Madeleine L'Engle Herself

by Madeleine L'engle

  But I have learned that if I suddenly discover that I need to rewrite the book, I’ll say, “Sorry I told you that. It is not going to be ready.” And my editor is usually the one who says, “She’s got more work to do on it.”

  HONEST JOURNALS

  A help to me in working things out has been to keep an honest—as honest as the human being can be—unpublishable journal. Granted, much of my non-fiction work is lifted directly from my journals, but what I use is only a small fraction of these numerous, bulky volumes. If I can write things out I can see them, and they are not trapped within my own subjectivity. I have been keeping these notebooks of thoughts and questions and sometimes just garbage (which needs to be dumped somewhere) since I was about nine, and they are, I think, my free psychiatrist’s couch.

  STORY FODDER

  Our memories which are essential to our wholeness can far too easily be turned from icon to idol. The good memories become idealized (idolized) until they bear little relation to reality. The bad memories, when they are carefully wrapped in pink cotton to keep them safe so they can be brought out and fondled, can be even more dangerous than the good ones.

  It has been a great help to me that when I have written out an event and thereby objectified it, at least a little, I can usually let it go. For me it works best in story, though the first step is usually a journal entry. When I was grown up my mother would apologize to me for my odd childhood, and I would protest, “But Mother, look at all the material it’s given me for my stories!” I wouldn’t want to have missed a minute of it, though there’s a lot of it I wouldn’t want to have to live over.

  PUT THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND TO WORK

  Very seldom have I had from dreams anything that I have actually used, only twice that I can remember. But what I do tend to do is when I go to bed I ask my subconscious to work on whatever particular problem I want it to. If I wake up in the night with a good idea, I say, “Remind me of this in the morning, please.” And your subconscious is very cooperative if you are courteous with it. If I leapt up to write it down, I wouldn’t go back to sleep.

  If I’m meant to remember it, I remember it. I don’t always remember it immediately on waking, but I’ll remember it within an hour or two. We can collaborate more with our subconscious minds than we realize.

  OUR STORIES CHANGE WITH US

  We write out of our own experience, and my experience is that which springs from being a wife and a mother and from my struggles to be human under these particular circumstances. Certainly I could not have written about the Murrys or the Austins without my own family experience.

  And now I write from the point of view of a single woman, a woman whose husband has died. Why do I dislike the word widow? Several other women whose husbands have died agree with me. We are women who no longer have a husband and who must get on with life as well as we can, living, loving, continuing to work, to see friends. I have had the blessing of living, for the first years since Hugh’s death, with my granddaughters through their years of college, and now Charlotte is in graduate school in New York. We entertain together, and this is a great joy, but it is very different from entertaining with a husband. Not better or worse, just different. But I know that sooner or later both these young women will be gone from my nest, and life will be different once again. And my writing will reflect my living.

  THE WRITER’S LIFE

  Many people in walks of life which do not involve creation are completely unaware of the necessity for discipline. It is not only that few serious artists who live lives of debauchery produce a large body of work, but that few serious artists are able to live lives which are without interruption. We do not shed all obligations when the children leave home. I am working on this section of this manuscript while teaching an intensive four and a half hour credit course, and neither may be skimped. Many writers work in the evenings after a nine-to-five job. And there are letters to be answered, the phone which constantly calls us. I travel a lot in order to give lectures, teach at writers’ conferences (though most of my destinations are not as glamourous as Cyprus). To write consistently, I must seize opportunities. I write in airports. I write on planes. I find airports and planes and hotel rooms excellent places in which to write, because while I am in them I am not responsible for anything except my work. Once I have my seat assignment I can write until the flight is called; when I am on the plane, the pilot is responsible for the flight; I am not; and so I can work on my manuscript. In a hotel room I do not have to think about the vacuum cleaner (though sometimes I would like to have one); domestic chores are not my responsibility; I am free to write.

  WHO WE ARE

  If you are an artist, regardless of your religion, everything you do is your witness. You cannot hide what you are. Emerson said, “What you are speaks so loudly over your head that I cannot hear what you say.”

  For teachers, this is very, very important. What you are is what the children are going to learn, despite what you say. If what you say and what you are are the same thing, then you’re going to be a fine teacher. As a writer, I try to make what I am not too far from what I say. What I say is far more than I am. My work knows far more than I know, but I try to make my own life not incompatible with what the work knows and what the work says.

  WRITING STORIES TAKES COURAGE

  I am grateful that I started writing at a very early age, before I realized what a daring thing it is to do, to set down words on paper, to attempt to tell a story, create characters. We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.

  A WRITER’S RESPONSIBILITY

  It takes courage to open oneself vulnerably to the depths of a book. The moment I set words down on a page I become responsible for those words. Letters from readers have forced me to be aware of this responsibility which I would much rather not know about—but there it is, and I had better accept it. A letter from a teenager ran something like this, “I am thinking about becoming a Christian, but one thing worries me. All my friends who are Christians say that only Christians can be saved. What do you think? I’m writing to you because your stories have made me trust you.” That’s more responsibility than I want. But we’re all responsible the moment we get out of bed every morning. I wrote that teenager a long letter (we’re still corresponding) and I hope that I gave her a glimpse of God’s love which is always greater than our continual misinterpretation of it. But I don’t know. And that is frightening.

  TRIBUTE FROM AN ASTRONAUT

  Further proof that my books know more than I do came later, again with [A Wrinkle in Time], when my husband’s television wife, Ruth Warwick, who plays Phoebe Tyler in All My Children, was on the Today Show with Ed Mitchell, who was one of the second group of astronauts actually to walk on the moon. His present job is to explain scientific concepts of space to laymen. And, he told Ruth, he finds this very difficult to do; scientific concepts of space are not easy to understand. So he uses a book, a book which he said can get these concepts across far better than he is able to. “It’s supposed to be a children’s book,” he said, “but it really isn’t. It’s called A Wrinkle in Time.” “Oh, yes,” said Ruth, “my husband’s wife wrote it.”

  So my book knows more about physics than I do, and I find this very exciting. I did, indeed, study physics while I was writing Wrinkle, but I’ve never taken a course in physics, and surely I could not have learned enough, reading on my own, to make my book useful to an astronaut.

  JUSTIFYING THE WRITING LIFE

  It was more difficult for me to justify time to write when my children were little than it was to find time to write. And that was false guilt. I felt it because my work was not being published. I had five books published and then this long hiatus. I felt that my time at the typewriter was not justifiable. I think I was
wrong. I think that was totally false guilt, because I was a writer because I was writing. But we tend to accept the images the world would put on us. And if you’re not a published writer, you’re not supposed to be a writer. Well, I know now that’s not true.

  CONCENTRATION AND BURNED VEGETABLES

  The writer cannot write just when he feels like it or he won’t have anything to write with. Like the violin, he has to be constantly tuned and practiced on. This can sometimes be very hard on husband or family, but it’s absolutely essential. My family has with the utmost forbearance and patience put up with innumerable saucepans, the bottoms of which are permanently speckled from burned vegetables. Last year it was peas, and this year I seem to have switched to string beans. I not only burn dinner when I dash to the typewriter to set down just one more sentence, I’m also given to excitement and enthusiasms far beyond the dignity of my position of somebody who’s past the half-century mark.

  DISCOURAGING MOMENTS

  There was nothing idyllic in the violent conflict between Madeleine, wife and mother, and Madeleine, writer. I struggled to write under the worst possible conditions, after the children were in bed—that force field of concentration would have been a dangerous idea while they were awake and active. Like most young mothers I was constantly tired. Added to fatigue was struggling to cope with failure, which looked as though it would have no end. I was trying to develop as a writer, but I received from editors nothing but a long stream of rejection slips, mostly the impersonal printed ones, although I had already had several books published, and with moderate success. Theron, my agent, was worried that too much failure would kill my talent, and perhaps, in the end, it would have. I’m not sure how strong I am, and what would have happened if the chill rejection had never stopped.

  WRITERS WANT TO BE PUBLISHED

  Well, somehow or other, like a lot of other women who have quite deliberately and happily chosen to be mothers, and work at another vocation as well, I did manage to get a lot of writing done. But during that decade when I was in my thirties, I couldn’t see anything. If a writer says he doesn’t care whether he is published or not, I don’t believe him. I care. Undoubtedly I care too much. But we do not write for ourselves alone. I write about what concerns me, and I want to share my concerns. I want what I write to be read. Every rejection slip—and you could paper walls with my rejection slips—was like the rejection of me, myself, and certainly of my amour-propre. I learned all kinds of essential lessons during those years of rejection, and I’m glad to have had them, but I wouldn’t want to have to go through them again.

  KEEPING PERSPECTIVE

  I started writing A Wrinkle in Time at the end of a decade of nothing but rejection slips. I had accepted myself as a failure as a writer, at least a failure in the world’s eyes. I was writing because I had to.

  Now I get a lot of absolutely marvelous letters, affirming letters. The only way that I can live with this is I answer them, put my answer in the mail, and forget them. Otherwise I could easily begin to take myself too seriously. And that would be death to creativity.

  THE PAIN OF REJECTION

  During that dreadful decade [of rejection] I pinned on my workroom wall a cartoon in which a writer, bearing a rejected manuscript, is dejectedly leaving a publisher’s office; the caption says, “We’re very sorry, Mr. Tolstoy, but we aren’t in the market for a war story right now.” That cartoon got me through some bad hours. It didn’t mean that I was setting myself beside Tolstoy.

  On the other hand I was anything but comforted when Hugh thought to console me by pointing out some published stories which “aren’t nearly as good as yours. Doesn’t that make you feel better?” “Of course it doesn’t make me feel better!” I cried. “You’re absolutely right, I write much better than that. Why should it make me feel better to have bad writing published? If it were better than mine, then I wouldn’t mind, then I would feel better.”

  THE DISCOVERY OF VOCATION

  I had to make a decision about myself as a writer in the moment of total failure. On my fortieth birthday I took a rejection of my book The Lost Innocence as a sign from God to give up writing and learn to scrub floors or make piecrust that doesn’t fall apart. And I covered my typewriter in a great gesture of renunciation.

  I was walking up and down my little room—my kids were at school—weeping my head off. I was very, very unhappy. I stopped in my tracks because my subconscious mind was blip, blip, blip, blipping up to my conscious mind the plot of a novel on failure. So I uncovered the typewriter. That night I wrote in my journal “I have to write. That’s the gift I’ve been given. And even if I am never, ever published again it is still what I have to do.” And I had to accept at that point that I might never, ever be published again because it had been a long time since I had gotten anything but rejection slips.

  I’m glad that I made that decision about myself as writer in the moment of utter darkness in the pits, because it’s very real. It’s easy to say you’re a writer when your books are being published and making money, but I wasn’t being published, and I wasn’t making any money. So it was a very real decision. And it is a decision we all have to make.

  PAIN FOSTERS STORIES

  The extraordinary thing is as artists, as human beings, we do learn from pain. I once was having a very casual lunch with a couple of people, one of whom was an Episcopal bishop. In the conversation, I happened to say that all of my best work had come out of pain. He said, “Let’s hope something terrible happens to you soon.” I didn’t appreciate it. But that is how it is. We grow through our growing pains, through the things that hurt us, through people failing us, through friends betraying us.

  The most poignant psalms are the ones where the psalmist is saying, “I could have stood it if it was an enemy who did this to me. But it was you my friend who broke bread with me. You have done this with me.” And then we have to ask ourselves who have we betrayed, who have we let down—maybe simply by being too tired to hear.

  This is all part of the creating of character in fiction because all of this produces conflict between people. And conflict between people is an essential part of the writing of fiction, as it is an essential part of our own lives.

  PRIVATE JOURNALS

  I think that a journal that is written to be a private journal—not a public journal, not a published journal—should not be available until it doesn’t make any difference what I’ve said about anybody.

  What will happen to my journals when I die? They are coming to Wheaton—probably with a hundred-year moratorium on them—if I don’t burn them. After a hundred years it won’t matter what I have put into my journals. I’ve known a certain number of rather important-named people, and I have written very freely about them. The only reason I don’t say definitely that I’m going to burn the journals is that they are a record of one woman’s family, one woman’s life, one woman’s thought in a very troubled period of this planet. And perhaps in a hundred years they might be valuable simply for the day-to-day insights they give into what life has been like in this troubled century.

  WRITER’S BLOCK AND BACH

  Music is, for me, a way of getting into this frame of mind where one can be simultaneously involved and detached. If I’m really stuck in something that I’m working on, if I’m absolutely blocked, if I go to the piano and play Bach and concentrate on Bach (preferably fugues) for about an hour or so, underneath this concentration on Bach my subconscious creative mind obviously has been working. When I’m through I usually realize, “Oh yeah, that’s what I need to do.” But I’ve got out of the subjective and into the objective through the help of Johann Sebastian, who just happens to work very well for me.

  CRITICISM STINGS

  When we write and are published, we become naked before people. And that means we are open to criticism. That’s a risk you have to take. If you write a book that says something and it pleases everybody, you’ve failed. If you give a talk where y
ou’re trying to say something and it pleases everybody, you haven’t been heard.

  It’s hard for us to open ourselves to rebuff. I bleed from bad reviews, even though I have been very blessed in getting many more good reviews than bad reviews. But like every other writer I know, when you get ninety-nine good reviews and one bad review, what review stays in your mind? The bad one. And why? Because it awakens our own doubts. Did I really serve the work? Did I really hear it? Could she really be right and I haven’t done it as I should have?

  If you’re going to write and be published, you’ve got to expect to have a few arrows thrown at you. They’re going to hurt, and you’re going to bleed. You’re probably going to cry if you’re like me. But that’s just part of it and you have to learn.

  THE PARADOX OF SUCCESS

  There is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for “success,” because that means that there has been a communication of the vision: that all the struggle has not been invalid.