Novel Ideas

Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process

Barbara Shoup, Margaret-Love Denman

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780820332796
• eBook ISBN: 9780820346281
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Novel Ideas provides a substantial introduction to the elements of fiction followed by in-depth interviews with successful novelists who speak with candor and insight into the complex process by which a novel is made. This edition includes new and updated interviews as well as writing exercises to enhance its use in the writing classroom.

Dorothy Allison recalls "deliciously self-indulgent" days of writing in her bathrobe, wrapped in misery and exultation; Peter Cameron explains how he made the move from short fiction to the novel with the aid of a music composer's notebook to track the movement of his characters. Writers as different as Ha Jin, Jill McCorkle, Richard Ford, and Michael Chabon describe their unique approaches to their work while consistently affirming the necessity of committing to the hard effort of it while also remaining open to surprise.

Aspiring novelists will find hands-on strategies for beginning, working through, and revising a novel; accomplished novelists will discover new ways to solve the problems they face in process; and serious readers of contemporary fiction will enjoy a glimpse into the way novels are made.

Includes interviews with:Dorothy AllisonLarry BrownPeter CameronMichael ChabonMichael CunninghamRobb Forman DewRichard FordHa JinPatricia HenleyCharles JohnsonWally LambValerie MartinJill McCorkleSena Jeter NaslundLewis NordanSheri ReynoldsS. J. RozanJane SmileyLee SmithTheodore Weesner

The Interviews

Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison is the author of two novels, a collection of stories, a collection of essays, and a memoir. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, she received a BA from Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) and an MA from New School for Social Research. The poverty, incest, and abuse that Allison experienced as a child figure heavily in her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Other honors include Lambda Literary Awards for Best Small Press Book and Best Lesbian Book. Allison is a popular workshop teacher and lecturer. She lives in California with her partner and their son.

Trash, 1988 (stories); Bastard Out of Carolina, 1992; Cavedweller, 1998

How do you approach and sustain work on your novels?

I’ve watched my whole life recircle, alter significantly. I think that part of it’s having a kid. Some of writing is so deliciously self-indulgent: you just live in your bathrobe or your pajamas for days. I work long binge sessions — in a state of misery and sweat, rocking back and forth and wringing my hands, or in exultation. Most of my life, even though I lived with other people, I had my own private space and nobody would go in there. Then I went and had a child. We were living up in Sonoma County and my compromise was to go out to a little building on our property to write. But that didn’t really work.

When you’re finishing a novel, you’ve got all these balls up in the air, and to get them up in the air, keep everything in your head is an intense emotional job. If it is interrupted, you can lose a book. I learned that the hard way: by losing a couple. After some terrific bouts with my own psyche, I developed the practice of going to stay with other people when I was finishing, or I would check into a motel. But I keep feeling I’m doing it wrong. I continually try to be reasonable, to work at reasonable hours while Wolf’s in school, but it doesn’t work that way. I work in the middle of the night the best and I work binges.

There’s nothing reasonable about the process. It’s a completely unreasonable process. It makes me feel like I’m guilty, like I’m sinning against being a good mama — and it’s a big issue for me to be a good mama. When we were about to make Wolf, I went and read everything I could find about what it was like to be a writer and have a kid, because I could set the gay and lesbian movement back a thousand years by raising a fucked-up child. Or not being able to write when I have a kid, because I’m a feminist and I’m arguing that you can do that. Then for years I tried to pretend, “Oh, no problem.” But it’s a terrible problem! I’ve lost whole books, and acknowledging that is difficult.

When you say you lost whole books, what do you mean? Describe that.

Well, there’s the sneaky way and there’s the God-help-me-it’s-gone way. The sneaky way is that you don’t know it’s gone until it’s gone. You have to get enough of it done when the tide is up inside to be able to do the long work of living in the novel. If you don’t get enough of it down, you will lose it, or it will become something else. Then you lose what you were originally going to do and you have to make peace with what you wind up with.

Isn’t there always that gap between what you hope and envision a novel will be and what the novel actually is?

Yes. That’s a given. But having it shift! I started working on Cavedweller when I was still working on Bastard. I started it with Cissy, the young girl. I started with this incredibly angry, resentful, God-help-me-I-don’t-want-to-be-in-the-South kind of little girl. I was pretty clear that I wanted to write about sisters who really have every reason to hate each other and who make a kind of accommodation. I started it before I had Wolf, and I wrote it mean, really mean. I knew that her mother was a drunk, that she’d been a rock-and-roller and was just a terrible mother. I knew she was going to be trying to be a good mother; that was going to be what the story was about. I wanted the background of this woman to be someone who really hated herself and couldn’t forgive herself. But she was minor, except for the violence.

Then I had this kid. Instead of writing about this girl, I was being a mom. There was a year in which I couldn’t work at all, and I lost the book. I just lost it. And when I went back to it, I wasn’t Cissy anymore. I was Delia. I was dealing with all my guilt. Was I going to be a good mama? Probably not. There’s no genetic tendency toward good motherhood here. There’s no social construction. I’m going to have to do this by hand. Then I started writing Delia, writing out of being this woman who was so ashamed of herself that she is basically willing to wall herself alive to do something different. And it’s a different book. It’s not a bad book, but totally different.

What do you think the first book would have been like? How might it have been better?

Now I can tell you I don’t know if it would have been better. But it would have been different. It would’ve been entirely Cissy’s book. Then I wrote all the Delia stuff, and I lost that book, because I had to run out and earn some money quick. I had six or seven months that I could not get to the manuscript at all, and when I went back I wasn’t either one of them. So instead of writing a Delia book or a Cissy book, it was much more interesting to me to be moving among these four females.

What was it like to go from the really focused first-person point of view in Bastard to multiple points of view in Cavedweller?

The other thing that happened, which is also very hard to talk about: you become an enormous success. This is very dangerous for writers. Everybody treats you like you’re God on earth for about a minute and a half. And the other thing that happened to me — do you know the concept of the dancing dog? It ain’t that the dog dances good, it’s that the dog dances at all. So here comes this lesbian, working-class piece of shit, and she writes a novel that comes in second for the National Book Award. I’d go around and I’d do these interviews and I’m a feminist and I’m a lesbian mom. I have a new baby and they’re all treating me like, “God must have lit on your shoulder, whispered in your ear.” Meanwhile, they’re treating me like this dog. “Oh, you’re kind of just a freak of nature, ain’t you?” So then I go back to Cavedweller, which, originally, had been written in first person, in Cissy’s voice. Then I had shifted to Delia in third person. I thought, “They think I’m a dancing dog. I’ve got to prove something.” So I wrote the whole damn book in third person and went into multiple narrators so that I could prove that I could do it. Which is a damn poor way to construct a novel.

Unless it works.

Yeah. But it took me two years longer than it should’ve, though I learned more doing it than I would’ve learned, maybe, doing the other thing. But instead of the story telling me how it’s supposed to be written, which, theoretically, is how it’s supposed to happen, the world made me write it the way I wrote it. It’s embarrassing. Why is it not a first-person narrative? Well, because I had to prove I could write a third-person narrative. I had to prove I could shift point of view. I had to prove I could do these different characters and make you believe they were different.

And then, part of it was also having a boy. This tender little baby boy. I’m a mean woman when I write. I write terrible things. But I had this tender-hearted, tender-skinned little boy, who, in the course of my writing this novel, went from an infant to four. I learned what kids were, which I’d never known. In my mind, the way the book would always go was that I would take Delia back, I would raise Cissy in Cairo. I would raise this little girl that was growing up to be a lesbian, but had never heard the word. I wanted to get that down and show what that was like. And I wanted to write this woman who was bargaining for redemption, bargaining with every ounce, and doing a damn good job. I was going to kill one of the girls, because I believe that you can’t bargain for redemption. I killed all three of them, but it wouldn’t work. Every time I would try to kill one of the girls, it was cold on the page. It felt cold. I think it was Wolf. I think, because of him, I couldn’t kill one of Delia’s girls. So there you go. The narrative would’ve been stronger if I could’ve murdered one of them. If you look at the construction of novels — climaxes and crises and how characters change — the simplest and most straightforward way would have been to do that. What I finally had to accept was that I couldn’t do it. Then I thought, “There are very damn few books that show you what it’s really like to raise children and set them loose in the world.” In fact, at the end of the book, she loses all of them.

Your characters are clearly very real to you. How do they first appear to you? How does a novel begin?

Somebody starts talking in my head. That’s always what it is for me. There are these visual images. I see somebody, see something. But for it to really start, somebody has to start talking. And for it to really work, several people have to start talking. If they start arguing, we’re going to no clothes and no showers for a few days.

Once the characters start talking, how does the story gather and form?

The original stuff with Cissy was drunk on glory. I had this teenage girl, who never felt right in the world. Then she went down in a hole in the ground and felt like she had found her place.

So her interest in caving, the cave scenes came first.

Yes. I had this weird experience at the Delaware Water Gap when I was, like, twenty. I went with a girlfriend. We drove up through the Delaware Water Gap and we had to stop. I got out of the car and I felt something weird. Really weird. I’ve gone back there many times. Every time I go back, I feel like I’ve been there before. Something happens. That’s what I wrote for Cissy; but for her it was, “I’ve come home.” Then she started talking. She hated her mama. She felt her mama was entirely responsible for everything that had happened. She hated the South. She hated these small-minded, evil people that treated her like dirt. She felt like she was an alien, like she’d been dropped on this planet. She had to have been. She couldn’t possibly have been born to this crazy mother and these crazy people that she despised. She was an obnoxious teenage girl. An adolescent girl who’s beginning to be fully in her body in that way that happens to you when, suddenly, you have to stay up all night and jerk off. You have to dream dreams. The whole world has opened up and you’re magical and terrified. That voice was really strong. So I wrote all that stuff.

How do you come to plot? What is plot, by your definition?

Something happens. Something real.

Do your characters unveil the plot for you?

I see the person and what happens is implicit in the person. You see Bone. You know the way she’s dressed, so you know she’s poor. And you know the way she looks at you, so you know she’s suspicious and careful.

Was it Bone’s voice that started Bastard?

Oh God, it took a long time to get Bone’s voice right.

How did you go about doing that?

I kept writing it over and over. I’d pare it down. It kept being too wise. It took me years to figure out what was bad about it, and then it took me years to figure out how to make her. You had to fall in love with her. You had to fall in love with her immediately, so she had to be this really strong but brittle and completely wrong-headed little girl. And she had to be a little girl. I did, like, thirty-eight drafts. I counted at one point. The first half of them were all just too smart. She knew too much, and to make the story work she had to not quite know.

But the reader had to know.

It was a tricky thing to make that work. I kept throwing stuff out and paring it down. I had to let her be wrong on the page, passionately wrong on the page. When she hates herself, you’ve got to absolutely believe that. At the same time, the reader’s got to know that she’s absolutely wrong. She’s not evil, she’s not a monster. This son of a bitch is fucking up this child, and this mother that she adores is failing her completely. You’ve got to believe that Bone genuinely loves them and genuinely feels herself guilty and responsible. It required paring down and paring down. I had to eliminate every explanation — and that’s the hard part. You keep wanting to explain.

How long did it take you to write that book?

To really write it, it took about three years. But it took me a decade to figure out how to write it. And I went a little crazy writing it. That was the other problem. You know, I’m always teaching and I’m always saying, “You’ve got to work up a sweat, you’ve got to go where your fear is.” But the thing that I leave out is that you will go crazy when you do this.

Is that because so much of what you’re working with is autobiographical? Or would it be like that anyway?

People can’t tell the difference. There’s a wonderful Doctorow quote. As soon as I saw it, I put it up on the wall because it’s completely true. He said, “Writing erases memory.” You take autobiographical material and begin to work it into story, the story becomes what you remember. You lose your real memory. It’s why I did Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, to try to figure out — “Now, wait a minute, did this really happen?” It took me a long while to sort it all out. In the writing, in the making of a character, if you use real incidents, your autobiographical reality becomes unreal and the story becomes stronger. Eventually, the real is gone. You can’t say anymore what did and did not happen. It’s very embarrassing. And tenuous. Especially when you’re talking about sexual abuse, which is always defensive and problematic in this culture. I have finessed it on many occasions, because I don’t want to have to tell all that stuff.

Near the end of Cavedweller, Dede tries to get Delia to talk about her life. She says, “We don’t talk,” and Delia responds, “We’re not the type.” So often writers are people who come from families that don’t or can’t talk to each other.

It makes a good writer. There’s a wonderful science fiction story I read when I was a teenager about making geniuses. It’s about this horrific family. There’s this little boy who’s four or five. All the cupboards are locked and they’re always yelling at him. They won’t explain anything. But what they are making is a child who is desperate to know, and curious as hell. It’s all deliberate. By the end of the story, you realize that these parents are literally constructing a kid who will puzzle out things and who will grow up and make them rich. It was a terrible, wonderful story, and I kept thinking, “That’s it!” I was raised in this hellhole, but it made me this person who wants to understand and explain and create a reason to love and live. Well, this is how you do it.

It has interesting implications about talent. What do you think talent is?

I don’t know. I really, genuinely don’t know. I do know when I see it, and I know that it’s a tragedy. You get these young people who want so badly to write. They’re desperate and they’re hungry and they’re willing to work. You can work with them and work with them and eventually, maybe, they’ll begin to have something. Then a kid will walk in. Doesn’t care, won’t work, but they’ve just got it. They’ve got voice and they’ve got a story to tell. There’s no justice in it. But even that doesn’t mean they’ll be writers. Sometimes they can’t shape it, they can’t cut it down, they can’t step back and work it.

So what is talent? I don’t know. Talent is magic. Talent is the ability to make words sing on the page. But to actually have something of worth, you have to have both talent and perseverance. You have to have the ability to step back, get a little distance from the narrative, especially if you’re aiming your narrative as an act of revenge or toward the acquisition of justice — about which I have very complicated feelings. I’ve had students who were so gifted that they’ll never be writers. It’s too damn easy. And then I’ve had students who’ve had just a little bit of talent, but who would work their butts off and keep rewriting and rewriting and take me seriously when I say thirty, forty drafts.

So in a sense, hunger is a kind of talent also.

Yes, and to see it as work. To be willing to go back and do it over and over. Also, there is an ear. My partner can play any brass instrument; it’s genetic. In fact, the whole family — they’re all musicians, opera singers, composers. That’s what they do. That’s the thing that comes down. Wolf, at three, picked up a trumpet and started playing it. There’s talent; it’s innate. But I’ve watched Alix develop her embouchure. It is entirely about the muscles in your mouth and lips and being willing to go on even though it hurts. I’ve seen her bleed to get better and better. I’ve watched her reacquire the embouchure. She played clarinet and all these instruments when she was in high school, and then didn’t do it for twenty years. Then she went back. At first she could go for three minutes, then she could go for six minutes. Now she can go do concerts and play for two or three hours. But she has to keep working it. Writing is exactly the same. You can come in with talent, but then you have to develop your embouchure. It’s purely about seeing it as an instrument that you use. The more you use it, the better you get. It’s a muscle of the mind. You have to develop it, and you can fuck it up.

What happens when perseverance fails you? Is there such a thing as writer’s block? Have you ever exper...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Writing a Novel
• The Interviews
• Writing Exercises