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Last weekend I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Gulf Coast Creative Writing Teachers Conference held this year in lovely Fairhope, Alabama. The conference was delightful. I enjoyed and admired many talented authors’ readings, met many warm and lovely new friends, and generally left the conference in that euphoric state that being with other writers evokes.
Before leaving home I learned that my audience would be published authors, grad students, and Ph.D candidates, and I worried about writing a suitable speech that would interest the varied ages and levels of experience. I finally came up with a speech that everyone seemed to like, and so I decided to share it with those of you who read this journal. Here it is:
Fairhope, Alabama
April 2008
Many years ago when I imagined becoming an author, I envisioned myself in my editor’s office reclining on a brown leather couch sipping a dry martini. My head was wreathed in spirals of smoke drifting from my long ivory cigarette holder. Across the room my editor sat at his huge teakwood desk reading my brilliant manuscript. He was a man of some mature years wearing a tweed jacket. An elegant pipe rested in the crystal ash tray on his desk, and after he read the last page of my work, he offered sincere, effusive praise and suggested that we celebrate my dazzling novel by sharing a late night dinner in an expensive restaurant.
Now fast forward to 2002, the year I published my first novel. I discovered that my fantasy was just that. Fantasy. I may as well have imagined that I was sitting in a rowboat in the Atlantic with a fisherman named Ahab. I have shoes older than my editor. There’s no couch in her small New York office. She doesn’t drink martinis; she drinks Crystal Light. She wears floral prints, grabs lunch at McDonald’s and she’d definitely never ever carry a pack of Winstons in her backpack.
Many changes in this profession of writing have been effected in the last ten years or so. And the publishing industry and the role of authors continues to transform as rapidly as the stock market quotes do from day to day.
Today an author is expected to wear many hats and acquire skills that have little or nothing to do with art. So what does an author need to succeed in 2008?
Well, here are a few of my observations. First, in the 2008 publishing world an author needs to be savvy about technology. Nearly every author I know has a web site or at the very least a blog, my space, or live journal. They are expected to have podcasts and trailers for their books and be able to surf the web to instantly find a review or chat room that relates to their work.
Today an author needs to be a salesperson. She is required to assist her publicist in marketing her work via mail-outs, newsletters, imaginative gimmicks and come on’s as if she were a traveling salesperson hawking snake medicine.
Another device an author needs is a “look” for book jackets, for television appearances, and book-related events. Many authors spend hundreds of dollars on professional photos, make-up artists, and hair dressers in an effort to make themselves as well as their books more saleable. Authors have become products.
An author needs energy. Book tours today are physically challenging. Authors may be expected to do as many as 20 events in a single week. I should know I once did 14 in 5 days.
An author needs to acquire mathematical skills in order to understand her royalty statement, which oftentimes involves something agents have dubbed as creative accounting.
And finally she needs legal assistance because she’ll never understand her contract.
An author does indeed need to acquire a great many skills in order to become successful, but what is far more important I believe is what traits an author needs to write a good book, play, or poem because, for while publishing has become about the bottom line, writing is first and foremost about the heart.
Some weeks ago during an interview I was asked what traits a writer needs to write a successful work. I was a bit taken aback as I had never considered this question, and in thinking about it, I wondered if there are universal traits we writers all share. I came to believe that there are commonalities among us. So now I’d like to share some of my thoughts about these qualities with you.
The first trait I believe a writer must have is curiosity. A writer must ask Why, what, when, how? If he is not curious about his fellow man, I doubt he is going to write anything of substance. I write to learn about the world, its people, and I write to learn about myself. The writer is forever student, never teacher. We seek answers, we pose questions, and we seek truth.
The second trait I believe a good writer needs is empathy. This applies especially to literary fiction. If a writer is incapable of empathizing with her characters, she’s not going to be able to tell their stories honestly. She may have the most original amazing plot on the planet, but if she doesn’t have empathy for her characters her readers won’t care about them. We must love our characters and they must become a part of us. I am my characters. They are all a part of me. They are both the best and the worst of me. In every moment that I’m writing I must own the emotion, the acts, the words that come to me. Some of my characters possess traits of mine that I abhor, that I want to smother deeply inside me, hiding them from the people I want to love me. Some of my characters exhibit qualities I am sometimes capable of like kindness and unselfishness, and even nobility on some fine days. I’m often asked about the African American characters I write about. How can these characters be me? I answer how can they not? They are as much a part of me as my aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents. If I were raised in a Jewish, a Muslim, a Hispanic, or Asian community, I’m certain I would write about them. They would comprise a part of me and my work.
What else do writers need? Writers need perseverance. I learned about perseverance early in life through observing my mother’s example. When my mother was thirty-five years old, she was told she would live only five years. She died not at forty, but at 65 through sheer determination to live to see her grandchildren. Born in an era and a community where there were few opportunities for women, she taught herself bookkeeping and became such an expert CPA’s consulted her for help. She traveled to Hawaii, to Tahiti, to every party she was invited to. She taught me to ignore naysayers, to persist when everyone else has given up, to dream large and then to make that dream come true. It took me eight years to publish Right As Rain, and that meant six revisions from beginning to end. How did I manage to keep working on it in the face of rejections and missteps? Well, I believe rejection is only an opportunity to try again. Hope cures disappointment. And after all, we writers aren’t brain surgeons. If they make a mistake, someone could die. If we make one, we only hurt our pride if we allow it. I believed in my novel and I believed in myself, in my ability to eventually get it right. Writers need faith in themselves.
Writers need to make creative work a priority in their lives. This sounds simple, but actually this is one of the hardest goals one can set for one’s self. It’s easy to say yes to other people to other things. It’s far more difficult to say no. But if we accept all invitations, if we allow others to lead us rather than leading ourselves, we will never find time to write. Our writing time must be scared. We must give up hours, days, and holiday weekends to nourish our talent. We cannot wait for inspiration to write. Talking about it, dreaming about it, researching, planning, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
We writers must write though the roadblocks others set up in our paths. I’m talking about critics and those who would sit on our shoulders and monitor and or direct our work. As far as critics go, I always return to two of the famous and most often cited quotes about critics. Kurt Vonnegut’s “A reviewer is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.” And John Osbourne’s “Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.”
Besides critics, however, and much more problematic are our friends, family, and other writers, those people we want to please the most. The person who sat most heavily on my shoulder when I was writing was my father. I imagined him reading my book and he’s reading along and then my character says something profane or maybe the F word, anything that would make me uncomfortable. But what was I to do if that’s what my character would say? I solved the problem fairly easily. Well, actually I didn’t solve it, my dad did. Early on in my writing life, I wrote a story for my Masters thesis in which I used the word masturbate and my dad got a copy of this story. After he read it, he praised it, saying he liked it so much he gave it to Miss Wilda. Now Miss Wilda is in her 80ies and is the cookie lady at Pisgah Methodist Church. “Dad,” I said. Did you read the story? I just told you I did, he said. But don’t you think it might be inappropriate for Miss Wilda to read? What’re you talking about? he asked. Then he said oh, I know what you mean. Don’t worry about it. I explained that to her. Explained what I thought. Explained how you do it? What’d you tell her I asked him. I told her that if you’re a really good writer you can write about things you know nothing about. So folks, don’t worry. The people who support you and your work are going to find a way to accept whatever you write. And if they don’t, well, just like those editors who rejected you, you don’t want them as readers anyway.
Finally, the last trait I believe we writers must have is courage. We must face our fears. Sometimes in listening to the voices of our characters what they tell us frightens us and we lose our nerve. Those voices are the ones that matter the most, and yet many writers are terrified of going so deeply inside themselves to feel the emotions those voices demand. Those characters might be in pain, they might be suffering from the same maladies that the writer suffers from. Their disappointments, failures, losses are synonymous with ours. And if we allow ourselves to feel the anguish they evoke, open those wounds of the spirit and reach inside ourselves to caress the muscles of our very human hearts, we might not be able to withstand it. And that’s a valid fear. I can’t tell you that at the end of the day, we’ll bounce back and be the same persons we were before giving ourselves completely to our art. You may find it difficult to reenter the ordinary life you were living. Robert Olen Butler believes that this why so many of our greatest writers turned to alcohol to escape the pain. But I believe it’s worth the risk. For if we do not write honestly, if we do not have the courage to explore the important questions, to feel both pain and joy with the intensity we are capable of, then I say we should find another profession that’s safe and comfortable. We must write through our fears, we must feel the voice before we record it, and if we can do that, then we know we’ve done something valuable, not just for ourselves, but for our readers as well.
I experience this fear whenever I write. I know what it feels like to murder someone, to face execution, to be raped, to lose a child, to bury a son. But I also know the joys of friendships, the ecstasy of love, of what it feels like when your dreams come true. I’ve lived numerous lives, and all of them are mine and they belong to my readers as well. My truth may not be your truth, but my task as a writer is not to tell you what to think or how to feel. My goal rather is simply to provide an honest story for you to read. When a person buys a book, it no longer belongs to the author, but to the reader, and when that person reads it he or she brings to it their own truth, their life experiences, and to me that is the wonder of the writers’ art.One of the ways we bring light to each other is through the sharing of our stories. Through them, through those stories we tell we all become connected in some way. Books are a bridge between the banks of our differences and when we walk through the pages we are given the opportunity to understand each other, to better understand ourselves. Writers and readers alike, we are all the characters. As sentient beings we possess the glorious capacity to feel joy and pain, to walk across the bridges of our world and explore and abide in another’s universe.
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