Why We Write (9 page)

There’s a moment in every book when the story and characters are finally
there
; they come to life, they’re in control. They do things they’re not supposed to do and become people they weren’t meant to be. When I reach that place, it’s magic. It’s a kind of rapture.

I would write even if I couldn’t make a living at it, because I can’t not write. I am amazed and delighted and still in a state
of shock about the success of
Water for Elephants
, but that’s not why I write. I do it for love. The rest is gravy.

How I write: through a portal darkly

When I write, I have to be entirely by myself. I just had an office built in our house, and it’s the first time I’ve ever had a room with a door, or even a room.

When I first started writing I had a corner in the living room. I put up a freestanding screen, but that didn’t keep little bodies from coming around the corner and asking for cookies. I could only write when no one else was home. We ran out of money for day care when my first book didn’t sell, so all of a sudden I was taking care of a toddler and trying to write. My husband built me an office—really more of a cage—out of baby gates. My son couldn’t unplug the computer anymore, but he could still throw things at me. Somehow I managed to finish my second book, and when it sold, we could afford a babysitter and once again I had the house to myself during the day.

That didn’t always translate into productivity. At one point, I was so stuck on
Water for Elephants
that I worked in a walk-in closet. I covered over the window and made my husband move his clothes out and pasted pictures of old-time circuses on the walls. We had no Wi-Fi, which was perfect. The only thing I could do was open my file. I figured if I stared at it long enough, something would happen. Apparently I was right, because I finished the book, but I spent four months in that closet. Does a walk-in closet count as a room of one’s own? Somehow I don’t think it’s what Virginia Woolf had in mind.

My writing process is embarrassingly ritualistic. When I’m
beginning a new book, I steep in the idea until the first scene comes to me whole. I go to sleep thinking about it, I’m thinking about it when I shower, when I cook. During that period I walk into a lot of walls.

Once I’m actually writing, my days all look the same. After I drink my tea, check my e-mail, and let the birds out, I open my file and read what I wrote the day before, over and over, until I feel I can continue. It usually takes me an hour and a half, but at some point I feel like I’ve gone through a portal into that other world, the fictional world, and I’m recording what’s going on rather than creating it.

If I answer the phone, or someone comes to the door, the spell is broken. Then I have to do that one-and-a-half-hour trance thing all over again. That’s why my office is at the back of the house, and that’s why the door is so important: there are only so many hour-and-a-halves in a day. If my door is closed, nobody knocks. I’m not proud of it, but once, when I still only had a corner in the living room, I hid behind the curtains from the mailman.

“I need a job, and I want to be a
paperback
technical writer”

I moved to the States from Canada in 1999 for a tech writing job. I liked it. It was a way I could write and get paid for it. When I got laid off in 2001 I was devastated. The longer you’re with a company, the closer you get to a window. At any new job, I was going to be right back by the elevator shaft.

My husband and I had talked about me retiring early to try writing fiction. I’d had delusions of writing a novel during my first maternity leave, but that was because I didn’t actually know
what newborns were like. Or novels. Needless to say, that didn’t work. So when I got laid off we decided we’d give it two years or two books, whichever came first. If I hadn’t replaced my salary as a tech writer by then, I’d go back to tech writing. We’d set ourselves up as a two-income family. We had a mortgage. We had three kids. We basically held hands and jumped off the cliff.

A quiet little book

At the two-year (and two-book) mark,
Riding Lessons
sold. It was a moderate success, by which I mean nobody cared what I was doing for the next year. What I was doing for the next year was writing
Water for Elephants.

I submitted
Elephants
to my editor, and she turned it down. But in the same e-mail she asked me to do a sequel to
Riding Lessons.
So I turned around and wrote
Flying Changes.
While I was doing that, my agent sent
Water for Elephants
out to other publishers. Nobody even looked at it for the longest time. After four and a half months, somebody at Random House finally pulled it out of the pile, read it, and liked it. At that point, my agent called the other editors and said, “We have interest.” Then all the editors started reading, and I got the strangest rejections. I kept hearing things like “Thank you for letting us look at this historical romance,” and “Circus books don’t sell.” I thought, “What circus books? I can’t think of a single one.”

Finally in 2006 we sold it for a very small advance. My income had gone down steadily and dramatically for each of my three books. The editor who bought
Elephants
initially thought of it as a quiet, good book. A little book. But the country’s independent booksellers had other ideas. They refused to let
Water
for Elephants
fail. When customers walked into their stores, they thrust my book into their hands. They made it the Book Sense Book of the Year. On the sheer strength of the indies, the chains had to buy it. It hit the
New York Times
bestseller list three or four weeks after it was published. A friend of mine who saw me around that time told me I looked shell-shocked. Which was exactly how I felt.

The dread follow-up novel

The hardest time I’ve ever had as a writer was writing
Ape House
. Before you’re published, there’s a sense of freedom in that nobody knows who you are or expects anything from you. I never expected
Water for Elephants
to be so successful, but it was, and I was moving forward with the knowledge (and fear) that a lot of people were going to read the next book. I had to find a way to become unaware, which was difficult because I was still doing a lot of public events for
Elephants.

I had to get off the road. I had to be on my own and pretend that nobody had ever heard of me. I had to open my file and go through the portal and get into that place and not worry about what potential readers might think. It was very, very hard. I had to turn down invitations and I felt guilty, but I can’t travel for one book and write another at the same time. I just can’t. There is only room for one fictional world in my head at a time.

Also—and I think this must happen in every field—there’s a lot of schadenfreude in this business. I knew there would be people gunning for me, and I was right. Sure, I got reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review
, but it was a nasty, almost personal, review.

The pressure is gone now. I’ve done my postbreakout book, and I survived. And I’m pretty damned proud of the book, too.

Why did the chick lit cross the road?

There are very good, very successful authors of “chick lit” and “women’s fiction,” but that’s not how I self-identify. I think if you’re a woman and you write novels with female characters, the industry tends to pigeonhole you, and if you’re not careful you get slapped with a pink cover no man would be caught dead reading on a subway. Why would I want to discount male readers? I want men
and
women to feel they can pick up my books.

I felt (correctly) that I was labeled as a women’s fiction author with
Riding Lessons
, and I hate very little as much as I hate being labeled. So I very deliberately wrote
Water for Elephants
as a book that would be difficult to classify. I figured that having it narrated by a ninety-three-year-old man would help. And what do you know? I think it did.

Me and my magic rocks

I’m a little bit superstitious. As I said, everything I do with my writing is ritualized. After I check my e-mail, I get another cup of tea. I check my e-mail again. And then I shut down the Internet and open my file. Actually, I do more than shut down the Internet. I use an app called Freedom to block me from it. Of course, I’ve figured out how to get around it, so when I’m really desperate, I get my long-suffering husband to change the network password and I tell him not to give me the new one until the end of the day. Was it Trollope who had his housekeeper
chain him to his desk with strict orders not to release him despite all pleas and threats until a set time? Maybe it was Stevenson. Anyway, this feels similar.

I clean my office completely before I start each book. Pretty normal so far, right? Well, I also have a collection of colorful rocks and a golden horseshoe, and every time I start a book I have to put my horseshoe down and arrange my stones within it until it feels right. And then I don’t touch them again until I finish the book. If I feel the need to rearrange the rocks while I’m writing, that’s a symptom of a pretty bad block.

I also never actually delete anything I write. If I know a paragraph, page, chapter, or scene has to go, I put it in a file called “Leftovers.” I’ve never recycled a single word from that file, but it’s one of those silly mental crutches that allows me to get rid of stuff. And getting rid of stuff is half the battle.

I
n 1992, reading the first line of Kathryn Harrison’s first novel—
In truth, my mother was not a beautiful woman
—I felt I’d found the author I’d been waiting for all my reading life. Who’d claimed that the narrator’s mother
was
a beautiful woman? I wondered. Who was this authoritative child-narrator, arguing that she was not?

Booklist
once called Kathryn Harrison’s work “diabolically compelling.” Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Harrison is best known for her memoir
The Kiss
, an exploration of her four-year
sexual relationship with her father, beginning when she was twenty. To label Harrison the Writer Who Slept with Her Father is like labeling Sylvia Plath the Writer Who Killed Herself. But the sales and controversy generated by
The Kiss
placed Kathryn Harrison where she belongs: on the short list of fearless, brilliant modern American writers to watch, a writer who turns readers into fanatical fans and fans like me into writers who look to her for courage and inspiration.