Why We Write

by Meredith Maran

  I can’t blame publishers; it’s just a part of my personality. I want to please people. I feel like I should always be the good girl. I haven’t developed a diva routine in which I say, “Hey, you should give me a lot of money and I get to be as difficult as I want to be.”

  The fact is that I got multiple extensions because Rin Tin Tin was proving to be much bigger, more complicated, and much harder to do because I couldn’t travel hither and yon easily to do the research I needed to do. And I didn’t feel I could reveal my vulnerability to my publisher.

  I got two extensions for one year each, because I was wary about asking for a much, much longer extension, which was what I needed, because I thought it would indicate that I was having trouble. So then I was late, and then late again.

  In a way it was the best thing that ever happened to me. When I asked for yet another extension, my publisher balked, and it became clear that they were no longer that invested in my book. So I got out of the contract and went to another publisher that really embraced the book and understood my need for more time. I took a loss on my advance, but I was philosophical about it. Advances are just that—advances. They’re not payments. They’re not awards.

  It’s a job—and an art form

  It makes me cringe to call myself an artist. Even if it’s true.

  I’m making art of a kind. At the same time I’m very pragmatic. I don’t treat myself as this precious flower. The fact that writing is a job doesn’t undercut the fact that it’s also an art.

  When I was first getting started, I thought, What’s important for me is to write as much as possible. If that means writing for fashion magazines, I’ll do it, even if that isn’t where I dreamed of writing, but I’ll do a good job of it. I had friends who said, “Ew, you’re writing for women’s magazines? I’d never write for that magazine.” I thought, How nice for you to be so picky. And anyway, I’m going to write a great piece wherever it runs.

  I think the content is more important than the context. And I figured that if I wrote well, eventually I’d get to pick where I got published. I can write a really good story for Vogue or Mademoiselle or anywhere, and I can say with pride that it’s not all about the packaging surrounding the story: my pride is about the story itself. That’s a pretty practical attitude, and I’m glad I have it. It’s served me well. That’s my attitude about life, too.

  Susan Orlean’s Wisdom for Writers

  You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

  You should read as much as possible. That’s the best way to learn how to write.

  You have to appreciate the spiritual component of having an opportunity to do something as wondrous as writing. You should be practical and smart and you should have a good agent and you should work really, really hard. But you should also be filled with awe and gratitude about this amazing way to be in the world.

  Don’t be ashamed to use the thesaurus. I could spend all day reading Roget’s! There’s nothing better when you’re in a hurry and you need the right word right now.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ann Patchett

  The news of Anders Eckman’s death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope. Who even knew they still made such things? This single sheet had traveled from Brazil to Minnesota to mark the passing of a man, a breath of tissue so insubstantial that only the stamp seemed to anchor it to this world….

  —Opening lines, State of Wonder, 2011

  Whether she’s stitching silver threads between an opera star, a businessman, and a band of terrorists; bringing a magician out of the deepest possible closet; or shining a bright light on race, class, and family, Ann Patchett is a master of the page. In her novels, in her searing 2004 memoir, and in the 2006 commencement address she delivered to her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College—a speech that gathered so much notice, it grew into a book called What Now?—Patchett writes with pure poetry, and pure ferocity.

  “‘What now?’ represents our excitement and our future,” she wrote in that book, “the very vitality of life.” The question represents the essence of Ann Patchett, the human being and the bestselling author as well.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: December 2, 1963

  Born and raised: Born in Los Angeles, California; raised in Nashville, Tennessee

  Current home: Nashville, Tennessee

  Love life: Married to Dr. Karl VanDevender

  Schooling: Sarah Lawrence College; Iowa Writers’ Workshop

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; PEN/Faulkner Award; the Orange Prize; Book Sense Book of the Year; finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award

  Notable notes:

  • In November 2011, following the closure of two Nashville bookstores, Ann Patchett and her business partner, Karen Hayes, opened Parnassus Books.

  • Patchett’s parents divorced when she was six, and her mother moved her and her sister from L.A. to Nashville. She credits her start as a writer to her need to write letters to her adored dad.

  • A confirmed homebody, Patchett once wrote, “Home is the stable window that opens out into the imagination.”

  • Patchett’s closest friend is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.

  Website: www.annpatchett.com

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  Taft, 1994

  The Patron Saint of Liars, 1992

  Bel Canto, 2001

  The Magician’s Assistant, 1997

  Run, 2007

  State of Wonder, 2011

  Nonfiction

  Truth & Beauty, 2004

  What Now?, 2008

  Ann Patchett

  Why I write

  I write because I swear to God I don’t know how to do anything else.

  From the time I was a little child, I knew that writing was going to be my life. I never wavered from it. Making that decision very young made my life streamlined. I put all my eggs in one basket, which has resulted in a great number of eggs.

  I don’t like to look back. That’s a big part of my psychology. It’s not because of lurking trauma. I don’t particularly look forward, either. I’m all about the now. But writing gives my life a narrative structure: “Oh God, this happened and then I did that…I shouldn’t have done that, but then I did this.”

  You know that old cliché, “I hate to write but I love to have written”? That pretty much sums it up. How I feel about writing depends entirely on what I’m working on. At the moment I’m writing an essay about marriage. It’s excruciating. I feel like I’m sitting on the asphalt on a pitch-black interstate, typing madly, while the eighteen-wheelers are bearing down on me. Every minute, I’m about to be squashed.

  Fiction is different, because in fiction you’re just trying to find what happened. I always feel I’m squinting at something in a snowstorm very far away, trying so hard to make it out.

  What if I didn’t write? What would happen to me? I’d get to read all these books that are stacked up all over my office, that’s what! I said to my husband last night: I really just want to take a month off and read.

  I love to write. I think of it as a privilege and a pleasure. But if something happened and I never wrote again, I’d be fine. It would be a less interesting life—less dimensional—but it wouldn’t be an unhappy life. I was given the gift of very good brain chemistry. I’ve had hard times in my life, but I’ve never had depression.

  Luddite-ish

  Can you believe it? I still write in WordPerfect. Why? Certainly not because I’m superstitious. I’m passionately against superstitions, talismans, ritual, routines. When you’re a writer, it’s so easy to become a freak.

  Everything I have is in WordPerfect, and I can’t bear to contemplate changing that. It’s like being on a train: it’s too late to get off fifteen stops ago. I just got
an iPad. I haven’t learned to use it yet, but the first thing I did was to download the WordPerfect app.

  Nondesperate housewife

  I think it might surprise my readers to know that I’m a housewife in Nashville, and I’ve got a really dull life. People imagine that I live so glamorously. The truth is, I stay home as much as I possibly can. And when I am home, I do the laundry, I keep house. I’m like a dream wife because I make all this money and I make a really good dinner every night and everything’s clean. I iron all the handkerchiefs. I’m extraordinarily lucky to have a happy, happy marriage.

  People ask me, “If you could go anywhere you want to go, where would you be?” And I say, “Home.” I don’t go to artists’ colonies to write now that I’m older. I want my work to be at home. I don’t ever want to tell myself that I work better someplace else. I want to work the very best at home.

  Fiction and nonfiction

  I was a contributing editor at Bridal Guide for one year, and a freelance writer for years after that, starting when I was twenty-two. Since then I’ve had a very healthy career as a magazine writer and an essayist. I know what it means to write for money, to write for an audience. I just love writing essays, but I do a lot less of it now because there are fewer magazines. I enjoy it, but I’d never sit down and write an essay unless someone asks me to do it.

  I figured out very early that I could make as much money writing magazine articles as I could teaching, and that magazine writing is infinitely easier. I’m a fiction writer. Do I want to spend three months writing a piece on global warming for the Nation for seven hundred dollars or a piece on shoes for Vogue that takes three hours and pays me three thousand dollars? You don’t have to ask me twice. I hardly ever say no to a magazine assignment. I’m a novelist, so it’s fun to do something I’ll be done with in one night. When I’m holed up for years at a time writing a novel, my friends can see my name in a magazine and know that I’m not dead.

  Just last week I wrote a piece for a catalog that sells “tools for writers.” They’re doing a little book to sell in their catalog about writers and their talismans. They asked me to write eight hundred words, for which they’d give me a two-hundred-dollar gift card. I thought, turning them down will take more energy than writing it. So I wrote a piece about how much I like having my dog around while I write.

  Nonfiction is totally different from fiction. If you’re writing an eight-hundred-page book about Chihuahuas, you need to make sure that no one else will turn in their book about Chihuahuas before you do. That’s not really a problem with a novel.

  When I was halfway through Truth & Beauty, there were inklings that someone else might be writing about my friend Lucy Grealy. So I sold the book before it was finished, to make sure I had a publisher who was committed. But I was going to write that book whether a publisher bought it or not.

  As far as fiction is concerned, I’ve never sold a book before I finished it and I never will. I write fiction entirely for myself. I write the book I want to read. It’s the story in my head that I can’t find in an existing book. The commercial success, or potential commercial success, of a book has no impact on me.

  Let’s remember: writing a book isn’t curing cancer. This is literary fiction. It doesn’t add up to a hill of beans. If I write something terrible or weird, fine. If I turn in a book and my publisher says, “Ann, this is not for us,” if I don’t agree with their critique, I’ll go to another publisher rather than make changes.

  When I finished Bel Canto, an editor who read it said, “I like the book, but there are some things I’ll take out. That Russian character is dreadful.” I said, “I really respect your opinion. Good luck with your life.” Thank God I didn’t have a contract with that editor, so I didn’t have to take the Russian out. I never want to feel like an indentured servant to a publisher.

  Lucky

  I say all the time that I had the last great writing career, because I was allowed to have it. I feel very, very fortunate that I got on board when I did.

  I published my first book at twenty-seven, at a time when a publisher was willing to stick by their authors, even the ones who didn’t sell a million copies. In my early days, if you looked up the definition of a midlist author, you’d find a picture of me. But I kept writing books, and they kept giving me advances. I got forty-five thousand dollars for Patron Saint, fifty thousand dollars for Taft, fifty-five thousand for The Magician’s Assistant. Writing was my job, and my advances went up slowly and steadily, like getting raises at the office.

  I don’t know who gets forty-five thousand dollars for a first novel anymore. Everyone thinks Liz Gilbert had a huge hit with her first book, but Eat, Pray, Love was her fourth book! Before that she published a beautiful collection of short stories, a novel, and a biography. No one realizes she wasn’t an overnight success.

  Nowadays, publishers look at your sales numbers, and if you’re not coming in with enough, you’re through. I was lucky it was my fourth book that was a big hit. The success didn’t mess with my mind the way it might have if I’d had that kind of hit with my first.

  Orange you glad?

  My happiest moment as a writer was winning the Orange Prize, in part because I’d lost it for Magician’s Assistant. At the time that I lost, I thought it was fine because it’s such a pleasure to be nominated, and because Carol Shields won, and she should have won. But when I won I thought, “Oh my God, this is really better. This is a lot more fun than losing.”

  My father, stepmother, husband, and my English cousins came to London for the ceremony at the London Opera House. It was such a glamorous night, really over-the-top gorgeousness. My psychological makeup is such that it’s very hard for me to access the moment, especially a moment in which I’m winning. But I felt that moment and it felt great.

  Happiness is a good hotel

  As my books have started selling in large numbers, here’s what’s changed in my career: I get better hotel rooms.

  When I started, I drove my book tours. I had a budget. I had to get to twenty-three cities for three thousand dollars. I drove every night till I was falling asleep.

  That’s changed. I have the most amazing publicist. Say what you want about your editor and your agent, but it’s your publicist who makes you or breaks you. My publicist has been with me from Bel Canto. Did my career get a whole lot better because my publicist got a whole lot better? That seems really likely.

  When my last editor got a job at a different publishing house, she wanted me to come with her. I told her, “You know there’s no way in the world I’d leave my publicist. You’ll have to get her to switch houses, too.” My publicist is the architect of my life. She’ll call me and say, “They want you to do this thing in Wisconsin.” I say, “If you want me to do it, I’ll do it.” There’s nothing more important to me than my time, and she’s in charge of my time.

  I have a friend whose book is coming out soon. It’s her first time with a new publishing house, and the publicist is abominable. I’ve been trying not to tell her, “You’re sunk. If your publicist is this bad, it’s over.”

  Truth and books

  I’m a very truth-oriented person. I know that as I’m writing, I’m going to keep telling myself to tell the truth about everything. At the same time, I am such a good girl that I don’t want to write things that might hurt or upset anyone. I wouldn’t have written Truth & Beauty if Lucy hadn’t died.

  But now I’m pushing fifty. It’s time to be able to write about anything I want to write about. I don’t want to make allowances as I’m going along, trying to save this person or that person’s feelings.

  Anyway, the truth is such a subjective thing. While I was writing about Lucy, a friend of hers called and asked me how the book was coming along. I told her I was up to the part about Lucy getting breast implants. Her friend said, “That was a huge secret. Lucy didn’t want anyone to know.” I said, “What? Lucy was so proud of those breasts. She showed them to everyone.”

  So I called an
other friend and asked her what to do. She told me, “The first time I ever met Lucy, she had her shirt off. She was Xeroxing her breasts in the Radcliffe office.” There you have it: different people, different truths.

  Ann Patchett’s Wisdom for Writers

  Don’t be afraid to make money writing the kinds of things you’d never write for the fun of it. There’s no shame in earning a living, and whatever you write, even catalog copy or fluffy magazine articles, makes you a better writer.

  Writing about my happy marriage is a lot more difficult, a lot more intimate, than writing about the unhappy stuff. But it’s my story to tell, and if I think I can learn something important, or share something important, I’ll tell it.

  Staying focused, sitting at your desk, is your number one job as a writer. There’s always something else to do. Don’t do it! Remember, time applied equals work completed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jodi Picoult

  One sunny, crisp Saturday in September when I was seven years old, I watched my father drop dead. I was playing with my favorite doll on the stone wall that bordered our driveway while he mowed the lawn. One minute he was mowing, and the next, he was facefirst in the grass as the mower propelled itself in slow motion down the hill of our backyard.

  —Opening lines, Sing You Home, 2011

  Jodi Picoult has published twenty novels in the past twenty years, the past six of them blockbuster bestsellers. Four of her books were made into Lifetime movies; one was made into a feature film. She’s been a regular on the New York Times bestseller list ever since, and her books have sold more than fourteen million copies worldwide.

  Picoult’s novels have connected with her readers in a way that is every publisher’s dream and every author’s. From school shootings to organ donation to autism, her books have connected the hottest social issues of our time to the deepest, most universal emotional dilemmas.