Why We Write (26 page)
Authors: Meredith Maran
The most difficult time for me as a writer is before I have a central guiding idea for a book. Once I have it I feel reassured. It’s like having an inhaler in your pocket, if you’re an asthmatic.
Before and after
I divide my writing life into periods of before and after I wrote
The Wife
. I don’t like much of what I’d written before that book. I was still living in a world of sentences that were sometimes
pleasing to me, but I wasn’t happy with them. I was keeping myself self-consciously lyrical and held-back and a little reserved as a writer. I worried that the results weren’t forceful enough.
The stuff I liked to read at the time was so much stronger than what I was actually writing. While I have some reservations about Philip Roth’s work, I love the muscularity of it. What was keeping me from writing with the kind of fervor I felt when I was reading? I took that on directly when I wrote
The Wife.
Rock, paper, scissors
I’d conceived
The Uncoupling
as a contemporary
Lysistrata
. I started it during the Bush years, when, like everyone else, I was fatigued by the endless wars the United States had started in Afghanistan and Iraq. Initially, I thought
The Uncoupling
would have a significant war content.
Then there was a shift as I wrote. I always know, when I dutifully return to a balky, “stuck” scene and realize that it won’t be any reader’s favorite, that it probably shouldn’t be in the book. I started seeing scenes like that in
The Uncoupling
. And then what I knew I actually wanted to write about just rose up and overpowered the rest. It was a kind of rock-paper-scissors game in my mind. What interested me most in the
Lysistrata
story, finally, as a writer, wasn’t the women using their sexual power to stop a war, but the way the play could allow me to take a look at sexual desire, and sexual fatigue in a marriage. It could allow me to look at female sexuality over time. So I reimagined the whole book.
Gratitude
These are not contemplative times, and writing is a contemplative experience. The idea that something is thoughtful and slow, and takes its time to reveal itself, is not in keeping with today’s velocity.
I envy people who have more financial security, because the pressures of making a living will bear down on you. I know how lucky I am that I’ve managed to stay around as a writer. I never take that for granted.
Meg Wolitzer’s Wisdom for Writers
- Writing that is effective is like a concentrate, a bouillon cube. You’re not just choosing a random day and writing about that. You pick ordinary moments and magnify them—as if they’re freeze-dried, so the reader can add water.
- To find the idea that guides your book, you might write freely for a couple of chapters. Then take a look at what you’ve made, and you’ll start to understand what the fabric of it is. Then go on and write, say, eighty pages of it. Not a hundred; if you get to one hundred and end up putting it aside, you might feel like you wasted so much time. I sometimes recommend writing around eighty pages, which is a solid mass of pages and something to feel proud of. Then look over it and begin to map out where the book is going.
- I always ask for the wisdom of writer friends whom I trust, and I always listen very closely to what they have to say. Be sure to pick a trustworthy “designated reader.”
- No one can take writing away from you, but no one can give it to you, either.
T
he author will donate a portion of her royalties from
Why We Write
to 826 National.
826 National is a nonprofit organization that ensures the success of its network of eight writing and tutoring centers, which each year assist nearly 30,000 young people. Its mission is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.
826 centers offer a variety of inventive workshops and publishing programs that provide under-resourced students, ages 6–18, with opportunities to explore their creativity and improve their writing skills. They also aim to help teachers get their classes excited about writing.
For more information or to make a donation, visit the website www.826national.org.
