Why We Write (17 page)

“I
write because the world is an imperfect place, and we behave in an imperfect manner…,” Terry McMillan told the
Writer
magazine in 2001. “Writing is about the only way (besides praying) that allows me to be compassionate toward folks who, in real life, I’m probably not that sympathetic toward.”

By exposing the realities of African American women’s lives to mainstream (which is to say, white) readers, Terry McMillan has written books that foster the compassion she seeks. Her 1992 novel,
Waiting to Exhale
, sold more than seven hundred thousand hardcover copies in its first year. By the time the movie version appeared in 1995, it had sold 2.5 million copies in paperback, thereby transforming the way the publishing industry
thought about African American fiction. By kicking open the door that had been shut to African American writers, Terry McMillan proved that black women would buy books, if only they were offered books that reflected their real lives.

Terry McMillan

Why I write

I didn’t choose to write. It was something that just happened to me.

I write to shed dead skin and to explore why people do the things that we do to each other and to ourselves.

Writing feels like being in love. I am consumed by the characters I’m writing about. I become them. I lose all sense of my own reality when I’m writing a novel. It’s refreshing, like running a few miles, the way you feel when you finish.

I don’t write about stupid people. I don’t write about victims. I write about people who are victimized, but they’re not going to
stay down. That said, I deliberately choose characters I’m not quite sympathetic toward, or that I truly do not understand.

Years ago I went to McDonald’s and got an employment application. For every character I create, I fill one out. I use an astrology book to pick their birthdays based on the characteristics I want them to have. I create a five-page profile for every one of my characters so I know everything about them: what size shoes they wear, if their hair is dyed, if they bounce checks, have allergies, what they hate about themselves, what they wish they could change, if they pay their bills on time.

My readers might be surprised to know how much research I do. The novel I’m writing now is about grandparents becoming parents. I’m reading all kinds of books on that topic. I’m interviewing people who work for all these government agencies. When people read it, they won’t know what went into it. They’ll think it rolled off my tongue.

A novel is like life: it’s a series of knots, and the quality of your life is determined by how you unravel them. I give my characters something to tackle. I let them tell me what the biggest challenge they’re facing is, what they’re most afraid of, and I make them face that challenge in my story. It’s made me a more compassionate person. I start out not liking my characters and I end up caring for them. I have to step out of my own comfort zone to tell their stories.

I cry a lot when I write. In
Day Late
, when my character’s mother died—oh my God, I was
messed up
. She’d left a purse in her closet with letters to her kids in it. When I was writing those letters I was a wreck. I got so many fan letters about those letters, saying they’d always wanted to get a letter like that from their mom.

I jump up in the morning. I can’t wait to go see what my characters are going to do today. I get wired up. When my character falls in love, I’m in love. When somebody’s heart is broken, or feels jubilation, I feel all of that. When I finish working for the day, I’m spent. I go for a walk or go do my errands, and I walk into the grocery store and it’s like everything is illuminated. Nobody knows where I just came from. Nobody knows that I just left New York or Las Vegas. It’s like I just walked out of one movie and into another one.

How it happened

When I was eighteen I was taking night classes at a junior college in L.A. I broke up with this guy and as a result, I wrote a poem. I wrote it on a steno pad, because I was this little stenographer for the Prudential Insurance Company during the day. Writing that poem kind of scared me. It was like I was possessed. I’d never written a poem in my life. I don’t even remember
reading
a poem before then.

One afternoon, a friend of my roommate’s read my poem. He wanted to know if he could publish it in the LACC (Los Angeles City College) literary journal. I said,
“Publish it?”
And he did. From that day forward, if a leaf fell off of a tree, I thought, There’s a poem in that. I was just a little poem-writing fool.

I ended up going to UC Berkeley, majoring in sociology. I wanted to be a social worker because I knew the world was a horrible place, and I thought maybe I could help. Back then, if you were, like, a little Negro, they gave you money to go to Berkeley. Anyway, we started a black newspaper called
Black
Thoughts
, and they published some of my poems. I was writing editorials for the
Daily Californian
as well.

Word got around, and other university newspapers, especially the black ones, started publishing my poems. To this day I still have those poems in the cardboard suitcase I bought for two dollars and ninety-nine cents in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1968. And you know what? Some of them aren’t really that bad!

In my junior year, when it came time for me to declare a major, I told my adviser I was declaring sociology. He asked me why; he said, “I’ve been reading your articles, and I can’t understand why you’re not focusing on writing.”

My mouth fell open. I could not believe it. This guy was not black, either. I explained to him that writing was a hobby, that you can’t make a living at it. He told me to go home and think about it, so I did. I realized he was right, so I switched my major.

I took a fiction writing class from Ishmael Reed. Ishmael read my first short story and he said, “Terry, you have a very strong voice.” People were always saying I had an unusually deep voice for a woman, so I thought that’s what he meant. I didn’t know
anything
back then. Nada.

After Berkeley I moved to New York, and I got into the Harlem Writers Guild—kind of like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but for black folks. I read them a story I’d written in Ishmael’s class, called “Mama Take Another Step.”

When I finished, this novelist, Doris Jean Austin, said, “This is not a short story, sweetie. It’s a novel.” Everyone was nodding. I didn’t know there was no market for short stories, but they did. By the end of that session, I’d written the opening chapter of my very first book,
Mama.

My life changed, and I didn’t like it

In 1987, I got a seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance for
Mama
, and it sold out of its first printing before it hit the bookstores. I got seventy-five thousand dollars for
Disappearing Acts.
Those two didn’t get on the
New York Times
list, but they sold a lot of copies. So I got a quarter of a million dollars for
Waiting to Exhale.

In 1992,
Waiting to Exhale
debuted at number six on the
New York Times
list. I couldn’t believe it. While I was on my sixteen-city tour for
Exhale
, my agent held an auction for the paperback rights. I was in Atlanta when my agent called me. She said, “Terry, you won’t believe this. It’s up to one point two.” I was, like, “One point two
what
?”

A half hour later she called back and said, “Oprah wants you on her show.” Oprah had never had a book author before. From that point forward a lot of things changed very quickly. I moved from Arizona to the Bay Area. From
People
magazine on down, everybody wanted interviews. I looked up and there was
Time
magazine, sitting in my living room. It was overwhelming.

Then this whole business that
black people do read
started coming to the fore. I resented that. I said, Black people have always read. There just hasn’t been a contemporary novel that appealed to us in such high numbers. But guess what: there are a lot of white people buying my book. And guess what else: we’ve been reading a lot of books by white authors. Do the damn math.

When all this first happened, my life changed completely. I didn’t like it. People started coming at me from every angle,
asking for money. Readers wrote me their sad stories. I had long-lost relatives suddenly appear. I got so depressed, I went to see a shrink.

It didn’t change things for just me

It didn’t change my writing to be successful. I still told the stories that I wanted to tell. The thing is, the critics hate you when you become commercially successful. They look for stuff to find wrong. When I was writing
Getting to Happy
, I knew the book was not going to be well received. I didn’t care. If the people reading the book like it, if it moves them, that’s what matters to me.

But when all the hoopla happened after
Waiting to Exhale
, the publishers started giving lots of young black writers mega advances, thinking they could get themselves the next Terry McMillan. For a minute there, a lot of these writers were being paid these big advances. They were signing these two- and three-book deals for all this money, and they didn’t understand that if your first book does okay, your second does mediocre, you’re not going on tour for your third book. They didn’t realize that if the publisher isn’t recouping its investment, you’re history.

When their books didn’t sell the way
Waiting to Exhale
did, when they didn’t earn back those advances, the publishers started punishing them by not giving them new contracts. Some of them had million-dollar deals. Now they’ve been kicked to the curb. They can’t get a contract to save their lives. I know a lot of them. It’s really sad. Really sad.

Racist, simple as that

There are a lot of white writers who get decent advances, and sell a decent amount of books, and they just keep going. Their publishers are willing to support them, regardless. They’re going to promote them anyway. These writers run around the country, getting big speaking fees. You don’t have a lot of black writers doing that. It’s racist, simple as that.

I know some black writers—Iyanla Vanzant, for one—who got a lot of money, and their books did well, but not the way the publishers expected them to. Never mind that the publisher didn’t promote them, didn’t send them on mega book tours, any of that. They were relying on
my
audience to run out and buy those other black writers’ books.

It even affects me. I have seventy pages of a new novel, and I’m being told, “It seems a little dark. It doesn’t have your trademark humor in it.”

I said, “Dark? Really?”

You know what? White people write depressing-ass books all the time. The more depressing it is, the deeper they think it is. Take
The Glass Castle
. Or Kathryn Stockett—she can write a book about black maids in the sixties. Talk about dark! What was so uplifting about that? And yet still it’s been on the
New York Times
for a hundred weeks. But when we tell our
own
stories, it’s either depressing or white people aren’t interested.

The thing that pisses me off more than anything is that when writers, mostly white writers, use language that’s so lofty, or they write about characters who would be inconsequential in real life, they make their characters’ lives so important. Crossing the street is a big deal. What’s in their cabinet is a big deal.
Take Jonathan Franzen.
Please.
After thirty pages, I was thinking,
Who cares?

I hate labels of all kinds

The woman who came to my house for
Time
magazine spent more time talking about my house than she did on my books. She wouldn’t have done that if I were a wealthy white writer. She was shocked that I have good taste.