Why We Write (2 page)

Thirty years later Joan Didion reprised the question in
The New York Times Book Review.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion wrote. “In many ways writing is the act of saying
I
, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying
listen to me, see it my way, change your mind
. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.

“There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

In 2001, the preternaturally gentle naturalist Terry Tempest Williams addressed the question in “Why I Write” in
Northern Lights
magazine. “I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that
often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.”

As for me: I write books to answer my own questions. So I made a wish list of authors to interview for this one, basing my selections on two factors. I wanted the conversation to benefit from a mix of genres, genders, ethnicities, ages, and, therefore, experiences in writing and in life. And I wanted to talk to those who have beaten the odds: Writers who have succeeded at both the craft and the commerce of writing, who could offer the greatest insights into the creative urge. Writers whose success has satisfied the basic motivations of the struggling author: to become rich and famous, to prove one’s work worthy of publication, to prove to one’s mother or ex-husband or ex-boss just how wrong that person was. For the household-name authors in this book: done, done, and done.

Those included here—“The Twenty,” as I call them— have written books that sell in the kinds of numbers that make publishers send them flowers and leather-bound first editions and, most important, new book contracts. They are authors whose work is regularly praised and sometimes condemned but is rarely ignored by important critics and publications. Their faces and voices are known to anyone who watches
Good Morning America
or listens to
Fresh Air
. Millions or billions of fans worldwide read every book they write.

In other words, the twenty authors here have exactly what every writer wants: full creative freedom and nothing to worry about.

Or so I thought.

*    *    *

I’ve been publishing poems and articles since Eisenhower was president. I’ve been writing books and book reviews since Nixon waved good-bye. Decades of assignments have taught me how difficult it can be to elicit a yes from writers as media-wearied as those on my wish list. Publicists, personal assistants, bodyguards, and bouncers have impressed upon me how many requests are rejected daily by those in that stratum of the Famousphere. So I expected the hard part to be the “get”: convincing these illustrious few to talk to me.

Q: What might convince the Twenty to sit for interviews for this book?

A: A shared commitment to literacy. And shared support for an organization that promotes it.

826 National fits the bill. It’s an innovative youth literacy program, founded in San Francisco in 2002 by the ever-innovative Dave Eggers, now encompassing outposts in Boston; Chicago; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; New York; Seattle; and Ypsilanti, Michigan. Each chapter is housed in a quirkily named storefront (the Boring Store in Chicago; the Museum of Unnatural History in DC) in which after-school tutoring sessions and summer camps are held and from which volunteers fan out into local public schools to help teachers do their jobs—all for free.

Once I’d spoken to the good folks at 826 National and we’d agreed that a portion of the proceeds of this book would go to their worthy projects, I started making calls. The first happy surprise of what proved to be an incredibly happy process: each of the Twenty, from Allende to Wolitzer, said yes. Some said they were eager to support 826. Many said they’d never been
asked the “why” question before. They were as interested to answer it as I was to hear their answers.

“Whenever I am writing,” Rick Moody told me, “or more accurately, whenever I
have written
, I feel better and more at peace as a human being.”

“You have deep control, and where else can you find that?” Meg Wolitzer said. “You can’t control other people or your relationships or your children, but in writing you can have sustained periods where you’re absolutely in charge.”

Sue Grafton said, “My best time as a writer is any day, or any moment, when the work’s going well and I’m completely absorbed in the task at hand. The hardest time is when it’s not, and I’m not. The latter tend to outnumber the former. But I’m a persistent little cuss. And I soldier on.”

Walter Mosley mused, “I can’t think of a reason not to write. I guess one reason would be that nobody was buying my books. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t stop me. I’d be writing anyway.”

I also asked each of the Twenty to share his or her least favorite part of the writing life.

“When I’m working on a book, I’m in a very agitated mental state,” Michael Lewis told me. “My sleep is disrupted. I only dream about the project….I’m mentally absent for months at a time. The social cost to my wife and kids is very high. Luckily, I’m a binge writer. I take a lot of time off between books, which is why I still have a family.”

“I start all my books on January eighth,” Isabel Allende said, shaking her immaculately coiffed head. “Can you imagine January seventh? It’s hell…I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jennifer Egan confessed that she worries. A lot. “It was scary, pouring time and energy into a project that didn’t have a clear genre identity and might therefore fall through the cracks,” she told me. “I’m afraid my publisher will say, ‘We can’t publish your odd book.’ My second-worst fear is that they’ll publish it, and the book will come and go without a whisper.”

“The only chance in hell I had of being published in the
New Yorker
would have been to sign my cover letters ‘J. D. Salinger,’” said David Baldacci.

Most surprising were the writers’ responses to the crucial question—a trick question, really—that I’d planted in the mix.

When I asked, “What’s the best moment you’ve had as a writer?” I expected to be regaled with tales of Pulitzers awarded. NEA grants granted. White House readings given. Multiple weeks on bestseller lists. The sort of writerly riches that less-celebrated authors hope to experience someday, should we survive our epic bouts of envy. So I was surprised that so few of the best moments cited by the Twenty had to do with money, fame, or critical recognition.

“Writing my third novel was the best time I’ve ever had as a writer,” Jane Smiley told me, her eyes glowing with the memory. “I felt I was being manipulated from afar. It seemed that the characters were using me as a secretary to write their story.”

Nor did Sebastian Junger mention runaway sales or movie deals. “When I went to Sarajevo in ’93 and I was with these other freelance writers,” he said, “and we were reporting on this incredible story, I went from being a waiter to being a war reporter in the course of three weeks. Seeing your name in print for the first time—nothing can compare to that.”

Gish Jen, née Lillian Jen, named her best moment the one when she took her “writing name”: “Lillian was a nice Chinese girl,” she told me. “Gish was not such a nice girl. Gish was the one propping the doors open so I could get back into the dorm at night….There’s a kind of freedom that goes with being Gish that didn’t go with being Lillian, and that freedom went with writing.”

Each chapter of
Why We Write
revolves around one author’s answer to the central question of the book. Each juicy narrative is accompanied by a short excerpt from the author’s latest book, a few words of introduction, and a boxed set of stats—“The Vitals” and “The Collected Works”—outlining the author’s major milestones, personal and professional.

Why We Write
is devoted to the notion that reading is good, and writing is even better. Toward that end, each chapter concludes with the author’s pithiest writing tips—a gift to beginning and experienced writers of all genres, genders, ages, ethnicities, and life experiences. The chapters are organized alphabetically based on the authors’ last names—one of many reinforcements of the premise of the book: that the status differences among the writers are far less significant than their similarities.

This book is a tribute to writers everywhere, and to the spirit that moves us—as embodied by the Twenty, who gave much of themselves so that 826 National might encourage a few more American kids to love reading and writing, and so that you might find your love of writing and reading enhanced by the book, real or virtual, that you hold in your hands.

Why We Write
is an homage, also, to my wonderful agent and my wonderful editor and to all the literary agents, editors, editorial
assistants, art directors, book designers, illustrators, copy editors, proofreaders, production managers, compositors, printers, publicists, marketing directors, sales reps, book reviewers, book bloggers, booksellers, and writers of all stripes and polka dots, who continue to adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of their life’s work, and who keep one eye in the rearview mirror and one eye on the road ahead, making books so they might reach the people who want, maybe even need, to read them.

Why We Write

I
sabel Allende is the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. Her name is invariably linked with magical realism, the genre originated by Franz Kafka in the 1920s and popularized by
One Hundred Years of Solitude
author Gabriel García Márquez, to whom Allende is often compared.

But the scope of Allende’s work, ranging from historical fiction to bare-all memoirs to the pleasures of food and sex, defies categorization—as does she. A beloved light of the Bay Area literary scene, Allende is first to volunteer when there’s a benefit for Hurricane Katrina survivors or a fund-raiser for the public library or when the local indie bookstore needs a boost.

Isabel Allende received me in her cozy, elegantly appointed
Sausalito salon, the front room of the 1907 brothel she bought in 2006. Upstairs her husband, Willie Gordon, practices “people’s law.” Downstairs, along with her longtime assistant, Juliette Ambatzidis (whose children are counted among Isabel and Willie’s grandchildren), Isabel Allende conducts the business end of her avocation: making beautiful words, making a more beautiful world.