the world is an imperfect place, and we behave in an imperfect manner…,” Terry McMillan told the Writer magazine in 2001. “Writing is about the only way (besides praying) that allows me to be compassionate toward folks who, in real life, I’m probably not that sympathetic toward.”

  By exposing the realities of African American women’s lives to mainstream (which is to say, white) readers, Terry McMillan has written books that foster the compassion she seeks. Her 1992 novel, Waiting to Exhale, sold more than seven hundred thousand hardcover copies in its first year. By the time the movie version appeared in 1995, it had sold 2.5 million copies in paperback, thereby transforming the way the publishing industry thought about African American fiction. By kicking open the door that had been shut to African American writers, Terry McMillan proved that black women would buy books, if only they were offered books that reflected their real lives.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: October 18, 1951

  Born and raised: Port Huron, Michigan

  Current home: Northern California

  Love life: Single

  Family life: Son, Solomon Welch, born 1984

  Schooling: BA in journalism at UC Berkeley; studied screenwriting at Columbia

  Teaching: University of Arizona; University of Wyoming; Stanford University

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Doubleday/Columbia University; Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, 1987

  Notable notes:

  • Terry McMillan first fell in love with books at age 16, when she worked in the Port Huron Public Library.

  • McMillan is an avid art collector. She bought her first signed lithograph, now valued at $200,000, for $90 at age 22.

  • McMillan never, ever reads her reviews. “You have a baby; do you really care if other people think it’s cute?”

  Website: www.terrymcmillan.com

  Twitter: @msterrymcmillan

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  Mama, 1987

  Disappearing Acts, 1989

  Waiting to Exhale, 1992

  How Stella Got Her Groove Back, 1996

  A Day Late and a Dollar Short, 2000

  The Interruption of Everything, 2005

  Getting to Happy, 2010

  Nonfiction

  Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction, 1990

  It’s Okay if You’re Clueless, 2006

  Film Adaptations

  Waiting to Exhale, 1995

  How Stella Got Her Groove Back, 1998

  Disappearing Acts, 2000

  Terry McMillan

  Why I write

  I didn’t choose to write. It was something that just happened to me.

  I write to shed dead skin and to explore why people do the things that we do to each other and to ourselves.

  Writing feels like being in love. I am consumed by the characters I’m writing about. I become them. I lose all sense of my own reality when I’m writing a novel. It’s refreshing, like running a few miles, the way you feel when you finish.

  I don’t write about stupid people. I don’t write about victims. I write about people who are victimized, but they’re not going to stay down. That said, I deliberately choose characters I’m not quite sympathetic toward, or that I truly do not understand.

  Years ago I went to McDonald’s and got an employment application. For every character I create, I fill one out. I use an astrology book to pick their birthdays based on the characteristics I want them to have. I create a five-page profile for every one of my characters so I know everything about them: what size shoes they wear, if their hair is dyed, if they bounce checks, have allergies, what they hate about themselves, what they wish they could change, if they pay their bills on time.

  My readers might be surprised to know how much research I do. The novel I’m writing now is about grandparents becoming parents. I’m reading all kinds of books on that topic. I’m interviewing people who work for all these government agencies. When people read it, they won’t know what went into it. They’ll think it rolled off my tongue.

  A novel is like life: it’s a series of knots, and the quality of your life is determined by how you unravel them. I give my characters something to tackle. I let them tell me what the biggest challenge they’re facing is, what they’re most afraid of, and I make them face that challenge in my story. It’s made me a more compassionate person. I start out not liking my characters and I end up caring for them. I have to step out of my own comfort zone to tell their stories.

  I cry a lot when I write. In Day Late, when my character’s mother died—oh my God, I was messed up. She’d left a purse in her closet with letters to her kids in it. When I was writing those letters I was a wreck. I got so many fan letters about those letters, saying they’d always wanted to get a letter like that from their mom.

  I jump up in the morning. I can’t wait to go see what my characters are going to do today. I get wired up. When my character falls in love, I’m in love. When somebody’s heart is broken, or feels jubilation, I feel all of that. When I finish working for the day, I’m spent. I go for a walk or go do my errands, and I walk into the grocery store and it’s like everything is illuminated. Nobody knows where I just came from. Nobody knows that I just left New York or Las Vegas. It’s like I just walked out of one movie and into another one.

  How it happened

  When I was eighteen I was taking night classes at a junior college in L.A. I broke up with this guy and as a result, I wrote a poem. I wrote it on a steno pad, because I was this little stenographer for the Prudential Insurance Company during the day. Writing that poem kind of scared me. It was like I was possessed. I’d never written a poem in my life. I don’t even remember reading a poem before then.

  One afternoon, a friend of my roommate’s read my poem. He wanted to know if he could publish it in the LACC (Los Angeles City College) literary journal. I said, “Publish it?” And he did. From that day forward, if a leaf fell off of a tree, I thought, There’s a poem in that. I was just a little poem-writing fool.

  I ended up going to UC Berkeley, majoring in sociology. I wanted to be a social worker because I knew the world was a horrible place, and I thought maybe I could help. Back then, if you were, like, a little Negro, they gave you money to go to Berkeley. Anyway, we started a black newspaper called Black Thoughts, and they published some of my poems. I was writing editorials for the Daily Californian as well.

  Word got around, and other university newspapers, especially the black ones, started publishing my poems. To this day I still have those poems in the cardboard suitcase I bought for two dollars and ninety-nine cents in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1968. And you know what? Some of them aren’t really that bad!

  In my junior year, when it came time for me to declare a major, I told my adviser I was declaring sociology. He asked me why; he said, “I’ve been reading your articles, and I can’t understand why you’re not focusing on writing.”

  My mouth fell open. I could not believe it. This guy was not black, either. I explained to him that writing was a hobby, that you can’t make a living at it. He told me to go home and think about it, so I did. I realized he was right, so I switched my major.

  I took a fiction writing class from Ishmael Reed. Ishmael read my first short story and he said, “Terry, you have a very strong voice.” People were always saying I had an unusually deep voice for a woman, so I
thought that’s what he meant. I didn’t know anything back then. Nada.

  After Berkeley I moved to New York, and I got into the Harlem Writers Guild—kind of like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but for black folks. I read them a story I’d written in Ishmael’s class, called “Mama Take Another Step.”

  When I finished, this novelist, Doris Jean Austin, said, “This is not a short story, sweetie. It’s a novel.” Everyone was nodding. I didn’t know there was no market for short stories, but they did. By the end of that session, I’d written the opening chapter of my very first book, Mama.

  My life changed, and I didn’t like it

  In 1987, I got a seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance for Mama, and it sold out of its first printing before it hit the bookstores. I got seventy-five thousand dollars for Disappearing Acts. Those two didn’t get on the New York Times list, but they sold a lot of copies. So I got a quarter of a million dollars for Waiting to Exhale.

  In 1992, Waiting to Exhale debuted at number six on the New York Times list. I couldn’t believe it. While I was on my sixteen-city tour for Exhale, my agent held an auction for the paperback rights. I was in Atlanta when my agent called me. She said, “Terry, you won’t believe this. It’s up to one point two.” I was, like, “One point two what?”

  A half hour later she called back and said, “Oprah wants you on her show.” Oprah had never had a book author before. From that point forward a lot of things changed very quickly. I moved from Arizona to the Bay Area. From People magazine on down, everybody wanted interviews. I looked up and there was Time magazine, sitting in my living room. It was overwhelming.

  Then this whole business that black people do read started coming to the fore. I resented that. I said, Black people have always read. There just hasn’t been a contemporary novel that appealed to us in such high numbers. But guess what: there are a lot of white people buying my book. And guess what else: we’ve been reading a lot of books by white authors. Do the damn math.

  When all this first happened, my life changed completely. I didn’t like it. People started coming at me from every angle, asking for money. Readers wrote me their sad stories. I had long-lost relatives suddenly appear. I got so depressed, I went to see a shrink.

  It didn’t change things for just me

  It didn’t change my writing to be successful. I still told the stories that I wanted to tell. The thing is, the critics hate you when you become commercially successful. They look for stuff to find wrong. When I was writing Getting to Happy, I knew the book was not going to be well received. I didn’t care. If the people reading the book like it, if it moves them, that’s what matters to me.

  But when all the hoopla happened after Waiting to Exhale, the publishers started giving lots of young black writers mega advances, thinking they could get themselves the next Terry McMillan. For a minute there, a lot of these writers were being paid these big advances. They were signing these two- and three-book deals for all this money, and they didn’t understand that if your first book does okay, your second does mediocre, you’re not going on tour for your third book. They didn’t realize that if the publisher isn’t recouping its investment, you’re history.

  When their books didn’t sell the way Waiting to Exhale did, when they didn’t earn back those advances, the publishers started punishing them by not giving them new contracts. Some of them had million-dollar deals. Now they’ve been kicked to the curb. They can’t get a contract to save their lives. I know a lot of them. It’s really sad. Really sad.

  Racist, simple as that

  There are a lot of white writers who get decent advances, and sell a decent amount of books, and they just keep going. Their publishers are willing to support them, regardless. They’re going to promote them anyway. These writers run around the country, getting big speaking fees. You don’t have a lot of black writers doing that. It’s racist, simple as that.

  I know some black writers—Iyanla Vanzant, for one—who got a lot of money, and their books did well, but not the way the publishers expected them to. Never mind that the publisher didn’t promote them, didn’t send them on mega book tours, any of that. They were relying on my audience to run out and buy those other black writers’ books.

  It even affects me. I have seventy pages of a new novel, and I’m being told, “It seems a little dark. It doesn’t have your trademark humor in it.”

  I said, “Dark? Really?”

  You know what? White people write depressing-ass books all the time. The more depressing it is, the deeper they think it is. Take The Glass Castle. Or Kathryn Stockett—she can write a book about black maids in the sixties. Talk about dark! What was so uplifting about that? And yet still it’s been on the New York Times for a hundred weeks. But when we tell our own stories, it’s either depressing or white people aren’t interested.

  The thing that pisses me off more than anything is that when writers, mostly white writers, use language that’s so lofty, or they write about characters who would be inconsequential in real life, they make their characters’ lives so important. Crossing the street is a big deal. What’s in their cabinet is a big deal. Take Jonathan Franzen. Please. After thirty pages, I was thinking, Who cares?

  I hate labels of all kinds

  The woman who came to my house for Time magazine spent more time talking about my house than she did on my books. She wouldn’t have done that if I were a wealthy white writer. She was shocked that I have good taste.

  In her article she described my books as “pop fiction.” If your work is popular, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t be taken seriously. I wrote the magazine a scathing letter. I said, “Don’t hate me because I happen to sell more books than your Paris Review little darlings. Don’t try to make me the Wal-Mart writer. You know what? Popular is not a bad thing.”

  The way that I define “pop” is like pop psychology: you already know how it’s going to end. My books are character driven, not plot driven. My books are not predictable. I mean, Getting to Happy—you don’t know if they’re going to get there. It’s a journey. That’s the whole point.

  I’m doing basically the same thing that Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway did. I’m telling stories about my world, in my time, in my own voice. No one held that against them.

  In a hundred years they’ll be able to eat those words “pop fiction.” I reject them right now. I don’t let anyone define me. I’m more interested in the story I have to tell. That’s what’s important to me.

  So I’m going to keep on writing it the way I’m writing it.

  Terry McMillan’s Wisdom for Writers

  I only write about characters who disturb me. I don’t sympathize with my characters at the beginning. In order to tell their story, I have to develop compassion for them by the end. That gives my characters, and me, and my readers an investment in how it all turns out.

  As soon as I understand what my characters’ dilemmas are, I give them something to tackle, something they need to change, because people fear change more than anything and that makes for compelling drama.

  I don’t put furniture polish on my stories and give my readers the shiny version. I tell it like it is.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rick Moody

  People often ask me where I get my ideas. Or on one occasion back in 2024 I was asked. This was at a reading in an old-fashioned used-media outlet right here in town, the store called Arachnids, Inc. The audience consisted of five intrepid and stalwart folks, four out of the five no doubt intent on surfing aimlessly at consoles.

  —Opening lines, introduction, The Four Fingers of Death, 2010

  “I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way,” Rick Moody told an interviewer in 2002.

  “Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. It helps people know what section to browse, but I don’t care about that stuff. I’m trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like mu
sic to me.”

  Indeed, since The Ice Storm was published in 1994, Moody’s books—not to mention his other artistic endeavors—would tax any effort to taxonomize his work. Besides a writer of memoirs, essays, novels, music criticism, story collections, novellas, and combinations thereof, he’s also a singer, guitarist, and piano player in a band, which he describes as “woebegone and slightly modernist folk music, of the very antique variety.”

  Born in New York City, Moody grew up in the Connecticut suburbs that have served as closely observed settings for many of his stories and novels. His reexaminations of the people and places of his youth included a critique of the Columbia University MFA program from which he’d graduated twenty years before. In a provocative 2005 Atlantic Monthly essay, he wrote, “What if all you did in class was assignments? What if you rewrote one sentence all semester? What if everyone got a chance to be the instructor, and everyone got a chance to be the student? Then, I think, we’d be getting somewhere.”

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: October 18, 1961

  Born and raised: Born in New York; raised in Connecticut suburbs

  Current home: Brooklyn and Fishers Island

  Love life: Married since 2002

  Family life: Daughter born in 2008

  Schooling: Brown University; MFA from Columbia University

  Day job?: Teaches writing, part-time, at NYU

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Guggenheim Fellowship; Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Art of the Memoir; the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize

  Notable notes:

  • Rick Moody’s grandfather was publisher of the New York Daily News.

  • Moody is also a musician, composer, and music critic. He plays in a band called Wingdale Community Singers and writes a music column for TheRumpus.net.

  • In 2006, an Arizona state senator advocated a measure allowing students to refuse “personally offensive” assignments—citing complaints he’d received about The Ice Storm.