Why We Write Page 6

  After work every night I’d come home, cook supper, wash dishes, chat with my then-husband, and put the children to bed. Then I’d sit down at my desk where I wrote from nine p.m. until midnight. Within the space of four years, I’d finished three full-length novels, which never saw the light of day. The fourth, Keziah Dane, was published in 1967 when I was twenty-five years old. My advance was fifteen hundred dollars. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  Doctor of literature

  Mystery writers are the neurosurgeons of literature. Or maybe magicians. We work by sleight of hand.

  Constructing a credible detective story takes ingenuity, patience, and skill. The writer has to find the perfect balance between right brain, the creative function, and left brain, the analytical. We have to develop character and plot at the same time—and by “plot” I’m not talking about a formula. Plotting is the way a story proceeds. It’s the sequence of events that unfolds and builds, scene by scene, to a satisfying conclusion.

  A mystery is the only literary form that pits the reader and the writer against each other. The writer’s side of the deal is to play fair. That means letting the reader make the same discoveries the detective makes in any given moment, putting all the information on the table in plain view.

  The trick is to conceal one’s purpose, distracting the reader’s attention while laying out the bits and pieces that will eventually point to the resolution. If a story’s too convoluted, the reader gets annoyed by having to keep track of unnecessary or implausible twists and turns. If a story’s too simple, and the answer to the question of “whodunit” is obvious, the reader’s annoyed because that takes away the pleasure of outsmarting the writer, who’s trying to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes.

  The fact that any mystery writer succeeds at this impossible commission can only be described as miraculous.

  Sue Grafton’s Wisdom for Writers

  There are no secrets and there are no shortcuts. As an aspiring writer, what you need to know is that learning to write is self-taught, and learning to write well takes years.

  You’ve got to write and revise every sentence, every paragraph, and every page over and over until the rhythm, the cadence, and tone are properly attuned to your inner ear.

  Figuring out how to get an agent, how to find a publisher, how to write a good query letter, how to pitch, how to network—all of this is beside the point until you’ve mastered the craft and honed your skills. Banging out a single book, then thinking you’re ready to give up your day job and be a full-time writer, is the equivalent of learning to play “Three Blind Mice” on the piano and expecting to be booked into Carnegie Hall.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sara Gruen

  The plane had yet to take off, but Osgood, the photographer, was already snoring softly. He was in the center seat, wedged between John Thigpen and a woman in coffee-colored stockings and sensible shoes. He listed heavily toward the latter, who, having already made a great point of lowering the armrest, was progressively becoming one with the wall….

  —Opening lines, Ape House, 2010

  Have you heard the one about the writer who sits down at her desk, scratches out a first novel, and hits the jackpot overnight? Sales in the millions, legions of adoring fans, wealth, fame, a movie deal that actually results in a movie, a staff to regretfully decline an endless stream of glamorous invitations?

  That was Sara Gruen’s story, I thought, and I told her so. Laughing uproariously, she corrected my misperception in her Canadian accent. Water for Elephants (which has sold more than five million copies in fifty-seven languages and was made into a 2011 movie starring Reese Witherspoon) has earned Gruen pretty much all of the jackpot items above—minus the staff. Her husband works full-time as her manager. But Water for Elephants was her third book, not her first. And the first two were merely “moderately successful.” And Elephants was rejected by the publisher of her first two novels. It sold to another publisher, after four months of rejections, for a very modest price.

  “Water for Elephants came within fifteen minutes of not selling at all,” Gruen told me. Jackpot notwithstanding, there was an unmistakable ring of gratitude in her voice.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: July 26, 1968

  Born and raised: Born in Vancouver, British Columbia; raised in London, Ontario

  Current home: Asheville, North Carolina

  Love life: Married to former book editor and creative writing professor Robert C. Gruen

  Family life: Three sons, ages 10, 13, and 17

  Schooling: Graduated from Carleton University, Ottawa, with highest honors in English literature, 1993; honorary doctorate of humane letters, Wittenberg University, 2011

  Day job?: Worked as a technical writer until 2001; now writes fiction full-time

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Book Sense Book of the Year Award, 2007; Cosmo’s Fun Fearless Fiction Award; BookBrowse Diamond Award for most popular book; Friends of American Literature Adult Fiction Award; Alex Award, 2007

  Notable notes:

  • Along with her husband and children, Sara Gruen shares her home with three dogs, four cats, two budgies, two horses, a goat, and a fish.

  • Gruen is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States.

  • Even as a technical writer, Gruen needed so much privacy to write that she had extra walls put up around her cubicle.

  • Thanks to international sales of her books, Gruen is a taxpayer in 57 countries.

  Website: www.saragruen.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=654617064& sk=wall

  Twitter: @saragruen

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  Riding Lessons, 2004

  Flying Changes, 2005

  Water for Elephants, 2006

  Ape House, 2010

  Film Adaptation

  Water for Elephants, 2011

  Sara Gruen

  Why I write

  The only thing that makes me crazier than writing is not writing.

  I knew I wanted to be a writer as soon as I knew how to read, and I began by making little illustrated books. At age seven, I sent one to a publisher. I’ve always been a stickler for detail, so I folded all the pages in half and stapled them carefully from the inside so it was nicely bound. I got a letter back from the editor—a rejection, of course. But I was thrilled. I have no idea what happened to the letter. I suspect it’s in my mother’s attic.

  I was twelve when I wrote my first “novel.” It was about a girl who wakes up and a horse has jumped into her backyard. Lo and behold—the same thing had happened to her neighbor and best friend. It took up three school notebooks. I didn’t let anybody read it. I think that book is also in my mother’s attic.

  I firmly believe that in order to write you must read. My parents had an extensive library, and as a kid I worked my way through it, picking the next book off the shelf when I was done with the last. I read everything from Alexander Pope to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

  Besides having a great library, one of the best things my parents did for my career was to make me take typing in high school. I can type as fast as I can think, which is crucial when the story’s flowing. I’ve been clocked at an honest 120 words a minute. Not coincidentally, nobody, including me, can read my handwriting. I’ve more or less given up on it.

  There’s a moment in every book when the story and characters are finally there; they come to life, they’re in control. They do things they’re not supposed to do and become people they weren’t meant to be. When I reach that place, it’s magic. It’s a kind of rapture.

  I would write even if I couldn’t make a living at it, because I can’t not write. I am amazed and delighted and still in a state of shock about the success of Water for Elephants, but that’s not why I write. I do it for love. The rest is gravy.

  How I write: through a portal darkly

  When I write, I have to be entirely by myself. I just had an office built in our house,
and it’s the first time I’ve ever had a room with a door, or even a room.

  When I first started writing I had a corner in the living room. I put up a freestanding screen, but that didn’t keep little bodies from coming around the corner and asking for cookies. I could only write when no one else was home. We ran out of money for day care when my first book didn’t sell, so all of a sudden I was taking care of a toddler and trying to write. My husband built me an office—really more of a cage—out of baby gates. My son couldn’t unplug the computer anymore, but he could still throw things at me. Somehow I managed to finish my second book, and when it sold, we could afford a babysitter and once again I had the house to myself during the day.

  That didn’t always translate into productivity. At one point, I was so stuck on Water for Elephants that I worked in a walk-in closet. I covered over the window and made my husband move his clothes out and pasted pictures of old-time circuses on the walls. We had no Wi-Fi, which was perfect. The only thing I could do was open my file. I figured if I stared at it long enough, something would happen. Apparently I was right, because I finished the book, but I spent four months in that closet. Does a walk-in closet count as a room of one’s own? Somehow I don’t think it’s what Virginia Woolf had in mind.

  My writing process is embarrassingly ritualistic. When I’m beginning a new book, I steep in the idea until the first scene comes to me whole. I go to sleep thinking about it, I’m thinking about it when I shower, when I cook. During that period I walk into a lot of walls.

  Once I’m actually writing, my days all look the same. After I drink my tea, check my e-mail, and let the birds out, I open my file and read what I wrote the day before, over and over, until I feel I can continue. It usually takes me an hour and a half, but at some point I feel like I’ve gone through a portal into that other world, the fictional world, and I’m recording what’s going on rather than creating it.

  If I answer the phone, or someone comes to the door, the spell is broken. Then I have to do that one-and-a-half-hour trance thing all over again. That’s why my office is at the back of the house, and that’s why the door is so important: there are only so many hour-and-a-halves in a day. If my door is closed, nobody knocks. I’m not proud of it, but once, when I still only had a corner in the living room, I hid behind the curtains from the mailman.

  “I need a job, and I want to be a paperback technical writer”

  I moved to the States from Canada in 1999 for a tech writing job. I liked it. It was a way I could write and get paid for it. When I got laid off in 2001 I was devastated. The longer you’re with a company, the closer you get to a window. At any new job, I was going to be right back by the elevator shaft.

  My husband and I had talked about me retiring early to try writing fiction. I’d had delusions of writing a novel during my first maternity leave, but that was because I didn’t actually know what newborns were like. Or novels. Needless to say, that didn’t work. So when I got laid off we decided we’d give it two years or two books, whichever came first. If I hadn’t replaced my salary as a tech writer by then, I’d go back to tech writing. We’d set ourselves up as a two-income family. We had a mortgage. We had three kids. We basically held hands and jumped off the cliff.

  A quiet little book

  At the two-year (and two-book) mark, Riding Lessons sold. It was a moderate success, by which I mean nobody cared what I was doing for the next year. What I was doing for the next year was writing Water for Elephants.

  I submitted Elephants to my editor, and she turned it down. But in the same e-mail she asked me to do a sequel to Riding Lessons. So I turned around and wrote Flying Changes. While I was doing that, my agent sent Water for Elephants out to other publishers. Nobody even looked at it for the longest time. After four and a half months, somebody at Random House finally pulled it out of the pile, read it, and liked it. At that point, my agent called the other editors and said, “We have interest.” Then all the editors started reading, and I got the strangest rejections. I kept hearing things like “Thank you for letting us look at this historical romance,” and “Circus books don’t sell.” I thought, “What circus books? I can’t think of a single one.”

  Finally in 2006 we sold it for a very small advance. My income had gone down steadily and dramatically for each of my three books. The editor who bought Elephants initially thought of it as a quiet, good book. A little book. But the country’s independent booksellers had other ideas. They refused to let Water for Elephants fail. When customers walked into their stores, they thrust my book into their hands. They made it the Book Sense Book of the Year. On the sheer strength of the indies, the chains had to buy it. It hit the New York Times bestseller list three or four weeks after it was published. A friend of mine who saw me around that time told me I looked shell-shocked. Which was exactly how I felt.

  The dread follow-up novel

  The hardest time I’ve ever had as a writer was writing Ape House. Before you’re published, there’s a sense of freedom in that nobody knows who you are or expects anything from you. I never expected Water for Elephants to be so successful, but it was, and I was moving forward with the knowledge (and fear) that a lot of people were going to read the next book. I had to find a way to become unaware, which was difficult because I was still doing a lot of public events for Elephants.

  I had to get off the road. I had to be on my own and pretend that nobody had ever heard of me. I had to open my file and go through the portal and get into that place and not worry about what potential readers might think. It was very, very hard. I had to turn down invitations and I felt guilty, but I can’t travel for one book and write another at the same time. I just can’t. There is only room for one fictional world in my head at a time.

  Also—and I think this must happen in every field—there’s a lot of schadenfreude in this business. I knew there would be people gunning for me, and I was right. Sure, I got reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, but it was a nasty, almost personal, review.

  The pressure is gone now. I’ve done my postbreakout book, and I survived. And I’m pretty damned proud of the book, too.

  Why did the chick lit cross the road?

  There are very good, very successful authors of “chick lit” and “women’s fiction,” but that’s not how I self-identify. I think if you’re a woman and you write novels with female characters, the industry tends to pigeonhole you, and if you’re not careful you get slapped with a pink cover no man would be caught dead reading on a subway. Why would I want to discount male readers? I want men and women to feel they can pick up my books.

  I felt (correctly) that I was labeled as a women’s fiction author with Riding Lessons, and I hate very little as much as I hate being labeled. So I very deliberately wrote Water for Elephants as a book that would be difficult to classify. I figured that having it narrated by a ninety-three-year-old man would help. And what do you know? I think it did.

  Me and my magic rocks

  I’m a little bit superstitious. As I said, everything I do with my writing is ritualized. After I check my e-mail, I get another cup of tea. I check my e-mail again. And then I shut down the Internet and open my file. Actually, I do more than shut down the Internet. I use an app called Freedom to block me from it. Of course, I’ve figured out how to get around it, so when I’m really desperate, I get my long-suffering husband to change the network password and I tell him not to give me the new one until the end of the day. Was it Trollope who had his housekeeper chain him to his desk with strict orders not to release him despite all pleas and threats until a set time? Maybe it was Stevenson. Anyway, this feels similar.

  I clean my office completely before I start each book. Pretty normal so far, right? Well, I also have a collection of colorful rocks and a golden horseshoe, and every time I start a book I have to put my horseshoe down and arrange my stones within it until it feels right. And then I don’t touch them again until I finish the book. If I feel the need to rearrange the rocks while I’m writing
, that’s a symptom of a pretty bad block.

  I also never actually delete anything I write. If I know a paragraph, page, chapter, or scene has to go, I put it in a file called “Leftovers.” I’ve never recycled a single word from that file, but it’s one of those silly mental crutches that allows me to get rid of stuff. And getting rid of stuff is half the battle.

  Sara Gruen’s Wisdom for Writers

  Planning and plotting and research are all fine. But don’t just think about writing. Write!

  Opening yesterday’s file can be the hardest part of a writer’s day. But that’s what writing is: building a bunch of yesterday’s scribblings into the book of today or tomorrow.

  It’s hard to find time to write, especially when you have a job or kids, or both. Tell the people who love you that your writing time is sacred. And even if it’s two hours on a Saturday, take that time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kathryn Harrison

  Behold: in the beginning there was everything, just as there is now. The giant slap of a thunderclap and, bang, it’s raining talking snakes.

  A greater light to rule the day, a lesser light to rule the night, swarming water and restless air. A man goes down on two knees, a woman opens her thighs, and both hold their breath to listen. Imagining God’s footsteps could be heard in the cool of the day….

  —Opening lines, Enchantments, 2012

  In 1992, reading the first line of Kathryn Harrison’s first novel—In truth, my mother was not a beautiful woman—I felt I’d found the author I’d been waiting for all my reading life. Who’d claimed that the narrator’s mother was a beautiful woman? I wondered. Who was this authoritative child-narrator, arguing that she was not?