Why We Write (20 page)

Genre ridiculousness

There’s a hierarchy of writers in the publishing industry. There’s so-called popular fiction, or commercial fiction, and then there’s “literary fiction.” People who like commercial fiction say, “Walter Mosley is a literary writer, so we don’t have to pay attention to what he writes.” The literary people say, “He’s a popular writer, so we don’t have to pay attention to him.”

The terms are ridiculous. I don’t care what you call me. The question is, is it a good book, or is it not a good book? Either
one you want to do is fine with me. It takes a certain kind of talent to write a mystery, to imagine in that way.

Year after year I’m invited to host a table at literary awards ceremonies, but I’ve never been nominated. It’s silly for me to be trying to raise money for you when your system of recognizing literature doesn’t recognize me.

There’s a whole group of “literary writers” who think they’re the important writers and they hate “commercial writers.” Well, guess what? There’s not an important writer in history who wasn’t a commercial writer. Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Dumas, Gogol, Dostoyevsky—every major writer in every genre was a popular writer. Melville’s thing was writing adventures, but he was writing this deep stuff. He didn’t tell people not to call them adventures. Melville wrote genre books, but he was a great, great writer. You don’t have to categorize his books to love his books. That’s the power of gorgeous writing.

If you write a nonfiction book about undocumented laborers in central California, the only people who are going to read it are people who already care about the issue. If you write a mystery about a Chicano with questionable papers who goes to kill the person who brought him across the border, you get all kinds of people reading that. People come to the genre because of something outside the story. But the story’s still there. They’ll get it.

I was talking to a “literary writer” one day. She said, rather proudly, “Not everybody can understand my fiction.” I said, “That’s not good. Your fiction should be accessible to everybody. As many people as possible should be able to read it and get something from it. If you wrote something that only ten people in the world can read, you didn’t need to write that book.”

What you need to do is have an even playing field where
you just talk about books: what do you think about this novel or short story? But nobody does that. In the end, what you can tell about the writing is in the writing itself.

The mysterious heart

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it’s like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that’s still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.

A
s a writer, what do you do and where do you go, once Meryl Streep has been Oscar nominated for portraying you in the movie adaptation of your book—or, in Susan Orleans’s case, the movie,
Adaptation
, of her book? Susan Orlean decided to do everything and go everywhere.

Susan Orlean is an exceptionally wide-ranging, voraciously curious journalist with an exceptionally wide-ranging career. A staff writer and blogger for the
New Yorker
since 1992, she’s written articles about nearly everything—chickens, dieting, dogs, surfer girls, Jean Paul Gaultier, Bill Blass, a Harlem high school basketball star, Tonya Harding, taxidermy—for
Rolling Stone
,
Vogue
,
Esquire
,
Spy
, and a host of other publications.

“I always dreamed of being a writer,” Orlean explains on her website, “but had no idea of how you went about being a writer—or at least the kind of writer I wanted to be: someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events.”

A true American treasure, Orlean lives an adventure-filled writer’s life. In doing so, she’s created a definition of journalism that didn’t exist before and remains unique to her. One suspects that if she were other-gendered, there would be a name for it, like Gonzo journalism or New Journalism. “Sue Journalism,” perhaps.

Susan Orlean

Why I write

Writing is all I’ve ever done. I don’t think of it as a profession. It’s just who I am.

I write because I love learning about the world. I love telling stories, and I love the actual experience of making sentences. From age five or six, the earliest time I could imagine myself as a person with a job, being a writer was all I imagined I’d be. I’d fallen in love with the idea of stories—telling them and hearing them. I was enchanted. The only problem was that when it came time to leave college and have a profession, I thought, Jesus, how do you make it a job?

My parents wanted me to go to law school. I grudgingly proposed that I would, if they’d let me first take a year off after finishing college. During that year I managed—very unexpectedly—to land a job as a writer at a little magazine in Portland. I had gone to the interview for the job with no clips, no experience, but a lot of passion; in fact, I basically announced, “You just have to hire me. This is all I want to do. Just this.” Frankly, hiring me was a very good decision for them, because wanting to be a writer is a huge percentage of what makes you be one. You have to want to do it really badly. You have to feel that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. That’s how it was for me. From the moment I got that job, being a writer was utterly and totally a fit I’d never experienced anywhere else. I didn’t have training. I learned on the job and from a series of very good editors. I think my pure desire made up for my complete lack of knowledge and experience.

True to my promise, one year later I took my law boards. But then I informed my parents that I wasn’t going to law school. My father was furious with me. I think he was worried about it being a real gamble as a way to make a living. Even after my first book came out, he was still suggesting that it wasn’t too late to go to law school as a fallback. I said, “Dad, I don’t plan to fall back.” If I’d had a fallback I might not have toughed this out and made it work.

A lot of my friends who thought about being writers ended up going into law or advertising or PR. They still dreamed about writing, but they couldn’t give up their good jobs. Fortunately I never had a good job to give up.

All the work’s a stage

When it comes to nonfiction, it’s important to note the very significant difference between the two stages of the work. Stage one is reporting. Stage two is writing.

Reporting is like being the new kid in school. You’re scrambling to learn something very quickly, being a detective, figuring out who the people are, dissecting the social structure of the community you’re writing about. Emotionally, it puts you in the place that everybody dreads. You’re the outsider. You can’t give in to your natural impulse to run away from situations and people you don’t know. You can’t retreat to the familiar.

Writing is exactly the opposite. It’s private. The energy of it is so intense and internal, it sometimes makes you feel like you’re going to crumple. A lot of it happens invisibly. When you’re sitting at your desk, it looks like you’re just sitting there, doing nothing.

Writing gives me great feelings of pleasure. There’s a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It’s like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way. It’s very physical. I get antsy. I jiggle my feet a lot, get up a lot, tap my fingers on the keyboard, check my e-mail. Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it’s working and the rhythm’s there, it does feel like magic to me.

Where I write

I don’t need to be in a perfectly quiet place to write. I don’t need a lot of fussy special conditions. But I do need the material that I work from within reach, and I do need a certain sense that I’m not going to be interrupted for a chunk of time.

That means I find it really hard to write when my son, Austin, is in the house. I can report in any situation, but writing—no. Austin used to ask if he could just sit in my studio while I wrote; he promised to be quiet. I thought, There’s no way in a million years I can write with this little person there. No way he could be quiet, either.

After Austin was born, it became pretty important to have a private workspace, so I built myself a little studio. It’s only fifty yards from the house, but it has a door I can close. I have a very Virginia Woolf need for my own space—not my old space, which was the dining room table. I don’t need it to look a certain way; I just need to feel it’s mine. I need to put things on the wall that don’t require approval from anyone else. I need to be able to leave at night with my notes laid out in a certain
way and know they’ll be exactly that way when I return in the morning.

I got lucky

Unlike most postcollege first jobs, the first job I got out of college, at that magazine in Portland, Oregon, was an actual writing job, not being an assistant to a writer. My editor told me to think of ideas that would make good stories, and then he told me to go do them. When the magazine folded, I briefly worked at a radio station doing odds and ends, and then I got another writing job at the
Willamette Week.