Why We Write Read online

  A pebble becomes a seed

  When I’m in the act of writing, more than any other emotion, I feel excited.

  I can’t say I’m never frustrated, but I’ve been at this a really long time now, so I have ways of dealing with the frustration. I know that at some point in every day’s writing, there will be a sort of takeoff. It might be early, it might be late, but there’s a place where I feel the energy moving itself forward, instead of me pushing it.

  One of the things I like about writing is that sense of the story unfolding. You throw this pebble into your story because you can’t think of anything better, just to keep going. Then it stops being a little pebble and starts being a little seed, and suddenly it has shoots. It begins to grow.

  I’m writing a book now that I’m sure will see the light of day, but God knows when. It’s a what-if book about one of my horses: what if she were racing at Auteuil, the jumper course outside Paris? And what if she got out of her stall and headed into Paris? It’s a really fun idea, but it has high levels of plausibility problems.

  While I was working on it the other day, I came to a bump in the road. I didn’t know what to do next. So I introduced a raven. He started out as a pebble. Then I looked up some facts about ravens, and then those were pretty interesting. I could feel the shoots begin around the raven. I could feel him start to speak in his own voice, becoming a little self-important, and suddenly the energy of the narrative entered into his voice. He became a raven from a long noble family of ravens, very proud of himself, very talkative. Somehow in the next few weeks he’s going to help the horse.

  That’s what I like the most about writing a story: the way a thing comes in as a pebble and blossoms.

  How I knew

  During my senior year at Vassar, I wrote a novel as my senior thesis. It was an adolescent novel about the traumatic relationship of two college students. It’s somewhere in the Vassar library now.

  Knowing that I was going to be a writer was a function of knowing that I really enjoyed writing that novel. It grew out of curiosity—and the other thing that all my work (and a lot of literary work) grows out of, which is gossip. There was a girl and a guy in my class, and even though they weren’t connected, I brought them together because they were the two weirdest people I knew. I can barely remember that novel now, but I remember how much I enjoyed writing it. It was much, much fun, and that was that for me.

  My own private Iowa

  In 1975, the year after I graduated from Vassar, I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was rejected, but my husband was accepted to the history department, so we moved to Iowa. I worked in a teddy bear factory. Someone else stuffed the teddy bears. My job was to sew the back seam.

  The next year I applied to the workshop again. This time I got in. My fellow students were quite good. We had Allan Gurganus, Jayne Anne Phillips, T. C. Boyle, John Givens, Richard Bausch. Everyone was very dedicated and professional and kind. Then I got a Fulbright and went to Iceland for a year. I’d spent most of grad school studying Old Icelandic literature, and I was going to write my PhD dissertation about it. My adviser said, “We don’t really need another dissertation on Old Icelandic. We have enough of those already.” So I turned in stories I had written instead, and then after I graduated, I wrote the first part of my first real novel.

  The best of times

  Writing my third novel was the best time I’ve ever had as a writer. I felt I was being manipulated from afar.

  It seemed that the characters were using me as a secretary to write their story. I really enjoyed that. Every day I’d go sit in front of the typewriter and I’d join my characters in fourteenth-century Greenland, Europe’s most far-flung trading outpost, and I’d put on my imaginary bearskin coat, and it would all just come out.

  About twelve years later, I had a similar experience with another novel. That one also felt like I was being told the story, this time by the horse out in the barn, Mr. T.

  The other books weren’t bad experiences. Just different.

  It gets better…

  I believe that you either love the work or the rewards. Life is a lot easier if you love the work.

  I’m lucky. I like the work more all the time. I’m even more curious now. I have more ideas. I’m more enthusiastic. I have more faith that the pebble will turn into a seed. My great fear is not that I’ll run out of subjects. It’s that I’ll run out of time.

  If you’re curious, there’s always a subject to write about. I always was interested in the outer world. I’ll paste in a few things from my inner life if there’s nothing else to put in, but it’s not my goal in life to write about myself.

  Some of my books have been more carefully planned than others. When I was writing A Thousand Acres, based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, I made a rule that I couldn’t diverge from Shakespeare’s plot. That got sticky. For example: No, they couldn’t have a war! They were a farm family in Iowa. So I gave them a legal battle instead.

  When I was about two-thirds of the way through, I realized that I had departed from the plot. I had to go back and fix it. If a book has a plan, it’s more difficult to write than a book that just has a form.

  Ten Days in the Hills had a form rather than a plan. I knew it was going to be ten days. I knew that each of the days was going to be about equal in length. I really wanted the book to be 444 pages long. I don’t know why; it just came to me as a kind of puzzle. I thought the structure of the puzzle would compensate for the looseness of the quote-unquote plot.

  As I saw the word count mount up, I thought, Hmm, we could have real numbers here. I have to say, my editor wasn’t sympathetic to the number magic. She got a little irritated with my desire to make Ten Days exactly 444 pages long.

  Except when it gets worse

  I wrote one of my novels in first person, and it was dead on arrival—I think because my protagonist wasn’t the sort of person who’d know or say the things that needed to be said.

  So I switched to third person and rewrote it. In that draft there was too much information. My protagonist’s inner voice had disappeared. The characters kept lying there, semidead. Even though I was fearful and anxious, I couldn’t stop going back to it. I thought it was a story worth telling.

  The turning point came at draft four or five. I asked my accountant’s book group to read it. They really liked it, and they also had appropriate suggestions. That was the moment I knew the book wasn’t a lost cause, because it appealed to its audience, mature women.

  I’ve never given up on a novel. Although I had my doubts about A Thousand Acres. I was writing it in the winter in this little office in our new house in Ames, Iowa. I kept falling asleep as I wrote. I put the manuscript aside, thinking it must be really boring. Then spring came and I reread it, and it seemed pretty good.

  It turned out the chimney of the furnace was leaking carbon monoxide. When we stopped using the furnace, the novel stopped putting me to sleep. The lesson there is, sometimes it’s not as bad as you think.

  Rumors of the novel’s death have been

  greatly exaggerated

  The novel as a form is extremely capacious. They’ve been saying the novel is dying forever and ever, and it’s still here. Of course I’m worried about the future of the novel. But I’m not worried about it. The novel is irreplaceable.

  Or not

  In the 1980s, publishing companies began to consolidate, and they got bigger and bigger. In the ’90s, everyone rode the gravy train. Then the train crashed.

  For writers, there’s always been a tension between money and fame. If you’re on the money side, that’s your compensation. You can do what Jodi Picoult talked about in terms of being labeled “chick lit” versus “literary fiction”: “weep into her check.” If you’re on the fame side, and your books are too complex to be bestsellers, that’s your compensation.

  Now advances are getting smaller. Bookstores are going under. Who knows what’s going to happen? The real question is, how big a hit will the au
dience take? Kids are reading books; that’s the only good sign there is. That doesn’t mean it’s going to pan out, but it’s something.

  What we have to look at in the death of the novel is the departure of male readers. The lionization of Updike and Mailer and those guys depended on the male infrastructure of literature: editors, reviewers, kvellers picking the dominant male; writers arguing among themselves about who was the dominant male. That culture of male dominance is gone now. They keep trying to revive it with Jonathan Franzen, but unless men come back to reading, it’s not going to revive.

  I say, let’s talk about Franzen after his tenth book. Let’s see if there’s consistency in his body of work.

  Boys and girls—together?

  If you ask a group of men how many books by women they’ve read in the past year, no hands will go up. If you ask a group of women how many books by men or women they’ve read, it’s about equal. I’m one of them. I read both.

  In 2005 the New York Times Book Review asked me to blog about a survey they did. They asked two hundred editors, authors, and critics—one hundred men, one hundred women—to name the best books of the past forty years. Beloved came in first. The next ten books were by men. Then came Marilynne Robinson.

  Men returned sixty-two percent of the surveys that came back. Except for Beloved, they all voted for male writers. The women voted for both women and men. A lot of women didn’t bother to vote. I wrote in my blog that maybe the women didn’t believe in that hierarchical view of literature. They thought it was a stupid question, whereas the men thought it was an important question.

  Curiouser and curiouser

  Believe me, I’m not complaining. I’ve been really lucky. It does still happen that I go to my publisher and say, “I have this idea,” and they say, “What?” When I went to my agent with A Thousand Acres, she said, “Are you kidding? Nobody wants to read about crops.” Then I turned in the book, and it was fine.

  I’ve had some rewards. Rewards are fantasies. You can’t wish for an award. You cannot say, “My career will finally be worth it if I win the Nobel Prize.” That’s false consciousness.

  If your career wasn’t worth it while you were writing those books, then what a sad life you’ve led. For me, it goes back to curiosity. I suppose my career will be over when I look around and say, “This is all boring; there’s nothing more that interests me.”

  You want your interests to outrun your actual days on earth.

  Jane Smiley’s Wisdom for Writers

  Don’t write a book you think a publisher will want to publish. Write the book you want to research and the book you want to read.

  When you’re a novelist, you’re a gossiper of the imaginary. You can take people you know who don’t know each other and make them fall in love. The fun part is seeing what happens.

  Figure out who your readership is for whatever you’re writing, and try it out on a group of those people—or a book group whose members are that kind of person.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Meg Wolitzer

  People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness. The bright points of silver. The butter in its oblong dish. The corpse of a chocolate cake. The leaning back in a chair at the end, slugged on the head and overcome….

  —Opening lines, The Uncoupling, 2011

  “Meg Wolitzer,” Nick Hornby wrote in the Believer, “is an author who makes you wonder why more people don’t write perceptive, entertaining, unassuming novels about how and why ordinary people choose to make decisions about their lives.”

  Hornby’s praise is understated, verging on dismissive. Perceptive and entertaining, yes, but unassuming? Not so much. Meg Wolitzer’s wit and popularity should not be cause to mistake her for a literary lite. Wolitzer starts small and goes wide, and her mission is ambitious: to depict who we average Americans really are, when no one’s looking.

  Wolitzer took a distinctly assuming position on the subject in the New York Times Book Review on March 30, 2012, writing in essay form what every one of her novels demands. “Many first-rate books by women and about women’s lives never find a way to escape ‘Women’s Fiction,’” she wrote, “and make the leap onto the upper shelf where certain books, most of them written by men,…are prominently displayed and admired.”

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: May 28, 1959

  Born and raised: Born in Brooklyn; grew up on Long Island, New York

  Current home: Manhattan

  Love life: Married to science writer Richard Panek

  Kids: Gabriel, born 1990; Charlie, born 1995

  Schooling: Studied creative writing at Smith College; graduated from Brown University, 1981

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1994; included in Best American Short Stories, 1998; Pushcart Prize, 1998

  Notable notes:

  • Meg Wolitzer is a self-described Scrabble nerd who prefers playing anonymously online. Hence the protagonist of her recent young adult novel, a boy who possesses magic powers that allow him to win at Scrabble.

  • After reading Wolitzer’s latest novel, The Uncoupling, Suzzy Roche of the Roches liked it so much she wrote a song based on it, “Back in the Sack.”

  • Meg Wolitzer’s mother is novelist Hilma Wolitzer.

  Website: www.megwolitzer.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/megwolitzerauthor

  Twitter: @MegWolitzer

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  Sleepwalking, 1982

  Hidden Pictures, 1986

  This Is Your Life, 1988

  Friends for Life, 1994

  Surrender, Dorothy, 1998

  The Wife, 2003

  The Position, 2005

  The Ten-Year Nap, 2008

  The Uncoupling, 2011

  Film and TV Adaptations

  This Is My Life (based on This Is Your Life), 1992

  Surrender, Dorothy, 2006

  Young Adult Novel

  The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, 2011

  Meg Wolitzer

  Why I write

  Though it’s pleasing, as a writer, to think that most of your life is a quest toward doing the kind of work that absorbs you most, sometimes I think that a good deal of my life is, perhaps, essentially a quest toward freedom from anxiety. Being engaged in prose, especially when it’s going well, can keep the anxiety of the world away.

  Writing is the only thing I know that can do that; the work becomes an airtight container. Poisonous things are not allowed in; after all, you’re the bouncer! You have deep control, and where else can you find that? You can’t control other people or your relationships or your children, but in writing you can have sustained periods where you’re absolutely in charge.

  I write, as Zadie Smith said, to reveal my way of being in the world, my sensibility. What am I but my sensibility: my self, my experiences, the changes I’ve made and seen?

  A certain kind of writer writes to meet her ghosts. I’m not brave in that way. In a sense I need to be lanced when I write. Nor do I write or read to escape. There is no escape; I don’t know what that even means. When I work, I want to achieve a sort of tilt, to create a skewed world, an interesting world.

  I like the physical sensation of writing, too. It gives me a kind of ruddy vigor, like some sort of exercise you want a reward for afterward. I find it deeply satisfying to have worked something out in a novel. My husband’s a science writer, and this is the closest I’m ever going to get to his world, to working on cosmic puzzles and theories.

  I’m a big Scrabble player, and I used to write puzzles. With my cowriter Jesse Green, I created a weekly cryptic crossword for 7 Days magazine in New York, way back when. Sometimes I think of writing as being like that: cryptic, filled with clues, inscrutable, elegant. What’s the way out of the locked room of the hell of a novel going nowhere?
I’ve been known to jump up and down (well, subtly) when I come up with a solution to a problem in my fiction. Working it out is a kind of exercise you’ve given yourself that no one else will give you. It’s a very personalized form of homework.

  I write to hammer out an idea that I’d be hammering out in my head anyway—to make some kind out concrete thing out of it. It’s a natural extension of the inner jabber. When I have inner jabber plus imperative, that’s a book.

  Writing for Mom

  I had a fairly unusual situation, growing up: I had a mother who was a writer, though unlike me, she came to writing very late. I was six or seven when she sold her first short story to the old Saturday Evening Post. I saw the pain and excitement of her experiences. When I started writing, I wrote for her.

  In first grade, I had a teacher who’d invite me up to her desk, and I’d dictate stories to her, because she could write them down faster than I could. My mother saved the stories, and looking at them now, I can see that I started to write as a way of figuring out the world. As I got a little older, I loved to rush home and show my mother what I’d written, knowing there would be an encouraging response.

  I gave a reading once, and an older woman stood up and said that her daughter was trying to be a playwright, and she was worried that her daughter wouldn’t be able to make a living. I said she should encourage her talents, and that the world would do its best to whittle away at her daughter, but a mother should never do that.

  At Brown, I studied with the great writer John Hawkes, who we all called Jack. One day I ran into him on campus, and because I wanted to please him, a lie sprang to my lips. I blurted out, “I just finished writing a story.” Then I had to run home and actually write it.

  Later on in a writing life, when you’re being published fairly frequently and you don’t have to obsessively please another person, there’s no thrilling Helen Keller “water” moment, but a series of moments: the excitement of knowing that you’re not writing into the void, that here’s a vessel for your work. That protégé/mentor thing is a way in, and then eventually you don’t need it anymore.