Why We Write Page 18
Shame
I sold my first novel to Random House for five thousand dollars while I was still at Brown. It came out eighteen months later.
I was all set to go to Stanford for grad school, but I decided to move to New York City and see if I could make it as a writer instead. I lived in the Village and ate tons of Indian takeout. I wasn’t focused on money. All I knew was, I’d sold my novel and I wanted to live as a fiction writer.
I went to MacDowell [Colony] right after I moved to New York. It was so long ago that I had my folk guitar with me, with its no-nukes sticker on the side, and I sat under a tree and played “The Water Is Wide.” Do I distance myself from that girl? Absolutely not. Living with our own ridiculousness is something writers have to do.
Over the next few years I kept selling novels for incrementally slightly larger advances. It was such a different era, and it never occurred to me to think of how many—or how few—copies I was selling. I felt I was successful simply because I was being published. I was very grateful and happy. It never occurred to me that this joy could be in peril, but of course it always is. Some of the writers I came up with eventually disappeared. Was it because they couldn’t get published anymore? Because they just stopped writing? In some cases I really don’t know.
I never had any money until 1992, when one of my books was made into a movie. It was perfect timing. I had a new baby, and I had no idea how I was going to write and also be a parent. The movie deal bought me time. It got me off the hamster wheel of writing and teaching.
I’ve resumed my place on that hamster wheel now, because I have a kid in college, and one who’s rapidly heading there. As I’ve mentioned, my husband’s a writer, too, so we’re both living that fragile, one-foot-on-a-banana-peel life. We make corrections as we need to. I feel that there’s no shame in doing whatever you need to do to make a living as a writer. It’s exhausting but exciting.
I was in a car full of writers once, being driven to some event, and everyone in the backseat was talking about our failures and disappointments. The driver turned around and burst out, “You’re all so talented! Why should you feel so much shame?” We had to laugh at ourselves. We knew we were describing a feeling that a lot of writers have.
Sometimes Zeus. Sometimes not.
I have very different kinds of writing days. With some books, I have that springing-from-the forehead-of-Zeus, improbable, and productive experience. There might be day after day of engagement, and the world drops away, the contents of my brain recast in miniature on the page. When I was writing my novel The Position, I had the feeling that I was simply the amanuensis. It was my job to write the book down like a secretary. I wrote that book very fast.
With other books, there might be days and days of fatigue and lethargy—and in my own experience, this ends up being because there’s a faulty or not fully realized imperative at the heart of the book.
The imperative: imperative
While I’m writing, I ask myself the question that a reader inevitably asks a writer: why are you telling me this? There has to be an erotic itch, a sense of book as hot object, the idea that what’s contained in the book is the information you’ve always needed.
If the answer to the question “Why are you telling me this?” doesn’t come quickly, if I’m writing without urgency, that’s my first sign that something’s amiss. When novels or stories feel like they’re going nowhere, they’ve lost their imperative, their reason for being.
Imperative is the kind of thing we associate with urgent, external moments—say, with political causes. I also associate it with art. You know that something might be righted, whether it’s a social wrong or incomplete information. That’s what art gives you: a more complete view, a view of corners you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.
Years ago, I sold a novel based on Freud’s famous patient Dora, written from her point of view, essentially attempting to reclaim her story from Freud and return it to her. I really enjoyed writing the first fifty pages, and I traveled to Vienna to research it. And then, not long afterward, I realized that I didn’t want to write this book. I felt constrained by the language I had to use because it was set in a long-ago time, and it was a first-person book. Reclaiming the narrative and returning it to her was great in theory but not in reality. Once I knew that, I lost the imperative to write it.
Some novels are like big pocketbooks; they’ve got the whole world in them, and the writer and the reader have to dig around a bit to find what they’re looking for. Some novels are more slender containers. This one would have had to be the latter kind. I was surprised I had so much trouble, because I’m very interested in psychoanalysis, and I thought such a book would be a way to write about the subject with force. But I found myself relying too heavily on lyricism, which, for me, is something of a trap.
Lyricism can break sentences into shining, separate, discrete objects, and that can either contribute to a work’s power or merely make the prose feel pretty, writerly, and admirable, but lacking in force. My trip to Vienna ended up as a single paragraph in my next novel after I dropped Dora and her world. Everything makes a good soup eventually, even if in a totally unrecognizable form.
The most difficult time for me as a writer is before I have a central guiding idea for a book. Once I have it I feel reassured. It’s like having an inhaler in your pocket, if you’re an asthmatic.
Before and after
I divide my writing life into periods of before and after I wrote The Wife. I don’t like much of what I’d written before that book. I was still living in a world of sentences that were sometimes pleasing to me, but I wasn’t happy with them. I was keeping myself self-consciously lyrical and held-back and a little reserved as a writer. I worried that the results weren’t forceful enough.
The stuff I liked to read at the time was so much stronger than what I was actually writing. While I have some reservations about Philip Roth’s work, I love the muscularity of it. What was keeping me from writing with the kind of fervor I felt when I was reading? I took that on directly when I wrote The Wife.
Rock, paper, scissors
I’d conceived The Uncoupling as a contemporary Lysistrata. I started it during the Bush years, when, like everyone else, I was fatigued by the endless wars the United States had started in Afghanistan and Iraq. Initially, I thought The Uncoupling would have a significant war content.
Then there was a shift as I wrote. I always know, when I dutifully return to a balky, “stuck” scene and realize that it won’t be any reader’s favorite, that it probably shouldn’t be in the book. I started seeing scenes like that in The Uncoupling. And then what I knew I actually wanted to write about just rose up and overpowered the rest. It was a kind of rock-paper-scissors game in my mind. What interested me most in the Lysistrata story, finally, as a writer, wasn’t the women using their sexual power to stop a war, but the way the play could allow me to take a look at sexual desire, and sexual fatigue in a marriage. It could allow me to look at female sexuality over time. So I reimagined the whole book.
Gratitude
These are not contemplative times, and writing is a contemplative experience. The idea that something is thoughtful and slow, and takes its time to reveal itself, is not in keeping with today’s velocity.
I envy people who have more financial security, because the pressures of making a living will bear down on you. I know how lucky I am that I’ve managed to stay around as a writer. I never take that for granted.
Meg Wolitzer’s Wisdom for Writers
Writing that is effective is like a concentrate, a bouillon cube. You’re not just choosing a random day and writing about that. You pick ordinary moments and magnify them—as if they’re freeze-dried, so the reader can add water.
To find the idea that guides your book, you might write freely for a couple of chapters. Then take a look at what you’ve made, and you’ll start to understand what the fabric of it is. Then go on and write, say, eighty pages of it. Not a hundred; if you get to on
e hundred and end up putting it aside, you might feel like you wasted so much time. I sometimes recommend writing around eighty pages, which is a solid mass of pages and something to feel proud of. Then look over it and begin to map out where the book is going.
I always ask for the wisdom of writer friends whom I trust, and I always listen very closely to what they have to say. Be sure to pick a trustworthy “designated reader.”
No one can take writing away from you, but no one can give it to you, either.
The author will donate a portion of her royalties from Why We Write to 826 National.
826 National is a nonprofit organization that ensures the success of its network of eight writing and tutoring centers, which each year assist nearly 30,000 young people. Its mission is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.
826 centers offer a variety of inventive workshops and publishing programs that provide under-resourced students, ages 6–18, with opportunities to explore their creativity and improve their writing skills. They also aim to help teachers get their classes excited about writing.
For more information or to make a donation, visit the website www.826national.org.