A PLUME BOOK
WHY WE WRITE
MEREDITH MARAN is the author of ten nonfiction books and the acclaimed 2012 novel A Theory of Small Earthquakes. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she writes features, essays, and book reviews for People, Salon, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Real Simple, the Guardian (London), the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She’s been a writer in residence at UCLA and at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, and a fellow at the MacDowell, Mesa Refuge, Ragdale, and Yaddo artists’ colonies. Meredith divides her time between sunny writing spots in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.
Why We Write
20 Acclaimed Authors on
How and Why They Do
What They Do
Edited by Meredith Maran
A PLUME BOOK
PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, February 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Meredith Maran, 2013
All rights reserved
Each selection is the copyrighted property of its respective author and appears in this volume by arrangement with the individual writer.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Maran, Meredith.
Why we write : 20 acclaimed authors on how and why they do what they do / Meredith
Maran ; with Isabel Allende…[et al.].
p.cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-60282-9
1. Authorship. I. Allende, Isabel. II. Title.
PN165.M37 2013
810.9’0054--dc23 2012018687
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Adobe Caslon Pro
Designed by Eve L. Kirch
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
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ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
For those who read, write, publish, purvey, and love books.
And in memory of Françoise Sagan, who made me
a reader and a writer and a lover of books.
Acknowledgments
Becky Cole: Best. Editor. Ever.
Linda Loewenthal: Best. Agent. Ever.
For making magic possible: the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, the Mesa Refuge, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.
For making this book, and innumerable reading hours, not only possible but delightful: The Twenty.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Isabel Allende
Chapter Two: David Baldacci
Chapter Three: Jennifer Egan
Chapter Four: James Frey
Chapter Five: Sue Grafton
Chapter Six: Sara Gruen
Chapter Seven: Kathryn Harrison
Chapter Eight: Gish Jen
Chapter Nine: Sebastian Junger
Chapter Ten: Mary Karr
Chapter Eleven: Michael Lewis
Chapter Twelve: Armistead Maupin
Chapter Thirteen: Terry McMillan
Chapter Fourteen: Rick Moody
Chapter Fifteen: Walter Mosley
Chapter Sixteen: Susan Orlean
Chapter Seventeen: Ann Patchett
Chapter Eighteen: Jodi Picoult
Chapter Nineteen: Jane Smiley
Chapter Twenty: Meg Wolitzer
Introduction
Why do writers write? Anyone who’s ever sworn at a blinking cursor has asked herself that question at some point. Or at many, many points.
When the work is going well, and the author is transported, fingers flying under the watchful eye of the muse, she might wonder, as she takes her first sip of the coffee she poured and forgot about hours ago, “How did I get so lucky, that this is what I get to do?”
And then there are the less rapturous writing days or weeks or decades, when the muse is injured on the job and leaves the author sunk to the armpits in quicksand, and every word she types or scribbles is wrong, wrong, wrong, and she cries out to the heavens, “Why am I doing this to myself?”
It’s a curiosity in either case. Why do some people become neurosurgeons, dental hygienists, investment bankers, while others choose an avocation that promises only poverty, rejection, and self-doubt? Why do otherwise rational individuals get up every morning—often very, very early in the morning, before the sun or the family or the day job calls—and willingly enter the cage?
Is it the triumph of seeing one’s words in print? Statistics show this isn’t a reasonable incentive. According to the website Publishing Explained, more than one million manuscripts are currently searching for a U.S. publisher. One percent of these will get the nod.
Nor can we credit the satisfaction of a job well done. As the ever-cheerful Oscar Wilde put it, “Books are never finished. They are merely abandoned.” Only thirty percent of published books turn a profit, so we can rule out material motivation. God knows it can’t be for the boost in self-esteem. To paraphrase Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of actors, “Writers search for rejection. If they don’t get it, they reject themselves.”
Why, then, does anyone write? Unlike performing brain surgery, cleaning teeth, or trading bonds, anyone can pick up a yellow pad or a laptop or a journal and create a poem or a story or a memoir. And, despite the odds against attaining the desired result, many, many people do. We fill our journals and write our novels and take our writing classes. We read voraciously, marveling at the sentences and characters and plot twists our favorite authors bestow upon us. How do they do it? we ask ourselves. And why?
“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”
So declared George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Why I
Write,” in which he listed the “four great motives for writing”:
Sheer egoism. “To be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups in childhood, etc.”
Aesthetic enthusiasm. “To take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.”
Historical impulse. “The desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”
Political purposes. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
Thirty years later Joan Didion reprised the question in The New York Times Book Review. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion wrote. “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.
“There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
In 2001, the preternaturally gentle naturalist Terry Tempest Williams addressed the question in “Why I Write” in Northern Lights magazine. “I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.”
As for me: I write books to answer my own questions. So I made a wish list of authors to interview for this one, basing my selections on two factors. I wanted the conversation to benefit from a mix of genres, genders, ethnicities, ages, and, therefore, experiences in writing and in life. And I wanted to talk to those who have beaten the odds: Writers who have succeeded at both the craft and the commerce of writing, who could offer the greatest insights into the creative urge. Writers whose success has satisfied the basic motivations of the struggling author: to become rich and famous, to prove one’s work worthy of publication, to prove to one’s mother or ex-husband or ex-boss just how wrong that person was. For the household-name authors in this book: done, done, and done.
Those included here—“The Twenty,” as I call them— have written books that sell in the kinds of numbers that make publishers send them flowers and leather-bound first editions and, most important, new book contracts. They are authors whose work is regularly praised and sometimes condemned but is rarely ignored by important critics and publications. Their faces and voices are known to anyone who watches Good Morning America or listens to Fresh Air. Millions or billions of fans worldwide read every book they write.
In other words, the twenty authors here have exactly what every writer wants: full creative freedom and nothing to worry about.
Or so I thought.
* * *
I’ve been publishing poems and articles since Eisenhower was president. I’ve been writing books and book reviews since Nixon waved good-bye. Decades of assignments have taught me how difficult it can be to elicit a yes from writers as media-wearied as those on my wish list. Publicists, personal assistants, bodyguards, and bouncers have impressed upon me how many requests are rejected daily by those in that stratum of the Famousphere. So I expected the hard part to be the “get”: convincing these illustrious few to talk to me.
Q: What might convince the Twenty to sit for interviews for this book?
A: A shared commitment to literacy. And shared support for an organization that promotes it.
826 National fits the bill. It’s an innovative youth literacy program, founded in San Francisco in 2002 by the ever-innovative Dave Eggers, now encompassing outposts in Boston; Chicago; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; New York; Seattle; and Ypsilanti, Michigan. Each chapter is housed in a quirkily named storefront (the Boring Store in Chicago; the Museum of Unnatural History in DC) in which after-school tutoring sessions and summer camps are held and from which volunteers fan out into local public schools to help teachers do their jobs—all for free.
Once I’d spoken to the good folks at 826 National and we’d agreed that a portion of the proceeds of this book would go to their worthy projects, I started making calls. The first happy surprise of what proved to be an incredibly happy process: each of the Twenty, from Allende to Wolitzer, said yes. Some said they were eager to support 826. Many said they’d never been asked the “why” question before. They were as interested to answer it as I was to hear their answers.
“Whenever I am writing,” Rick Moody told me, “or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being.”
“You have deep control, and where else can you find that?” Meg Wolitzer said. “You can’t control other people or your relationships or your children, but in writing you can have sustained periods where you’re absolutely in charge.”
Sue Grafton said, “My best time as a writer is any day, or any moment, when the work’s going well and I’m completely absorbed in the task at hand. The hardest time is when it’s not, and I’m not. The latter tend to outnumber the former. But I’m a persistent little cuss. And I soldier on.”
Walter Mosley mused, “I can’t think of a reason not to write. I guess one reason would be that nobody was buying my books. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t stop me. I’d be writing anyway.”
I also asked each of the Twenty to share his or her least favorite part of the writing life.
“When I’m working on a book, I’m in a very agitated mental state,” Michael Lewis told me. “My sleep is disrupted. I only dream about the project….I’m mentally absent for months at a time. The social cost to my wife and kids is very high. Luckily, I’m a binge writer. I take a lot of time off between books, which is why I still have a family.”
“I start all my books on January eighth,” Isabel Allende said, shaking her immaculately coiffed head. “Can you imagine January seventh? It’s hell…I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jennifer Egan confessed that she worries. A lot. “It was scary, pouring time and energy into a project that didn’t have a clear genre identity and might therefore fall through the cracks,” she told me. “I’m afraid my publisher will say, ‘We can’t publish your odd book.’ My second-worst fear is that they’ll publish it, and the book will come and go without a whisper.”
“The only chance in hell I had of being published in the New Yorker would have been to sign my cover letters ‘J. D. Salinger,’” said David Baldacci.
Most surprising were the writers’ responses to the crucial question—a trick question, really—that I’d planted in the mix.
When I asked, “What’s the best moment you’ve had as a writer?” I expected to be regaled with tales of Pulitzers awarded. NEA grants granted. White House readings given. Multiple weeks on bestseller lists. The sort of writerly riches that less-celebrated authors hope to experience someday, should we survive our epic bouts of envy. So I was surprised that so few of the best moments cited by the Twenty had to do with money, fame, or critical recognition.
“Writing my third novel was the best time I’ve ever had as a writer,” Jane Smiley told me, her eyes glowing with the memory. “I felt I was being manipulated from afar. It seemed that the characters were using me as a secretary to write their story.”
Nor did Sebastian Junger mention runaway sales or movie deals. “When I went to Sarajevo in ’93 and I was with these other freelance writers,” he said, “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.”
Gish Jen, née Lillian Jen, named her best moment the one when she took her “writing name”: “Lillian was a n
ice Chinese girl,” she told me. “Gish was not such a nice girl. Gish was the one propping the doors open so I could get back into the dorm at night….There’s a kind of freedom that goes with being Gish that didn’t go with being Lillian, and that freedom went with writing.”
Each chapter of Why We Write revolves around one author’s answer to the central question of the book. Each juicy narrative is accompanied by a short excerpt from the author’s latest book, a few words of introduction, and a boxed set of stats—“The Vitals” and “The Collected Works”—outlining the author’s major milestones, personal and professional.
Why We Write is devoted to the notion that reading is good, and writing is even better. Toward that end, each chapter concludes with the author’s pithiest writing tips—a gift to beginning and experienced writers of all genres, genders, ages, ethnicities, and life experiences. The chapters are organized alphabetically based on the authors’ last names—one of many reinforcements of the premise of the book: that the status differences among the writers are far less significant than their similarities.
This book is a tribute to writers everywhere, and to the spirit that moves us—as embodied by the Twenty, who gave much of themselves so that 826 National might encourage a few more American kids to love reading and writing, and so that you might find your love of writing and reading enhanced by the book, real or virtual, that you hold in your hands.
Why We Write is an homage, also, to my wonderful agent and my wonderful editor and to all the literary agents, editors, editorial assistants, art directors, book designers, illustrators, copy editors, proofreaders, production managers, compositors, printers, publicists, marketing directors, sales reps, book reviewers, book bloggers, booksellers, and writers of all stripes and polka dots, who continue to adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of their life’s work, and who keep one eye in the rearview mirror and one eye on the road ahead, making books so they might reach the people who want, maybe even need, to read them.
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