Why We Write (8 page)

My working journals serve several purposes. They give me
a record of my process, a day-by-day account of the problems I see as a book takes shape. When I come up against writer’s block, I go back and read the journals from the early stages of the writing. As odd as this sounds, more than once I’ve solved a problem and tagged the solution long before I began the actual writing.

Another joy of keeping journals is that on days when I’m feeling especially frustrated and despairing, I can read through the journals from an earlier book and realize that I felt just as baffled and frightened when I was writing that one. Knowing that I’ve survived all my bumbling and fumbling in the past helps me survive it in the present. And sometimes, the odd and unrelated ideas that occur to me while I’m writing one book spark an idea for the next book in the series. I don’t know if other writers operate this way, but it’s worked for me.

When I reread the journals, I can see I’m telling myself the story in endless loops, repeating myself until I can see the whole of a narrative. So the journals are incredibly boring. I don’t try to be literate or lofty, and I ignore the fact that one day someone else might read every tedious page. The purpose of the journals isn’t to impress myself or anyone else; it’s to verbalize my challenges as I meet them and to weigh all my options. Writing in the journals is a warm-up, the repository for my research, dialogue fragments, and character sketches. There have been times when I’ve lifted entire paragraphs from a journal and stitched them into the scene I’m writing, which always feels like a gift.

The six working journals for
V Is for Vengeance
totaled 967 single-spaced pages. The finished manuscript was 662 double-spaced pages. This might appear to represent a whole lot of wasted effort. But in truth, every wrong turn eventually led to
the right one. In the end, I wouldn’t have given up a single moment of the process.

Eudora Welty once said, “Every book teaches you the lessons necessary to write that book.” To which I add, “The problem is that the lessons learned from writing one book seldom apply to the next.”

Father knew best

I was raised in a household where reading and the love of good literature were an essential part of our daily lives. My father, C. W. Grafton, was a municipal bond attorney. He wrote mysteries in his spare time, if lawyers can be said to have spare time. He’d put in a full day’s work as a lawyer, come home for supper, and then go back to his office to write.

After years of doing this, he managed to publish two novels of what he intended to be an eight-book series,
The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope
and
The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher.
He borrowed the titles from an English nursery rhyme about an old lady trying to get a pig over a stile. (These days, there’s probably not a kid in this world who knows what a “stile” is, unless it’s mentioned in the same sentence with Juicy Couture.)

When my father realized he couldn’t make a living wage from his writing, he was forced to set aside his series in order to support his wife and two daughters. His intention was to go back to writing when he retired, but he died before he was able to do that.

As I was growing up, my father talked often and lovingly about the process of writing. Those lessons sifted down into my consciousness long before it occurred to me that I might write
one day. His passion for the mystery genre was something I picked up at an early age.

I wasn’t cut out to be a ballerina

When I was growing up long, long ago, girls had limited career options. In alphabetical order, the choices were: ballerina, nurse, salesclerk, secretary, stewardess, or teacher.

I had no physical talents whatever, so there went
Swan Lake
. I suspected that teaching, which is extremely fulfilling for some people, would be a bore for me. I was married and a young mother, so Pan Am was out of the question. I was interested in medicine, although perhaps not for the loftiest of reasons. When I was in my early twenties, the two most popular television series were
Dr. Kildare
and
Marcus Welby, M.D
. In my fevered imagination, I conjured myself in a white cap, white shoes, and a crisp white uniform, awash in purity of purpose, sacrifice, dedication, drama, emergencies, lives saved, and all made right with the world. How much better could a job be?

Unfortunately, I’m squeamish about blood and suffering. I’m also needle-phobic. So becoming a nurse in real life meant I’d actually spend my days stretched out on the floor in a dead faint.

I’ve mentioned the sorry results of my dreams of working at Sears. So my last hope rested on my untapped secretarial aspirations. Hell, I was game. I taught myself how to type, pretended I knew medical terminology, and got a job as an admissions clerk, and then as a secretary, in a hospital clinic for the indigent. Later, I processed applications and typed up intern and resident rotations in a hospital. Later still, I ran the front office
for a family physician. All of this, please note, in the white uniform and white shoes I’d originally pictured myself wearing.

After work every night I’d come home, cook supper, wash dishes, chat with my then-husband, and put the children to bed. Then I’d sit down at my desk where I wrote from nine p.m. until midnight. Within the space of four years, I’d finished three full-length novels, which never saw the light of day. The fourth,
Keziah Dane
, was published in 1967 when I was twenty-five years old. My advance was fifteen hundred dollars. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

Doctor of literature

Mystery writers are the neurosurgeons of literature. Or maybe magicians. We work by sleight of hand.

Constructing a credible detective story takes ingenuity, patience, and skill. The writer has to find the perfect balance between right brain, the creative function, and left brain, the analytical. We have to develop character and plot at the same time—and by “plot” I’m not talking about a formula. Plotting is the way a story proceeds. It’s the sequence of events that unfolds and builds, scene by scene, to a satisfying conclusion.

A mystery is the only literary form that pits the reader and the writer against each other. The writer’s side of the deal is to play fair. That means letting the reader make the same discoveries the detective makes in any given moment, putting all the information on the table in plain view.

The trick is to conceal one’s purpose, distracting the reader’s attention while laying out the bits and pieces that will eventually point to the resolution. If a story’s too convoluted, the reader
gets annoyed by having to keep track of unnecessary or implausible twists and turns. If a story’s too simple, and the answer to the question of “whodunit” is obvious, the reader’s annoyed because that takes away the pleasure of outsmarting the writer, who’s trying to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes.

The fact that any mystery writer succeeds at this impossible commission can only be described as miraculous.

H
ave you heard the one about the writer who sits down at her desk, scratches out a first novel, and hits the jackpot overnight? Sales in the millions, legions of adoring fans, wealth, fame, a movie deal that
actually results in a movie
, a staff to regretfully decline an endless stream of glamorous invitations?

That was Sara Gruen’s story, I thought, and I told her so. Laughing uproariously, she corrected my misperception in her Canadian accent.
Water for Elephants
(which has sold more than five million copies in fifty-seven languages and was made into a 2011 movie starring Reese Witherspoon) has earned Gruen pretty much all of the jackpot items above—minus the
staff. Her husband works full-time as her manager. But
Water for Elephants
was her third book, not her first. And the first two were merely “moderately successful.” And
Elephants
was rejected by the publisher of her first two novels. It sold to another publisher, after four months of rejections, for a very modest price.

“
Water for Elephants
came within fifteen minutes of not selling at all,” Gruen told me. Jackpot notwithstanding, there was an unmistakable ring of gratitude in her voice.

Sara Gruen

Why I write

The only thing that makes me crazier than writing is not writing.

I knew I wanted to be a writer as soon as I knew how to
read, and I began by making little illustrated books. At age seven, I sent one to a publisher. I’ve always been a stickler for detail, so I folded all the pages in half and stapled them carefully from the inside so it was nicely bound. I got a letter back from the editor—a rejection, of course. But I was thrilled. I have no idea what happened to the letter. I suspect it’s in my mother’s attic.

I was twelve when I wrote my first “novel.” It was about a girl who wakes up and a horse has jumped into her backyard. Lo and behold—the same thing had happened to her neighbor and best friend. It took up three school notebooks. I didn’t let anybody read it. I think that book is also in my mother’s attic.

I firmly believe that in order to write you must read. My parents had an extensive library, and as a kid I worked my way through it, picking the next book off the shelf when I was done with the last. I read everything from Alexander Pope to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Besides having a great library, one of the best things my parents did for my career was to make me take typing in high school. I can type as fast as I can think, which is crucial when the story’s flowing. I’ve been clocked at an honest 120 words a minute. Not coincidentally, nobody, including me, can read my handwriting. I’ve more or less given up on it.