Madeleine L'Engle Herself

by Madeleine L'engle

  OUR STORIES REFLECT OUR WORLD

  “But books are a story,” someone else said. “That’s what they have to be: entertainment. They shouldn’t be anything else.”

  Well, of course. The story comes, and it is pure story. That’s all I set out to write. But I don’t believe that we can write any kind of story without including, whether we intend to or not, our response to the world around us.

  The writing of a book may be a solitary business; it is done alone. The writer sits down with paper and pen, or typewriter, and withdrawn from the world, tries to set down the story that is crying to be written. We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.

  UNLEARNING

  Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity. The ability to see things fresh and new and in eternity, rather than in time, can be lost—and for the writer to lose it and not find it again is fatal. It is our unlearning we share in our writing whether for children or grownups, that unlearning which gives us the courage to open ourselves to the sinister as well as the dexterous part of our creativity. Thus we will be able to work to our fullest, to allow the characters to people our stories, to lead us in directions we never anticipated. We don’t need to settle for the limited selves we can control and manipulate.

  LISTEN TO YOUR WRITTEN WORDS

  If you don’t have somebody to read your book to you, read it aloud, preferably to somebody else, because you’ll be listening through that person’s ears. And you will hear things that are infelicitous, that you will simply not have seen otherwise. If you can’t find anybody to read it to, read it to the mirror. But read it aloud because that is a wonderful way of checking on where you’re getting into cumbersome rhythms or repetitive rhythms or where you are repeating a word.

  SETTING TIME LIMITS

  When I write, I realized, I do not think. I write. If I think when I am writing, it doesn’t work. I can think before I write; I can think after I write; but when I am actually writing, what I do is write. This is always the instruction I give at writers’ workshops: “Don’t think. Write.” And I put a time limit to the assignments. “You may not work on this for more than an hour. If you’re not finished at the end of an hour, that’s all right. Stop.” It’s a lot easier to write without thinking if there’s a time limit.

  One workshop participant said to me one morning, ‘‘I thought what you were asking us was absolutely impossible. But then I woke up at two o’clock and I did it.” And she smiled with delight at what she had done.

  RELEASE, RELEASE, RELEASE

  When you want to give the audience an emotion—whether in acting or in singing or in writing—you have to be on the other side of the emotion. In talking with one of you, I likened it to intercessory prayer. When you are praying for someone, beware. Do not manipulate. Do not try to control. Do not try to order the universe. You simply move through into that person and then offer whoever it is to God. But, again, you go through and out and on other side of emotion. If you are manipulative with your character—one you’re playing, one you’re writing about, or one you’re praying about—then it doesn’t work.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF EDITORS AND EDITING

  In revision, you have to do a lot of thinking. Why doesn’t this scene work? This is where a sense of an editor is so helpful because your editor will be able to talk with you about a scene and say, “I don’t believe in your character in this scene.”

  I have had editors say, “We don’t know what to do with this book. We love it, but we can’t cut it.” Well, I believe anything that can be cut should have been cut. That if it is there, it is there because it has to be there, even if it’s a comma. You don’t want anything left in your final manuscript that isn’t absolutely essential.

  GOALS AND LIMITS

  I am, I suppose, a compulsive writer. I need to write. It is my play as well as my work. But I think it’s a mistake to set arbitrary goals. Your goal is to make the book as good a book as you can possibly write at this particular stage in your life. And you don’t stop until you have done that, and when you have done that, it’s a mistake to play around with it because then you’ll just succeed in ruining it.

  You begin to sense the point at which you have done as much revising as you can do. It’s not exactly right, you haven’t served it as well as it should be served, but that’s as far as you can go.

  THE HOUSE OF FICTION

  Henry James tells us: Reader, do not report. The writing of fiction is an entirely different discipline from the writing of journalism, and I have to warn my students that I can teach them nothing about journalism; a journalist must report; he tells, rather than shows. The two techniques are almost diametrically opposite. The writer of fiction—and I include in this all the works of the imagination, poetry, plays, realistic novels, fantasy—may never tell; he must show, and show through the five senses. “Describe this room in which we’re sitting,” I say, “and make use of all five of your senses. Don’t tell us. Show us.” The beginning writer finds this difficult. I have to repeat and repeat: fiction is built upon the concrete. A news article is essentially transitory and may be built upon sand. The house of fiction must be built upon rock. Feel, smell, taste, hear, see: show it.

  THE BEST TEACHERS

  When I teach a writers’ workshop, all I can teach are techniques. One cannot teach “creative writing.” Such writing is a gift, but the gift cannot be served unless the techniques have been learned thoroughly enough to become instinctive.

  The best teachers of writing are the great writers themselves. If we read enough, certain truths become self-evident. There are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do, and a proper study of their works will show us what these are.

  SKILLS OF THE TRADE

  You can have all the gifts in the world, and unless you have practiced your techniques, unless you have acquired the skills of your trade, your gifts will be unexpressed. If you are an oboist, you must practice your oboe. If you are a writer, you must write every day. We train our skills constantly.

  Writers are terribly lucky because one of the ways of training our skills is reading. And of course I love to read. But in reading we discover things that the good writers always do. We discover things they don’t do. And in reading bad books, we discover things we don’t want to do.

  THE INSPIRATION OF GREAT WORKS

  When I read the great works of writing, the extraordinary thing is I’m not intimidated by them. Instead, they make me want to go and serve my own work better. I don’t have to compete with Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare. I just have to try to be Madeleine. I don’t have to be anybody else. So when I read something that is far greater than anything I could do, rather than putting me down, it expands me, pulls me up, makes me want to do more. I don’t too often react with “Boy, I could do better.” If I don’t like it, I don’t bother to read it. I have limited eyesight for reading time, and I tend to pick things that I know I’m going to want to read. So mostly I read books, and I’m pretty selective in the books.

  BOOKS WORTH READING

  Have you discovered Robertson Davies? Robertson Davies is a Canadian writer. The three books to start with are known as The Deptford Trilogy. The first of the three is Fifth Business. The second is The Manticore, and the third is World of Wonders.

  In the area of nonfiction, I recommend The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zucov. This is the philosophy of quantum mechanics. To keep up with my science, I’ve gone back to Lewis Carroll. He bears repetition. In order to keep up with my granddaughters, I’ve gone back to Shakespeare. We’re now deep into Twelfth Night and trying to do the music, to find the English madrigals that go along with Shakespeare’s words.

  I also read English murder mysteries. Dick Francis writes
about horse racing. I couldn’t care less about horse racing; however, Francis deals with decency in human nature, and not many writers deal with decency anymore. Then of course I always go back to my great old favorites—Marjorie Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Josephine Tey—because good books are worth reading any number of times.

  Section VII

  THE EMPTY PAGE

  Getting Started

  Ultimately, you have to sit down and start to write.

  COOKING UP STORIES

  When I start working on a book (and I’m usually thinking about several books over several years before I actually start to write one), I’m somewhat like a French peasant cook. There is a big black stove, several pots on the back of it. And the cook goes by and drops a carrot in one pot and a piece of potato in another and an onion and a piece of meat in another. At dinnertime, you look and see which pot smells best and pull it forward. The same thing is true with writing. There are several pots on my back burners. An idea for a scene goes into one pot, a character into another, and a description of the tree in the fog in another. And when it comes time to write, I bring forward the pot which has the most in it—or more likely, this being a less literal world, the pot shoves itself out at me.

  Now the dropping in of the ideas is sometimes quite conscious. I know I’m putting a carrot in this pot. But sometimes something has been added when I don’t even realize it. And I look into the pot and say, “Oh that’s there, just what I need.” But I don’t know when it got put in. When it comes time to write, I look at everything in the pot. I sort, I organize, I arrange, I discover, I think about character and storyline. And most of this part of the work is done by the me of which I am aware. It is a conscious act.

  BEGIN WITH AWE

  Lewis Carroll may have thought that he was writing a book for a specific little girl; he was also writing for himself; mostly for himself. The children’s writer clarifies things for himself, not by wrapping them up in tight and tidy packages, but in opening himself up to them. One of the greatest delights of writing is in seeing words we never expected appear on the page. But first of all we have to go through the fear that accompanies all beginnings—no, not fear, but awe: I am awed at my temerity when I sit down at the piano to play a Mozart sonata; I am awed when I sit down at the typewriter to start a new book and so step out into that wild land where the forgotten language is the native tongue. Then, and then only, when I have got my feet wet in a distant brook, as real as the one at Crosswicks, am I free to communicate to others what I have seen.

  A WRITER’S IDEAS

  Everything you do, everywhere you go, you can gather ideas. Train yourself to keep your eyes and ears open at all times. Tune in your sense of smell, your sense of taste. Keep all your senses acute and listening. Write all the time. As artists, you must train yourselves. The more you write, the more you paint, the more you practice your instrument, the more you live constantly this double way. You keep asking yourself: How do I write it? How do I paint it? How do I put it into music? You are constantly, in small ways, getting ideas.

  PLANET MAKING

  People say, what about all those planets in A Wrinkle in Time? Well, I was hatching A Wrinkle in Time while our family was taking the ten-week camping trip that I describe in The Moon by Night. Everything I describe in Wrinkle is something I saw on that camping trip. You see something small, and then you can enlarge it. A possible planet (which I didn’t use) came to mind in Yellowstone where I looked at a pool about four feet around of bubbling yellow clay. Now you can easily take that little four-foot pool of bubbling yellow clay and make an entire planet out of it. So you see something real, and then you do what is called extrapolating.

  SERENDIPITIES

  When I was starting to write A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I had the plot pretty well established in my mind, but I wasn’t sure how to get into it or how to structure it. While I was struggling with this, I opened the day’s mail and there, from a friend who was in Scotland visiting Iona, was a card with the words of “Patrick’s Rune,” the rune which was to be the backbone of my plot.

  In this fateful hour

  I place all Heaven with its power

  and the sun with its brightness

  and the snow with its whiteness

  and the fire with all the strength it hath

  and the lightning with its rapid wrath

  and the winds with their swiftness along their path

  and the sea with its deepness

  and the rocks with their steepness

  and the earth with its starkness

  all these I place by God’s almighty help and grace

  between myself and the powers of darkness.

  So there was the structure of my novel, come to me in the mail. I thought of those words often as we drove across countryside where runes and blessings and mysteries were still part of the air we breathed.

  APPROACHES TO THE WRITING TASK

  The approach to each book is different, as your approach to each person you speak to is different. If you’re a teacher, your approach to each child is different. But you have a basic approach, which is the same no matter what you’re writing.

  I have slowly emerged into my approach. When I was first writing, I was much more conscious of what I was doing. I was much less willing to relinquish my control. And here, of course, we get again into this incredible paradox of control and letting go, of having to have technique—because if you do not have technique, nothing can speak through you—but then letting go so that the spirit of the work can move through you.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCIPLINE

  Ultimately, you have to sit down and start to write. And even if all you do is type out “I can’t write this morning; I can’t write this morning; oh, bother, I can’t write this morning,” that will sometimes prime the pump and get it started. It is a matter of discipline. It is particularly a matter of discipline for a woman who has children or who has another job.

  I think that my years in the English boarding school where I had to create my own privacy were also a way of learning to create my own discipline. Now there are mornings when I joyfully sit down at the typewriter. But there are mornings when it is anything but a joy. There are evenings when I go to the piano and the music comes pouring from my fingers. There are evenings when I’m all thumbs and I have to make myself sit there and go over scales and finger exercises before I can play anything. The same thing is true with writing.

  WRITE EVERY DAY

  The most difficult part of each day is starting to work. I will sharpen pencils. I never write with pencils. I’ll line up my black felt pens. If the worse comes to worst, I’ll change the typewriter ribbon. And finally I begin. I may throw out—not always, but often—the first five lines, five pages, before the work begins to take over and we begin to move together.

  There’s no secret to it. There are no rules to it, except that as with playing any musical instrument, if you don’t practice your instrument every single day it will not be fit to receive the music. And that is very true of the writer who does not write every single day.

  Now, believe me, with the schedule I’ve got here, all I’ve been writing is my journal. I spent this morning at a grade school, and tonight we’ve got another talk. But just writing my journal is enough finger exercises to keep going. And when I get on a plane, I write the whole way home.

  THE RHYTHM OF WRITING

  While you are writing on anything, you’ve got to do it every day, just as a pianist has to practice every day and a violinist has to practice every day. Very often I don’t want to write, but if I’m in the midst of a book, it is an everyday job. Sundays off. It’s good to leave your writing alone only at a planned vacation time when you have finished a work and need to lie fallow. It’s rather difficult for me to lie fallow long enough, to be back into that filling station long enough. I tend to want to start too soon, and we need
our refueling time.

  WHERE THE STORY BEGINS

  One of the things I learned in college was that I usually was wise to start my story where I thought it ought to start and then cut a minimum of the first paragraph. I had to write my way into where the story began. And that is still often true. You can’t avoid writing your way to where the story begins. That’s often a necessary prelude to getting to the beginning. You have to learn to realize when you have got to the place where the story begins, where suddenly you find yourself in a tactile world, a concrete world.

  THOSE FIRST FEW SENTENCES

  The hardest part is the first three sentences. Sitting down with pen and paper and just getting those first three sentences out. I sometimes have to write my way into something knowing that that first paragraph is just preliminary, but I have to write myself in. It’s like being in a cold lake and sometimes you have to go in toe by toe. Some of you can plunge in, but not always; you have to write your way into it. And then you’re swimming.