Why We Write Read online

  Why We Write

  CHAPTER ONE

  Isabel Allende

  In my forty years, I, Zarité Sedella, have had better luck than other slaves. I am going to have a long life and my old age will be a time of contentment because my star—mi z’étoile—also shines when the night is cloudy. I know the pleasure of being with the man my heart has chosen. His large hands awaken my skin.

  —Opening lines, Island Beneath the Sea, 2010

  Isabel Allende is the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. Her name is invariably linked with magical realism, the genre originated by Franz Kafka in the 1920s and popularized by One Hundred Years of Solitude author Gabriel García Márquez, to whom Allende is often compared.

  But the scope of Allende’s work, ranging from historical fiction to bare-all memoirs to the pleasures of food and sex, defies categorization—as does she. A beloved light of the Bay Area literary scene, Allende is first to volunteer when there’s a benefit for Hurricane Katrina survivors or a fund-raiser for the public library or when the local indie bookstore needs a boost.

  Isabel Allende received me in her cozy, elegantly appointed Sausalito salon, the front room of the 1907 brothel she bought in 2006. Upstairs her husband, Willie Gordon, practices “people’s law.” Downstairs, along with her longtime assistant, Juliette Ambatzidis (whose children are counted among Isabel and Willie’s grandchildren), Isabel Allende conducts the business end of her avocation: making beautiful words, making a more beautiful world.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: August 2, 1942

  Born and raised: Born in Lima, Peru; raised in Chile, Bolivia, and Lebanon

  Current home: San Rafael, California

  Love life: Married 20+ years to attorney Willie Gordon

  Family life: “Tribe” includes son Nicolas, grandchildren, family members, and friends

  Schooling: Married her first husband at age 20; never attended college

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Feminist of the Year Award, 1994; American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2004; Chilean National Prize for Literature, 2010; 12 international honorary doctorates

  Notable notes:

  • Isabel Allende’s father’s first cousin was Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, 1970–73.

  • Allende writes in Spanish, and her books are all translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.

  • The Isabel Allende Foundation, founded in 1996, “promotes the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected.”

  • Allende’s 18 books have been translated into 35 languages, with 57 million copies sold.

  Website: www.isabelallende.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Isabel-Allende/103761352995313

  Twitter: @isabelallende

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  The House of the Spirits, 1982

  The Porcelain Fat Lady, 1984

  Of Love and Shadows, 1985

  Eva Luna, 1987

  The Stories of Eva Luna, 1990

  The Infinite Plan, 1991

  Daughter of Fortune, 1999

  Portrait in Sepia, 2000

  City of the Beasts, 2002

  Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004

  Forest of the Pygmies, 2005

  Zorro, 2005

  Inés of My Soul, 2006

  The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir, 2008

  Island Beneath the Sea, 2010

  Memoirs

  Paula, 1995

  Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998

  My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, 2003

  Film Adaptations

  The House of the Spirits, 1993

  Of Love and Shadows, 1994

  Plays

  The Ambassador (Chile)

  The Ballad of Nobody (Chile)

  The Seven Mirrors (Chile)

  The House of the Spirits

  Paula

  Eva Luna (a musical)

  Isabel Allende

  Why I write

  I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later.

  Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way. If I’m talking about a woman in Victorian times who leaves the safety of her home and comes to the Gold Rush in California, I’m really talking about feminism, about liberation, about the process I’ve gone through in my own life, escaping from a Chilean, Catholic, patriarchal, conservative, Victorian family and going out into the world.

  When I start writing a book, I have no idea where it’s going. If it’s a historical novel I’ve researched the period and the place, but I don’t know what story I want to tell. I only know that in a subtle way or in a hidden way, I want to have an impact on the reader’s heart and mind.

  I think it might surprise my readers to know how picky I am with language. How I read aloud a paragraph and if there are words repeated, I don’t like it. I go through the translation into English line by line. The translator sends me every twenty or thirty pages, and if I see a word that doesn’t exactly match my meaning, I go to the dictionary. It’s so important for me, finding the precise word that will create a feeling or describe a situation. I’m very picky about that because it’s the only material we have: words. But they are free. No matter how many syllables they have: free! You can use as many as you want, forever.

  I write in Spanish. I could write a speech in English, but fiction happens in the womb. It doesn’t get processed in the mind until you do the editing. But storytelling comes in Spanish to me. It’s like making love. I could not be panting in English. It doesn’t work that way.

  I try to write beautifully, but accessibly. In the romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, there’s a flowery way of saying things that does not exist in English. My husband says he can always tell when he gets a letter in Spanish: the envelope is heavy. In English a letter is a paragraph. You go straight to the point. In Spanish that’s impolite.

  Reading in English, living in English, has taught me to make language as beautiful as possible, but precise. Excessive adjectives, excessive description—skip it, it’s unnecessary. Speaking English has made my writing less cluttered. I try to read House of the Spirits now, and I can’t. Oh my God, so many adjectives! Why? Just use one good noun instead of three adjectives.

  When I tell the story of slavery, I tell it from the slave’s point of view. I also go into the master’s heart. I want my reader to feel the slave, to understand what it is to not have freedom.

  In all my books there are strong women who have to overcome incredible obstacles to have their own destiny. I’m not trying to create models for other women to imitate. I just want my women readers to find the strength. And I want my male readers to understand what it is to be a woman—to find the sympathy.

  So I suppose that’s it. Then, too, I’m unemployable. What else would I do?

  Hell is January seventh

  I start all my books on January eighth. Can you imagine January seventh? It’s hell.

  Every year on January seventh, I prepare my physical space. I clean up everything from my other books. I just leave my dictionaries, and my first editions, and the research materials for the new one. And then on January eighth I walk seventeen steps from the kitchen to the little pool house that is my office. It’s like a journey to another world. It’s winter, it’s raining usually. I go with my umbrella and the dog following me. From those seventeen steps on, I am in another world and I am another person.

  I go there scared. And excited. And disappointed—because I have a sort of idea that isn’t really an idea. The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show
up invited, eventually she just shows up.

  Heaven is when the muse shows up

  When I feel that the story is beginning to pick up rhythm—the characters are shaping up, I can see them, I can hear their voices, and they do things that I haven’t planned, things I couldn’t have imagined—then I know the book is somewhere, and I just have to find it, and bring it, word by word, into this world.

  Then my life changes. Then it becomes a completely different process of excitement, and obsession, and stress. I can work for fourteen hours. Just sitting down for that much time is hard! My son programmed my computer so that every forty-five minutes I have to get up. If I don’t, I get so stiff that I can’t get up at the end of the day.

  I correct to the point of exhaustion, and then finally I say I give up. It’s never quite finished, and I suppose it could always be better, but I do the best I can. In time, I’ve learned to avoid overcorrecting. When I got my first computer and I realized how easy it was to change things ad infinitum, my style became very stiff.

  There’s a certain charm in what is spontaneous. I want the reader to feel that I’m telling the story to him or her in particular. When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and repetitions. I try to avoid that in literature, but I still want it to be a conversation, like storytelling usually is. It’s not a lecture.

  It’s hard to find that balance. But I’ve been writing for thirty years, so now I know when I’m overdoing it. I read it aloud, and if it’s not the way I talk, I change it.

  Channeling an eighteenth-century Haitian slave

  I have to be very careful with dialogue, because my books are translated into thirty-five languages. It’s hard to translate dialogue. Colloquialisms change and the book becomes dated. You never know how your characters’ conversations are going to translate to Romanian, to Vietnamese. So I don’t use a lot of dialogue. What I do use, I try to keep really simple.

  In Island Beneath the Sea, the slave couldn’t be more different than myself physically or emotionally. She’s a tall African woman. Yet I know how I would feel if I was in her place. When I’m writing, I am a slave. I am on the plantation. I feel the heat, I smell the smells.

  Being in the thrall of creating a story, it’s a sickness. I carry the story with me all day, all night, in dreams, all the time. Everything I see, everything that happens, it seems to me the universe is talking to me because I connect it to the story. I feel invincible. It could be the most horrible story, but I feel totally happy.

  When I was writing my latest book, Island Beneath the Sea, I got so awfully sick that I thought I had stomach cancer. I kept vomiting. I couldn’t lie down. I had to sleep sitting up. My husband said, “This is your body reacting to the story. When you finish the book, you’ll be okay.” And that is exactly what happened.

  The best time: the first

  I’ve received so many gifts as a writer. I’ve won awards and prizes. My books have been made into movies and plays. I was even a flag bearer in the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Can you imagine? I walked into the stadium behind Sophia Loren and before Susan Sarandon. I have a fantastic picture of the ceremony. You see Sophia Loren—beautiful, tall, elegant—and then the flag, and then a hole, and then Susan Sarandon, also beautiful. I’m five feet tall, and I am under the flag. I’m invisible.

  But the best time for me was in 1981, when I was writing my first novel. There was no ambition to it, no hope that it would be published, no pressure of any kind. I didn’t know yet that I was a writer—I knew that only after I finished my fourth book—so I had no expectations, just the freedom of telling a story for the heck of it.

  I worked in my kitchen in Caracas at night, on a little portable typewriter. A typewriter! So I couldn’t make mistakes. When I finished the book I showed it to my mother. She said, “Why did you name the worst character in the book after your father?” I never met my father, but I said, “No problem, I’ll change the name.” So I had to find a name for that character with the same number of letters, and then I had to go through five hundred pages, inserting the new name on each one.

  I would cut the pages up with scissors and Scotch tape the corrections in. Some pages had so many corrections, they could stand up and walk.

  But the freedom of it! That was a wonderful time, not caring about anything but the story, carrying my one copy of my book everywhere I went, at my breast, like a newborn baby.

  The worst time: going dry

  My daughter, Paula, died on December 6, 1992. On January 7, 1993, my mother said, “Tomorrow is January eighth. If you don’t write, you’re going to die.”

  She gave me the 180 letters I’d written to her while Paula was in a coma, and then she went to Macy’s. When my mother came back six hours later, I was in a pool of tears, but I’d written the first pages of Paula. Writing is always giving some sort of order to the chaos of life. It organizes life and memory. To this day, the responses of the readers help me to feel my daughter alive.

  But after I wrote Paula, I went into a writer’s block. I would try every day to write, but I was dry inside. After two years of despair, I met Annie Lamott at Book Passage, our local independent bookstore. She asked me if I was doing any better. I said no, I’m worse. She said, “Oh, Isabel, your reservoirs are empty. You have to fill them up.” I said, “How can I fill them up?” Annie said, “You’ll find a way.”

  Annie was right. I went with my husband and a friend to India. That shook me up. I asked myself, “Why would I be complaining and whining when there’s so much sorrow and wonder in the world? Who am I to be focused only on myself?” That was a wonderful thing.

  When I came home, I still couldn’t write fiction, so I gave myself a task. I told myself I can write about anything, as long as it’s not politics or football.

  I needed a subject as removed as possible from the theme of Paula. So I wrote Aphrodite, a nonfiction book about sex and gluttony.

  So now I know that if I’m in a writer’s block, I can go back to writing nonfiction. Writing memoirs has its advantages. I know I can never be blackmailed, because I keep no secrets.

  But I’m still scared of being unable to write. It’s like swallowing sand. It’s awful.

  Into the future

  Storytelling and literature will exist always, but what shape will it take? Will we write novels to be performed? The story will exist, but how, I don’t know. The way my stories are told today is by being published in the form of a book. In the future, if that’s not the way to tell a story, I’ll adapt.

  Language: that is what matters to me. Telling a story to create an emotion, a tension, a rhythm—that is what matters to me.

  Isabel Allende’s Wisdom for Writers

  It’s worth the work to find the precise word that will create a feeling or describe a situation. Use a thesaurus, use your imagination, scratch your head until it comes to you, but find the right word.

  When you feel the story is beginning to pick up rhythm—the characters are shaping up, you can see them, you can hear their voices, and they do things that you haven’t planned, things you couldn’t have imagined—then you know the book is somewhere, and you just have to find it, and bring it, word by word, into this world.

  When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and repetitions. It’s good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It’s not a lecture.

  CHAPTER TWO

  David Baldacci

  Jack Armstrong sat up in the secondhand hospital bed that had been wedged into a corner of the den in his home in Cleveland. A father at nineteen, he and his wife, Lizzie, had conceived their second child when he’d been home on leave from the army. Jack had been in the military for five years when the war in the Middle East started….

  —Opening lines, One Summer, 2011

  Based on the theory that adversity builds character—or at least, humility—I didn’t expect David Baldacci to possess either trait. He�
�s so good-looking that People magazine listed him among its “50 Most Beautiful People in the World.” His first book earned him a two-million-dollar advance, became an instant international bestseller, and was made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood. Then there are his book sales: 110 million in print worldwide.

  Baldacci did experience adversity along the way. He spent a decade lawyering by day and writing by night—late at night—with nothing to show for his efforts save exhaustion and rejection letters. “The only chance in hell I had of being published in the New Yorker,” he said, “would have been to sign my cover letters ‘J. D. Salinger.’”

  David Baldacci is a nice guy. He and his wife run a literacy foundation called Wish You Well. He supports a host of charitable organizations. And he’s a nonsectarian president-pleaser. Bill Clinton called The Simple Truth his favorite book of 1999. George H. W. Bush signed a note to Baldacci, “Your number one fan in Houston,” and invited his favorite author to Kennebunkport for a sit-down.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: August 5, 1960

  Born and raised: Richmond, Virginia

  Current home: Vienna, Virginia

  Love life: Married 20+ years to Michelle Baldacci

  Family life: Two teenaged children (Spencer and Collin); two Labradoodles (Finnegan and Guinness)

  Schooling: BA from Virginia Commonwealth University; law degree from University of Virginia

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Gold Medal Award from Southern Writers Guild for best mystery/thriller, 1997; Thumping Good Read Award from W. H. Smith, 1996; People’s Choice Award from Library of Virginia, 2005; Silver Bullet Award from International Thriller Writers, 2008; 2011 inductee, International Crime Writing Hall of Fame; 2012 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award

  Notable notes:

  • David Baldacci practiced corporate and trial law in Washington, DC, from 1986 to 1995.