This Saturday I read this fascinating piece in the Guardian. It’s by novelist Amy Tan and it’s all about her reasons for writing and how she found her reason to write her novel, The Joy Luck Club (which I haven’t read but seems to be essentially about the bonds between mothers and daughters and the legacies passed down.)
In the article, she describes how when she started writing fiction (relatively late on, at 35) she didn’t have a reason to write, and the result was work that wasn’t altogether ‘true’, which in terms of novel writing, I understand to mean work she believed in, that came from the heart, that was something she didn’t just want to say but had to say.
Back then, her writing tutor at the fiction writers’ workshop she attended, told her that the story she had written was in fact, not a story at all but “the beginnings of about a dozen stories and voices,” and that some of what she had written “felt true and other bits were false.’ It was only when Tan’s mother suffered a heart attack and was taken to intensive care when Amy Tan herself was on holiday (a message she failed to pick up for four days, believing when she did, that her mother was already dead) did her true reason to write emerge.
Tan immediately began to grieve and the regrets bubbled up: “It was now too late to know her, to make her happy, to tell her that I loved her and was sorry…” she says. When she found out her mother was alive she promised herself that she would undo all these regrets. She began to talk to her mother about her life and her history; she got to really ‘know her’. The stories began to ‘pour out’ she says. The result was The Joy Luck Club. She had found her reason to write.
This fascinating article made me think about my own fiction and how the fact that writing is always easier and certainly more enjoyable when you identify the reason you are doing it as early on as possible. In my folder for my latest book (for which I have about 200 documents. It was a long and painful process!) I have one document entitled ‘WHY ARE YOU WRITING THIS BOOK? The document was made early on in the writing process (February 2012 to be exact.) and it is clear how at that stage, I was floundering quite seriously on this question. In fact it was only much later that I managed to nail the answer (which we shall come onto in a second). I have no doubt that that slowed me down substantially and was the reason it took so long for the book to take flight.
I have written four novels now. Two and four were complete b****rds making number one and three looking like a walk in the park. I believe this is because I hadn’t sorted my reason for writing these stories, early on enough. (Or maybe I only get on with odd numbered books?) I didn’t ‘believe’ at first and just like Father Christmas, you have to believe, I am finding, for the magic to happen.
Looking back, I’ve always had a thing about authenticity (*in fact in an excruciating moment of book madness whilst I was struggling to get number four off the ground after months and months of battling, I actually wrote that line in an email to my agent: “I’VE GOT A PROBLEM WITH AUTHENTICITY!!!” I do not doubt that she rolled her eyes and clicked delete, muttering ‘just write the sodding book Regan.’ She should write her own book one day ‘RIDICULOUS THINGS AUTHORS HAVE SAID TO ME / OR RIDICULOUS REASONS AUTHORS HAVE GIVEN ME FOR NOT WRITING THEIR BOOK)
I digress, but if I can just be allowed to indulge for a moment, I kind of do have a problem with authenticity! Everything has to be real. Everything has to be true. I can’t ‘fake it to make it’ in life as I can’t in writing. I can’t go out with people who are wrong for me – it fries my brain. I couldn’t marry my friend, the father of my child, even though that would have made my life immeasurably easier. I was the eight year old for whom it wasn’t good enough to have a ‘real life’ baby doll for Christmas. It had to be real life, in that I ‘gave birth to it’ (a son, named Richard in case you’re wondering about my childhood WEIRDNESS) Cue ‘real’ labour contractions on Christmas Eve and me breastfeeding him on Christmas Day, much to my grandmother’s horror (because let’s face it, you would be horrified if your 8 yr old granddaughter was sitting on the settee with a doll attached to her little-girl flat-chested nipple.) Given, my mum had just given birth to my little sister, so I was undoubtedly imitating her but STILL I am sure plenty of little girls got a new sibling when they were eight years old and didn’t feel the need to ‘become a mother’ themselves? A worrying need for truth and authenticity even then? A psychologist would have had a field day.
Fast-forward thirty years and I still have this obsession with authenticity in my life and in my writing. It doesn’t matter how much people (who I live with!) tell me to stop indulging myself and just get on and write the bloody novel, I have to be ‘feeling’ it. I have to believe what I’m saying and believe I have something to say. If I’m not, I still write because I have no choice and the rent has to be paid, after all but it’s like pulling teeth, wading through wet cement, that cement regularly setting so that I am ankle deep and unable to move, rendered paralysed by terrible writer’s block (which I think does exist by the way, but which probably just means you need a break).
So, as I’ve said, my reason for writing number four came late, but come it did. And that reason turned out to be my original reason – your first instincts being usually the right ones – that I wanted to write a book, funnily enough, about a woman who had spent her entire life not telling the truth about her life when suddenly ( after history repeats itself and her life is turned upside down once again) is forced to.
I wrote this in my document entitled WHY ARE YOU WRITING THIS BOOK?
I want to write this book because I want to explore….
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ONE WOMAN IS FORCED (DECIDES) TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT HER LIFE.
And that was it, I was off. It was so much easier after that.
So what of my other books? What reasons did I have to write those? What is my reason for writing in the first place? I really identified with Amy Tan in the article when she said her reason for writing fiction was: “the excitement of seeing the world both enlarged and with greater detail….”
I always imagine I am holding up a kind of microscope to life and the world when I write, and also when I read. It feels like seeing the world in technicolour, in greater depth; as if you are literally going through it with a fine tooth comb, highlighting the bits – human emotions, descriptions, senses, experiences – that you find the most interesting and beautiful, the most dramatic and share-worthy
In terms of individual books….
BOOK ONE: One Thing Led to Another was definitely cathartic to write. Based on the true story of my life and the fact I had had a baby with my best friend and then written a column about it in Marie Claire I needed to make sense of what felt like my world being turned upside down and everything I thought my life would be – marriage, family, convention – not materialising.I feel like I grew up writing that book. I came to terms with what had happened to me but also gave my heroine, Tess, the happy ending (romantically, anyway) that I didn’t have, even if I was to find out, that simply having a child and making it work with his dad as co-parents, was the happiest ending of them all.
BOOK TWO: The One Before the One. Even though on the surface, this was a comic tale of a crazy little sister interrupting her sensible big sister’s life and what they teach one another about love, it was also a response to what was going on in the relationships in my own life: about letting go of people, setting them free and therefore yourself. It was almost like i had to write it, to do it in my actual life. I had to ‘write it out’.
BOOK THREE: How We Met Was my baby, the book I’d always wanted to write and I had my reason set out well before I even set pen to paper. I’d always wanted to write a kind of hymn or ode to my friends, about that time in your life, about growing up with your friends and the power of friendship. I guess, deep down, I wanted to write my own St Elmo’s fire! One of my all time favourite films.
So, now we come to BOOK FIVE, and as well as plotting it out before I start writing (another thing I’ve learned) I’m going to make sure I understand my reason for writing it, before I write it. I’m going to make sure I have something to say.
Why do you write? What is your reason for writing the book / story you’re writing, if you are indeed writing one? I’d love to hear from you.
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HOW WE MET is out now, published by Harper Collins
KATY REGAN 