It’s something we practice in our daily living all the time. But I think, perhaps, artists of all disciplines practice it more consciously.
EXPLANATIONS TANGLE US
I know I’m not capable, really, of saying anything intelligent about anything I’ve written. But then I remember a story I heard about Demetri Metropolis being asked if he knew why he had such an effect on both the members of his orchestra and the audience alike. And Metropolis said, “No.” He said he wouldn’t even begin to try to explain it for fear he’d be like the centipede who was asked by the little bug which leg he moved first when he walked. And the centipede puffed up with pride, began to analyze the question, and has not walked since.
So we’re apt to get tangled up in legs when we begin to analyze why anybody writes or paints or makes music or what the creative process is. Why do people write or paint or sing? In trying to think with you a little bit about this question, I’m being a little bug and not a centipede.
Section III
MY BOOKS WROTE ME
Elements of a Writer’s Life
It’s an enormous responsibility to have a gift. It’s often a responsibility I don’t want. But I don’t know how to turn it down. I’m somehow not allowed to.
SOLITUDE BIRTHS A STORYTELLER
I was still at the age of unselfconscious spontaneity when I started to write. At the age of five I wrote a story, which my mother saved for a long time, about a little “grul,” my five-year-old spelling for girl.
I wrote stories because I was a solitary, only child in New York City, with no easily available library where I could get books. So when I had read all the stories in my book case, the only way for me to get more stories to read was to write them.
BAD TEACHERS
The thing my teachers in fourth, fifth and sixth grades did for me that was most helpful in forming me as a writer was to downgrade me totally, to assume that I was stupid. I learned that there was no point doing homework. It was going to be pushed down. And so instead of doing homework, I would dunk my books and think of myself as the non-achiever, and then I would move into the real world where I wrote stories. And I wrote because it was my survival system. It was my way of being in touch with my whole self, my conscious and my unconscious mind.
I wrote because I was discouraged in school, because I was put down as a human being. Now I don’t suggest that that is advisable for teachers. It happened to work for me.
CHILDHOOD JOURNALING
Journals were not in vogue when I was a child. I kept a journal probably because Emily of New Moon kept a journal, not because I had any encouragement from teachers or family. I also kept a journal because somebody gave me a pretty notebook. I used to love to go into stationery stores and look at the pretty notebooks, particularly when I was in France and saw the notebooks with marbleized covers and little leather corners. You couldn’t see a notebook like that and not want to write in it.
WRITING AS CALLING
When I was in college I knew that I wanted to be a writer. And to be a writer means, as everyone knows, to be published.
And I copied in my journal from Chekhov’s letters: “You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.”
I believed those words then, and I believe them now, though in the intervening years my faith in them has often been tested. After the success of my first novels I was not prepared for rejections, for the long years of failure. Again I turned to Chekhov: “The thought that I must, that I ought to, write, never leaves me for an instant.” Alas, it did leave me, when I had attacks of false guilt because I was spending so much time at the typewriter and in no way pulling my own weight financially. But it never left me for long.
MOVING OUTSIDE OF OURSELVES
I learned something of the force of the work myself during that same period when I went through my first shattering experience of falling in love and having the love turn to ashes. I not only survived, but did a considerable amount of growing up through the writing of my first full-length novel.
I concentrated on my work because it was what saved me. I had, over this broken affair, left the apartment with the other girls, left my entire group of friends, and moved into a tiny apartment of my own, so the noise and confusion was in my own heart. When I was working on that first novel I was genuinely and painfully unhappy. But during the actual writing I was at play; I was completely thrown out of my subjective misery into the joy of creation, so that what might have been a totally destructive experience became instead a creative one, and a freeing one.
TYPEWRITERS
When I was first writing, I still had that typewriter that my father gave me when I was ten, and it was an ancient Remington manual that he had used when he was a foreign correspondent before he went into the First World War. And so I wrote all of my first drafts longhand, because that typewriter was a real hassle. At one point, I was typing with a pair of pliers and a hammer because the e kept slipping, at which point my agent said to my husband [Hugh], “For heaven sakes, can’t you get Madeleine a decent typewriter?” I’d written about eight books.
So my husband and my mother got together and got my first IBM electric. And it took me about two weeks to adjust. I would find myself writing eighteen different letters that I didn’t want for each letter that I did. And I still tend to anagram. I’ll get all of the letters in a word, but they may not be in the right order; and then I do consistently one Freudian error. Every time I write the word huge I spell it h-u-g-h and have to go through the manuscript and correct it. But I love my typewriter.
SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS
We were living in the country, going to the Congregational church. I was asking the Congregational minister, who was a friend, all of the big theological questions. In fact, most of our friends were Congregational ministers and I asked them all the big theological questions—and they answered them! That was a terrible mistake. My big theological questions don’t have answers. But I was still groping and my Congregational friends gave me the German theologians to read. So I dutifully read the German theologians, and shook my head sadly. There is a very valid use for German theology; it puts you to sleep. So I kept on thinking and asking my questions. Eventually, I started asking my questions of the stars instead of the Congregational ministers. I began to read astronomers and physicists.
They did not give me answers, but they gave me an affirmation of a pattern and purpose in the universe that is breaking through randomness and chaos. So I wrote A Wrinkle in Time as my rebuttal to the German theologians. It was for me an affirmation of a God I could believe in and a universe I could believe God had created—a universe in which we have free will. It was for me a theological work. But I’m a storyteller and so my first job was to tell a good story, to try to make the reader want to turn the page.
A STORY IS BORN
In A Wrinkle in Time, you have my discovery of the new sciences of higher math, my struggles against limiting God, my struggle to work out a viable theology and a viable Christology and, of course, my foremost interest in writing a good story.
At the time I wrote Wrinkle, I was struggling with theology. I found much of “Christian” theology narrow, restrictive, and dogmatic. It limited God. I did not want my God shackled. And so I began to work out, in writing the book, a theology where I could comprehend a God loving enough to create and care for all of creation—not just a few little Christians on one minor planet in one minor solar system in the backwashes of one ordinary galaxy.
So it was a theological as well as a literary enterprise for me, but as a storyteller I had to make the story come first. I sat down and typed out “It was a dark and stormy night.” The theology is down deep. It’s not there unless you look for it. And that’s where I think it should be in stories. It shou
ld not hang below your skirt like a slip.
A SHAKY START
A Wrinkle in Time almost never got published. It was so “almost” that I called my agent after two and a half years of trying, after we’d gone through all the publishers, and asked him to send it back. I said, “Nobody’s going to buy it. It’s too different. I take the rejections too hard, and it’s just too hard on the family for me to keep on going through this.” And he sent it back, and that should have been the end of it.
But my mother was with us for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old New York friends. And she happened to go to church with John Farrar of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and insisted that I meet John. At that point I was disgusted with publishers, but Mother set up an appointment, and I went down bearing my battered manuscript.
John had read my first novel and remembered it, had admired it. When he read Wrinkle, he loved it and was scared of it, but finally decided to publish it. They would take the risk of publishing it. And it is rather pleasant that this much-rejected book is the all-time bestseller of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
GOD’S TIMING FOR A WRINKLE IN TIME
I don’t have to understand the timing of the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, which had nothing to do with me. I wanted that book published two and a half years earlier. I bellowed at God about it. I did not understand the rejection slips for what I knew was a good book. But if it had come out when it went to that first publisher, the one who published Meet the Austins two and a half years earlier, it might just have dropped into a black pit of oblivion and never been heard from again.
Wrinkle was published at exactly the right moment, at a moment when the world had to face that we were in grave danger. This was close to the time of the Bay of Pigs when we needed not to reject evil but to face it and have courage for it. But I had nothing to do with the timing, and that is something that still leaves me in considerable awe. I mean, why? Why did that happen for me? Why have some other writers never been discovered? I don’t have the answer to that one. I still worry about van Gogh, who never had the satisfaction in his lifetime of knowing that anybody understood what he was trying to do. He had to die thinking of himself as an absolute and total failure.
SCIENCE FANTASY
Writing A Wrinkle in Time was a redemptive experience for me, a working out of a great deal of pain from a decade that had been extraordinarily difficult. It was my first effort in a genre now called “science fantasy,” and science fantasy is not far from fairy tale, that world which delves deep into the human psyche, struggling to find out at least a little more of what we are all about. We are indeed mysterious creatures, and the more rational we think we are, the more irrational we are likely to be, for we are not made up of reason alone. Reason alone produces characters like IT, the archetypal villain in Wrinkle, IT, who is brain alone, with no heart, no imagination, no mystery.
DETACHMENT AND INVOLVEMENT
A writer must be both detached and involved simultaneously. We cannot afford either as writers or as human beings to be detached from the human predicament, because this is what we write about and it’s the predicament we ourselves are in. We cannot afford to be detached from what is going on in Vietnam or in Jerusalem or in New York City or in Wheaton. We are always on stage, actors in the human drama. But we are also simultaneously members of the audience.
This knowledge came to my creative unconscious mind long before I understood it with the above-the-eyebrow part. One of my college assignments was to write a story in the present tense, first person. And I wrote an oddly detached story, one that I really was at that time incapable of writing. But it wrenched itself out of me leaving me physically drained and emotionally exhilarated. It was a story of a painter who was watching his wife die. He loved her. He was in agony over her death. He hated his friends who came to help. He hated his friends who didn’t come to help. He was totally involved in grief. But all the time that his wife was dying, he couldn’t stop one part of his mind from considering exactly how to paint her, how to mix the colors to show the shadow of death moving across her face.
Obviously, I didn’t really know what I was doing when I wrote this story, but it taught me a lot about the ambivalence of involvement/detachment that happens to all artists.
CONSIDERING IMMORTALITY
My great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother are alive for me because they are part of my story. My children and grandchildren and I tell stories about Hugh, my husband. We laugh and we remember—re-member. I tell stories about my friend, the theologian Canon Tallis, who was far more than my spiritual director, with whom I had one of those wonders, a spiritual friendship. I do not believe that these stories are their immortality—that is something quite different. But remembering their stories is the best way I know to have them remain part of my mortal life. And I need them to be part of me, while at the same time I am quite willing for them all to be doing whatever it is that God has in mind for them to do. Can those who are part of that great cloud of witnesses which has gone before us be in two places at once? I believe that they can, just as Jesus could, after the Resurrection.
THE LIMITS OF EXPERIENCE
When writing, you can take yourself at any age and you can put yourself in almost any situation. You can’t write out of anybody else. I can’t write out of my children. I can’t write out of my friends. I have to put myself in the situation in which my characters are. I can go back to the seventeenth century if I have to. I can go into outer space, but it’s always got to be through me. Otherwise it is not going to be truthful. Whether I want it to be or not, it is inevitably within the limits of my own experience, my own awareness, my own involvement.
WRITE IT DOWN
When I have a profound personal experience, I write it down in my journal and that way I am working through it. To some extent, I am objectifying it. It is no longer just subjective. But I’m also setting it in my memory. If you want to put it in a novel or a book, it does have to wait. It’s very important to set down what you’re feeling while it’s happening. But you need to get further away from it before you can then put into it what you hope will be a work of art.
TWO VOCATIONS
I was wife and mother with my children at home during all of the normal period that your children are home. In other words, I had two vocations. And two vocations are very difficult to juggle. They clash. But certainly it is possible. Many teachers who have a great vocation to teaching take the summers off and write. I think that would be kind of nice to have a whole summer off.
There are professional people—doctors, musicians, coaches, financial experts, et cetera—who do not claim to be writers but who are writing lots of books in their fields and getting published. Then there are people who are supposed to be writers who aren’t getting anything published or are having a hard time.
WOMEN WRITERS FACE SPECIAL DEMANDS
A woman who follows a vocation needs an unusually understanding husband; and even then, a woman’s success can put a real strain on a marriage. And I believe that this will always be true even when women’s liberation is an accomplished fact. And the woman who accepts the demands of a call must be able to observe rigorous discipline. If we follow vocation and choose to have a family, too, there is a constant balancing of priorities. We have to learn to turn away from the typewriter in order to cook dinner. And, yet, we mustn’t lose the train of thought.
WRITERS MUST EAT, TOO
For a woman who has chosen family as well as work, there’s never time, and yet somehow time is given to us as time is given to the man who must sail a ship or chart the stars. For most writers it takes many manuscripts before enough royalties are coming in to pay for a roof over the head and bread on the table. Other jobs must often be found to take care of bread and butter. A certain amount of stubbornness—pig-headedness—is essential.
JUGGLING TIME
I’ve said before, but I think it’s worth re
peating, the time that our children are home is a very short part of our lives. It’s about ten years at the most until the littlest one is in school. And once the kids are out that door and on the school bus you go back to the typewriter.
You can vacuum with your children. You can dust with your children. You can talk to them while you’re cooking. So household chores can be shared and become a part of your dialogue.
You don’t have to do your chores when your children are in school. You can write. Even if the little one is in nursery school for only two hours, you have two hours which you give to writing. And that’s about the only way you do it.
ON SETTING GOALS
I don’t set page goals. I know writers who will write twelve pages a day and that’s that. If they finish within an hour, they’re through. If they take all day to do it, they take all day to do it. The number of pages I produce in a day is very, very variable. My publishers put a certain amount of pressure on me. “Aren’t you finished with the book yet?” “Can we announce it for June?” And if I say yes, I have then put a goal on myself.
Madeleine L'Engle Herself Page 5