Why We Write Read online

  I landed right in the center of incredible world events. I’d saved up some money and I was living cheaply with other freelancers, sharing expenses. In Zagreb the food is good, the land is gorgeous, the women are very beautiful, and the war had a clear right and wrong. That’s about as good as it gets if you’re a thirty-year-old guy.

  I started filing radio reports—thirty-second voice spots for various radio networks. It paid nothing, but it was legitimate news reporting. I wrote lots of articles, most of which didn’t get published. The Christian Science Monitor published one.

  Then one day in 1994 a guy I was living with tracked me down, yelling, “Hey, man, you got a fax.” It was from my agent. I wish I’d saved it. It said, “I sold your book, you’ve got to come home.” I was actually a little disappointed. I didn’t want to leave. But he’d gotten me a thirty-five-thousand-dollar advance, so of course I did. I would have written that book for ten bucks.

  It took me three years to write it. I was living in my parents’ unheated summer house on Cape Cod. I kept doing tree work, because I figured I needed a backup plan.

  A perfect storm

  There’s a bright line in journalism between fact and fiction. I feel very strongly about holding that line. As a journalist, you can’t just imagine a scene or a conversation.

  Halfway through writing The Perfect Storm I hit a terrifying dilemma. I was writing a book about a boat that disappeared. As soon as the boat left shore, I lost the thread. What do you say about a boat that disappeared? Where’s the action? What are people saying to one another? What does it feel like to die on a ship in a storm? I had a big hole in the middle of my narrative, and I couldn’t fill it with fiction.

  Everything I know about writing came from reading other people’s good work—Tobias Wolff, Peter Matthiessen, John McPhee, Richard Preston. In The Hot Zone Preston had faced a similar problem. His central character died, so he had holes in the narrative. He filled them by using the conditional tense. He said to the reader, “We don’t know, but maybe he said this, maybe he did that. We know his fever was 106, so he would have felt that.”

  I realized that I could propose possible scenarios to my readers without lying. As long as I was honest about the fact that these were simply possibilities to be considered, it stayed within the rules of journalism. So I found other boats that had survived a storm and listened to their radio contacts. I could say, “We don’t know what happened on my guys’ boat, but we know what happened on this other one.” I interviewed a guy whose boat had flipped over in heavy seas, and he’d found himself with a lungful of air in a sinking boat. He told me what he thought had happened with the crew of the Andrea Gail, so I could tell that to the reader. I filled the holes legitimately, not with imaginings. Solving that problem was superexciting for me.

  Success brings joy—and misery

  The Perfect Storm came out in the spring of ’97. The publisher had hopes for it, but no one knew it was going to be as big as it was. It was on the bestseller list for three or four years; it was number one for a while. The movie sold to Warner Bros. for decent money. It felt like doors were just flying open for me. It was a complete writer’s fantasy.

  I was very proud of the book, but going from being a private person to being in that kind of spotlight was pretty excruciating. I was scared of public speaking, and suddenly I was on a book tour, speaking every day, sometimes in front of thousands of people, absolutely petrified.

  The media does this weird thing. If they decide they like you, they paint an unrealistic portrait of you that no one could possibly live up to. I’m five foot eight, and people I met kept saying, I assumed you were six foot three. What was it about my book that made me tall? If you have a healthy amount of insecurity, it gives you a much bigger dose. It caused me to do a lot of painful self-examination. I felt myself shrinking. Every day I was miserable. It never got better.

  So I didn’t make the mistake of writing a second book right away, which is what everyone expected me to do. I went back to reporting for magazines overseas in Kosovo, Liberia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Chad, and other places. I was writing about situations that were seriously desperate. What I and other journalists did could potentially save lives by drawing the attention of the world. There were plenty of reporters with more experience, but if I wrote about Sierra Leone in Vanity Fair, for example, it often got attention because of my new visibility as an author.

  The drug

  When I went to Sarajevo in ’93 and I was with these other freelance writers, and we were reporting on this incredible story, I went from being a waiter to being a war reporter in the course of three weeks. Seeing your name in print for the first time—nothing can compare to that.

  By the time you’re at the level where you might be on the Times list, it’s just part of your business. There are beautiful, beautiful books that never make the list, and there’s complete garbage on the list. Every writer knows that. Everyone knows that whether you get on the list, or how long you spend on the list, is not entirely a reflection of the quality of your work.

  There are moments in the field, or at your desk, when you can’t believe what’s flowing through you and coming out on the page. It’s the hand of God, or whatever you want to call it: you’re writing way beyond yourself.

  There are musicians who talk about a solo they’ve done and they have no idea where that came from. There are athletes who set world records and say, “I performed so far outside my abilities, I don’t know what that was.” It happens to writers, too. That’s the thing we’re all looking for. That’s the drug. Seeing your name on the Times list is such a pale, empty experience compared to that. You can’t even compare them.

  Writership versus readership

  I do this sort of split thing when I’m writing. I’m very aware that I’m writing for readers, and I do everything I can to engage them, to make my writing accessible and compelling.

  At the same time, I try to be completely disinterested in what I think people will like. I’m writing for myself. I want to learn about the world, and writing is the way I do it. You can’t know people’s tastes, anyway. No one could have predicted that Perfect Storm would be a hit. A fishing boat that sinks in a storm? The publishers don’t know. Readers don’t know. Nobody knows.

  In every book I’ve written, there were moments when I thought, I can’t put this in, I’ll lose half my readership. In Perfect Storm it was the physics of wave motion. Who wants to read about that? But I said to myself, The story demands it. Waves sank this boat; you gotta explain how waves work.

  So I put the physics in, and I thought, If no one reads it, so be it. If the author thing doesn’t work out, I can always go back to tree work. It wouldn’t be the end of my life. I’m going to write the best book I can. That said, if I put in a topic I think readers will be resistant to, I work extra hard at my language to make them eat their spinach. I don’t like spinach, but if you add enough garlic I’ll eat it.

  Why I try to write well

  Now I know I have an audience, so I feel a huge responsibility to write really well.

  When I was writing War, I felt such urgency. There had been a hundred books about the last two wars; who was I to add to the pile? I wanted to write something profound and powerful and useful. Something that people would read. I felt I had to write something extremely profound about the topic.

  I wrote War in six months. Writing it tapped into something emotional and intuitive in me. I was completely psychologically saturated. I’ve never had that kind of experience before or since. Every night I was dreaming it; I was back with that platoon. I was also making the movie Restrepo about it while I was writing the book.

  I’ve tried to figure out what good writing is. I know it when I read it in other people’s work or my own. The closest I’ve come is that there’s a rhythm to the writing, in the sentence and the paragraph.

  When the rhythm’s off, it’s hard to read the thing. It’s a lot like music in that sense; there’s an
internal rhythm that does the work of reading for you. It almost reads itself. That’s one of the things that’s hard to teach to people. If you don’t hear music, you’re never going to hear it. That internal rhythm in a sentence or a paragraph, that’s the DNA of writing. That’s what good writing is.

  I pay an awful lot of attention to language. Language is really important to me. It takes longer to write that way, but it’s worth it.

  Sebastian Junger’s Wisdom for Writers

  Don’t dump lazy sentences on your readers. If you do, they’ll walk away and turn on the TV. You have to earn your paycheck by earning your readers’ attention.

  Write for yourself, not for a “market.” You can’t predict which of your works will connect with the most readers. Some of my best work sold the worst, and vice versa.

  You can’t be sloppy about the images you use. If you settle for “the rain hammered down” (which is probably a sentence I’ve written somewhere or other), it’s dead writing. You have to push yourself to think profoundly and imaginatively about what something looks like, what it sounds like, what it feels like. You have to push yourself to find powerful, original ways of describing things. If you can do that, and if you have good rhythm in your sentences, people will read everything you write and beg for more.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mary Karr

  (Prologue: Open Letter to My Son)

  Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out….

  —Opening lines, Lit, 2009

  Mary Karr is a writer in possession of a rare and formidable gift. Her prose reads like poetry, and no wonder. Years before The Liars’ Club landed on the New York Times list and stayed there for more than a year, earning Karr a prominent spot in America’s literary landscape, she was a published poet. Her plainspoken, devastating poetry made her the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize—not bad for a girl from a southeast Texas refinery town.

  In the winter 2009 issue of the Paris Review, Amanda Fortini reports on her two-year-long effort to complete her interview with Karr. “She had started [Lit] over twice,” Fortini wrote, “throwing away nearly a thousand pages, and had been working long hours to meet her deadline.”

  “It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are,” Karr told Fortini. “We still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.”

  This is the paradox that powers the words of Mary Karr. She writes from one end of the existential continuum to the other, from the bleak to the divine, from darkness to light.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: January 16, 1955

  Born and raised: Groves, Texas

  Current home: New York, New York

  Schooling: Port Neches–Groves High School; Macalester College; MFA from Goddard College, 1979

  Day job?: Teaches in English department, Syracuse University

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Guggenheim Fellowship; Pushcart Prize; PEN/Martha Albrand Award; Bunting Fellowship; Whiting Writers’ Award; National Endowment for the Arts grant

  Notable notes:

  • At age 11 Mary Karr wrote in her diary: “I am not very successful as a little girl. When I grow up, I will probably be a mess.”

  • Karr’s mentors and teachers include Etheridge Knight, Tobias Wolff, Robert Bly, and Robert Hass.

  • Karr’s 1991 Pushcart-winning essay, “Against Decoration,” in which she argued for direct and clear language in poetry, remains one of her most controversial works.

  Website: www.harpercollins.com/author/microsite/about.as px?authorid=27468

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/marykarrlit

  Twitter: @marykarrlit

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Memoirs

  The Liars’ Club, 1995

  Cherry, 2000

  Lit, 2009

  Poetry

  Abacus, 1987

  The Devil’s Tour, 1993

  Viper Rum, 2001

  Sinners Welcome, 2006

  Mary Karr

  Why I write

  I write to dream; to connect with other human beings; to record; to clarify; to visit the dead. I have a kind of primitive need to leave a mark on the world. Also, I have a need for money.

  I’m almost always anxious when I’m writing. There are those great moments when you forget where you are, when you get your hands on the keys, and you don’t feel anything because you’re somewhere else. But that very rarely happens. Mostly I’m pounding my hands on the corpse’s chest.

  The easy times are intermittent. They can be five minutes long or five hours long, but they’re never very long. The hard times are not completely hard, but they can be pretty hard, and they can go on for weeks. Working on Lit, I threw away two thousand finished pages. Prayer got me through it. That’s what gets me through everything.

  I usually get very sick after I finish a book. As soon as I put it down and my body lies down and there’s not that injection of adrenaline and cortisol, I get sick. I have a medium-shitty immune system so that doesn’t help.

  All of that said, writing feels like a privilege. Even though it’s very uncomfortable, I constantly feel very lucky. For most writers there’s a span of twenty years or so when you can’t write because you’re doing eighty-seven other things. It’s really just the past year that I haven’t also been raising a kid and teaching. There are more demands on me to do other damn things—touring and lectures—but they’re not horrible.

  If I couldn’t write I’d be very sad. I think I’d do something that had to do with the body. I’d be a yoga teacher or a gym coach or a massage therapist. Of course, none of that would address my need to write. That’s why I’m still writing.

  Writing drunk, writing sober

  I got sober twenty years ago. I wrote my first two books of poetry while I was still drinking. I revised the second one in the loony bin.

  I knew I was going to die if I didn’t stop drinking. I didn’t know how, exactly, but I knew it wouldn’t be pretty. I didn’t write at all for the first fifteen months I was sober. I couldn’t concentrate. Every time I sat down I’d start crying. My mind was too agonizing a place to sit in. It was the struggle not to drink, and also, a lot of feelings came up that I’d been running away from. You know the only way out of those feelings is through them, but you don’t have the skill set to get through them. It’s trial by fire. People who get sober show more faith than any saint. We step off the cliff into an abyss. It’s really dark.

  When I went into a mental institution after I stopped drinking, my writing took a great leap forward—or at least people started paying a lot more for it. I was more clear and more openhearted, more self-aware, more suspicious of my own motives. I was more of a grown-up.

  I had a spiritual director who was also sober who said to me, “You’ve tried antidepressants. You’ve tried psychotherapy. You’ve tried LSD, cocaine, drinking your brains out. What if the solution to all of your problems was to develop a spiritual practice, and you’ve never tried it?”

  It was seven or eight years after that when I converted to Catholicism. Since then I’ve been a lot less depressed, a lot less self-centered, believe it or not—as someone who writes memoirs, how dare I say that, but it’s true. I’m a lot less worried about my ego, which makes me a better writer.

  The myth of the rich and famous author

  Before I was a teacher I tended bar. I was a receptionist; I had a strange business career in telecommunications. When I first got sober I was on retainer as an editor with the Harvard Business Review. My son’s twenty-five, and I started teaching when I was pregnant with him.

  I taught a class at Harvard; I got five thousand dollars. I taught a class at Tufts; I got three thousand dollars. I taught a class at Emers
on; I got fifteen hundred dollars. For the five years I was teaching in the academic ghetto around Boston, I couldn’t live on my earnings. So I continued to write business articles for the Harvard Business Review. It didn’t help my writing one bit, but it permitted me to keep eating, which permitted me to keep breathing.

  I still don’t support myself as a writer. I support myself as a college professor. I couldn’t pay my mortgage on the revenue from my books. The myth is that you make a lot of money when you publish a book. Unless you write a blockbuster, that’s pretty much untrue.

  Starting when I was five, I always identified as a writer. It had nothing to do with income. I always told people I was a poet if they asked what I did. That’s what I still tell them now.

  Unhitching from the plow

  For me the best time is at the end of the day, when you’ve written and forgotten. You wrote longer than you expected to. You’ve been so absorbed in it that it got late. You unhitch yourself from the plow.

  I require myself to do a certain number of hours or pages each day: either six hours or a page and a half. If I’ve been working all day and I haven’t advanced because I keep writing and deleting, then I get to quit after six hours. After that I get up and I go and meet somebody who won’t talk to me about the writing. Six hours or a page and a half, whichever comes first.

  For Lit and Cherry at the end it was up to three pages a day, which took me a long time. How much I get done in a day depends on how bad off I am. With Lit—I know this sounds insane—I had to do it lying down, because otherwise my back went out. I could lie in bed with this contraption with my laptop on it, and not get a repetitive stress injury.

  It wasn’t just lying down that made it hard