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Interview on
Writing | |
How did you get started writing fiction? I always wrote fiction, but it took me years to find the time and the confidence to write an entire novel without knowing whether it would ever get sold --- and to learn how to write a novel, period. I spent a long time writing short stories, which I loved, but you canít earn a living doing that. And once I had children, I had time only to write what I knew was going to earn money: magazine articles and my baby-naming books. After my last child was in nursery school, I began devoting consistent time to working on a novel, to take the process seriously and to stick at it until I had a saleable draft. How much does your life influence your fiction? I feel I really became a novelist when I learned to let go of reality ‚ hard to do for someone like me whoíd written magazine articles and non-fiction books for years ‚ and created fictional characters and invented their unique story. So Iíd say that womenís issues, family dilemmas that I find interesting in real life and that I personally have lived through get explored in my novels. Some of the settings in my books are based on places Iíve known: Kennedyís apartment in the East Village in The Man I Should Have Married is one where I lived, and I worked as a waitress in an Irish bar. But the bar was owned by a woman, sadly not a sex god like Declan, and there was no Marco in my life, and I did not become a single mom at 19. I do not have a rich much-married mother and my husband did not leave me for a surfer. But I have worn a strange outfit while throwing a yard sale and I have flung a potholder that was crawling with roaches out an apartment window.Are the four characters in Babes in Captivity based on women you know? The individual women, their personalities, families, situations, stories, are entirely invented. What is drawn from life is the power of their friendship. Most women today have female friends who are central to their lives and it was this relationship that I wanted to write about. It changes form over time: You might be on a field hockey team in high school, in a sorority in college, have a kind of Sex & The City group of close friends when youíre single. You segue into a momsí group once you have kids, and then perhaps a group based on work or on mutual interests ‚ Iím part of both a writersí group and a reading group, for instance ‚ once the kids get older. But the closeness of the group and the value of the friendships stays the same. What advice do you have for fledgling novelists? You can use elements from your real life ‚ places you love, people youíve met, stories youíve heard ‚ but as a novelist your job is to reshape them into a work of fiction, to create a story thatís compelling for the reader. Before you start writing, create your characters and sketch out your settings, know your title and your ending. Write in scenes: The scene is the building block of any novel. And write every day. Itís much more productive to spend an hour a day on your novel than to spend seven hours once a week. The last piece of advice is to get comfortable with criticism and rejection, a major factor in every writerís career. The difference between successful people and nonsuccessful people isnít that the successful people get rejected less, itís that they keep going after they do. How much do you revise when you write your novels? It depends on the novel. The Man was my first serious novel and took me literally years to write, including lots of failed drafts and wrong turns before I finally got it write. -Babes is a much more complex book, with four main characters and four viewpoints instead of one. I did three completely new versions of that. For my next novel, Younger, I spent three months crafting an extremely detailed 12-page proposal. Working out all the kinks of the story in advance allowed me to breeze through a solid first draft ‚ the writing took only a few months, including two extremely productive weeks at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where I was freed from having to do anything but write. |
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