Those of you wanting to know a little about my writing philosophy, here’s a little something I had to write for a Creative Writing class years ago. It’s what they call an “aesthetic statement,” just a fancy name for describing or telling readers what has influenced your writing choices and made you the writer you are. Well, I guess there’s probably more to it than that, but you get the idea. If you’re curious, here is my formal aesthetic statement (P.S. Those of you familiar with my fiction voice, please forgive the voice of academia—it was for a Master’s degree!):
I have been writing since I could pick up a pencil. Yes, it started with letters, followed by words and sentences, then paragraphs and pages, just like it does with all of us. But—at the tender age of seven—I wrote my first poem and then began my autobiography (which I stopped writing that same year, realizing later that it was a large project that would never be complete and was quite possibly not as interesting as I had originally thought). It was only a few short years later in middle school when I started writing mystery “novels” that were actually novellas with a heroine not unlike myself, a pre-teen girl named Sally Wheeler who found out about the neighbor’s hidden treasure one week and discovered who was stealing her cousin’s horses the next. It was during this phase in my writing “career” that I discovered the beauty of suspense and plot. While I still had a way to go and I had yet to learn about depth, cause and effect, emotion, complex characters, dialogue, imagery, and realism, I found that my friends and family read what I wrote and actually enjoyed some of it. I wrote (as well as produced and starred in) plays and comedy sketches and composed poems, short and longer stories; I even wrote nonfiction for my high school newspaper. In college, I learned to write academically as well. But the main reason why I wrote was because, intrinsically, I had to. I wrote even if no one other than me would ever read it. I wrote because it was something I not only had to do, but it was something I loved to do, was driven to do.
I couldn’t quite understand why I felt that way, why—even though it was ego-boosting to have a room full of my girlfriends reading my first attempt at a romance novel, unable to go to sleep because they wanted to read the next chapter, and the next, and the next—it really didn’t matter if people never read my writing, why it was okay if my writing never sold, why I could be satisfied simply because I was writing. When I was older, though, these words from Stephen King struck a chord with me and explained why the process was fulfilling and sustaining:
. . . when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic. That goes for reading and writing as well as for playing a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, or running the four-forty. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate . . . will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them . . . . (150)
Rarely have I found writing of any kind to be “strenuous.” “Stimulating” would be a more apt description. I find my life outside the pages to be more strenuous than the words I dabble in. Everyday life drains me; creating other worlds fills me back up.
I tried to deny that part of myself. Really, I did. I settled into a boring day job and started a family. And I almost convinced myself that I felt fulfilled with that job. But I still caught myself writing first chapters and poems, followed by more poems and second and third chapters. I scribbled in a spiral notebook during my lunch breaks. Some mornings I would be working on a novel on the computer, then jump in the shower to get ready for work. Once on the road, my story would continue writing itself in my head and as soon as I sat at my desk, I would jot notes to myself and tuck them in my purse until I got home again and was able to incorporate them into the book. And while writing on my own, I also co-wrote scripts with my husband. Finally, though, I published several poems. Other people (not just family, friends, or instructors but publishers) thought my writing was good enough to share with a large audience. [Note to my dear readers—don’t try finding any poetry published by yours truly; you never will, because it is published under another name that I’ll never reveal! I try to keep my Beatnik self separate from my fiction self.] So I kept writing. I wrote a young adult mystery (this time with more depth, better dialogue, and a more realistic plot than my earlier youthful attempts) followed by a romance novel, which was followed by a mystery, then a paranormal suspense/romance, then a romantic thriller, then another romance, followed by a thriller romance. Seven novels, as well as other types of writing (I’ve never abandoned poetry, and I continue to dabble in short story and creative nonfiction), and the well of my creativity is still overflowing. More than ten years ago, I challenged myself to not just start writing a novel (as I’d done numerous times); it was time to see one through to the end. I haven’t been able to stop since. I write to find out the ending, to see where my characters will go and how they will grow. I usually suspect I know the direction a story will go but often do not know for certain until I write it. I had no way to describe this process, save to say my “muse” blessed me. Stephen King, though, was able to voice the way I felt about the novels I found myself writing:
Stories are relics . . . . The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; . . . [s]ometimes it’s enormous . . . . Either way . . . the techniques of excavation remain basically the same . . . . I want to put a group of characters . . . in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety . . . but to watch what happens and then write it down. (163-64)
King goes on to say, “I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way . . . . In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it’s something I never expected” (164-65). I had always been embarrassed to tell people my writing “techniques”—that what I wrote was only loosely plotted (at best) and that I often had no certain idea how my stories would end. So many fellow writers worked with outlines, and I worked with but a few vague ideas. Finally, I thought, I had found someone, inarguably the most prolific (and possibly the most beloved) author in America
So, at last, I understood how I worked, but I still didn’t understand why I wrote what I wrote. Why, even though I had written in several different genres with vastly different plots, did I always explore similar heroine traits? Why did I always find myself drawn to a strong woman fighting against all odds, one who had to dig deep inside herself to find even more strength to go on, and eventually became a better person for her struggle? Why—even though these women were very different people—did they seem to belong to the same club, so to speak?
I’ve since come to believe that I keep returning to a theme that’s near and dear to my heart. It has only been in the past century that women as a whole have truly been given the opportunity to speak, to act, to be, and we are still exploring that territory. When I read a novel with a female protagonist, I don’t want to read of a heroine like Adeline in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. Adeline faints frequently in the face of fear; she has little defense, save from men in her life. They control her destiny. While I respect the work of Radcliffe (Romance was published in 1791), I cannot relate to its heroine, and I doubt many contemporary Western women can. It is hard for us to imagine ourselves in the heroine’s shoes, feeling her fear, utter helplessness, and total reliance on men (well…it’s hard for most of us, anyway). We can read of a stronger heroine centuries later in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, published in 1936. Scarlett O’Hara is a protagonist set in the South, spanning pre-Civil War to well after. Scarlett is unusual in that many of the things she does, she does for power. She marries her sister’s beau Frank Kennedy to save her family plantation; she runs a business and doesn’t hide behind closed doors when she is pregnant; and she relentlessly pursues the men who have captured her heart. Scarlett, however, does not have the freedom that contemporary women do; she finds herself manipulating people, lying, and using her feminine charms to get what she wants. Mitchell’s heroine is much like women of her day in the early twentieth century rather than a true Southern belle from the Civil War era, but this gaffe is forgiven because Scarlett is one of the first female protagonists in American literature whose destiny is self-governed and self-propelled. Yes, Scarlett cannot do it on her own, but she does what she wants in whatever fashion she can. So even though it can be argued that Gone with the Wind is an overly nostalgic look at the South that worships a culture that promoted slavery and, in fact, thrived on it, later female authors didn’t have to break as much ground when it came to strong heroines.
One of the first contemporary American novelists to make an impact on me with her strong female characters was Toni Morrison. From the title character of the novel Sula to the women in the tome Paradise (which tells the tale of a plethora of women, each one strikingly different), Morrison explores her protagonists’ strengths, desires, fears, and needs. Each character is fully realized, and there is no way we can put down a Morrison novel without feeling as though we know these women as deeply as we know our sisters or best friends. It is novels like Morrison’s that inspire me to know my characters that well. When I read a “chick lit” novel, a genre so popular today, I realize that we desperately need more novels like Morrison’s, with real characters who face real problems; how many novels can we read about women whose deepest fears entail gaining two pounds or not being able to buy that cute little scarf in the window? How satisfying, really, are these stories? Can we truly relate to these flat cardboard characters or are we just passing our time with them? I must admit that these stories too serve a purpose, but which are the stories we will pick up time and again? Which novels will continue to enlighten us every time we read them? I am certain, based on my own experiences, it is the novels driven by complex characters who face realistic challenges.
The themes I return to in my writing deal with some of the deepest fears and desires any woman could experience. I find myself compelled to write about women who must face overwhelming, sometimes crippling challenges. These are women who long desperately for love but are also afraid of it. They are women who fear showing any sign of weakness but who must face those shortcomings to grow. They are women who love deeply—their companions, friends, children, parents—but often neglect themselves. They are, by and large, the epitome of today’s modern woman—all that is wrong and right, the woman who can now work in a man’s world but still finds herself the person who makes dinner and vacuums the carpet; or the woman who does climb her way to the top of her corporation, only to find that she is viewed as a domineering, cold woman, respected but hated; or the woman whose past haunts her so much that she makes her way in the world supporting herself but guards herself from love in any form. They are women who are no longer reactive but proactive, who are molding their futures, who are living with their mistakes as well as their successes. They are real women whose stories must be told, and I am the archeologist who must unearth their stories and put them together. I feel that only I can tell their stories, through my intuition, muse, or whatever one would like to call it. Even Morrison says,
I have long despised artists’ chatter about muses—“voices” that speak to them and enable a vision, the source of which they could not otherwise name. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one’s insight . . . . [o]r to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction. I regarded the “mystery” of creativity as a shield erected by artists to avoid articulating, analyzing, or even knowing the details of their creative process. (xi)
She goes on to talk about how the death of her father drove her to ask questions of him, which in turn led her to write Song of Solomon, and she adds, “Whatever it is called—muse, insight, inspiration, ‘the dark finger that guides,’ ‘bright angel’—it exists and, in many forms, I have trusted it ever since” (xii).
It is a character or characters, not a plot, that drives me to write. And they emerge on the page much as Anne Lamott describes: “Knowledge of your characters also emerges the way a Polaroid develops: it takes time for you to know them” (44). They are like real people; you don’t know everything about a person when you first meet her, and discovering a character works much the same way. It is only by spending time with a character, telling her story, describing her life, that I get to know who she is and feel comfortable telling her story. And it is only by showing her struggle and growth that we can see what she is truly made of. It is the insatiable desire to write, to excavate, then, that has kept me telling stories, writing poems, and scribbling in notebooks all these years. I feared as a young adult that I would lose the ability or need to write, yet it is stronger than ever before. It is that yearning that will continue to fuel me for decades to come.
Works Cited (presented in true, academic MLA fashion!)
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York
Lamott, Anne. 1994. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York
Anchor, 1995. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Foreword. Song of Solomon. 1977. New York
That probably didn’t help at all, did it? Ah, well…I tried.
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