For Writers: How to
Begin a Novel (How I Did, Anyway)
by
Joyce Maynard
(In which I reveal how a combination of influences including the eruption of Mount St. Helen's, a childbirth manual, an erotic novel, a Robert Altman movie, an abortion, a George Jones album and a Van Morrison album, a visit with Ann Beattie, a history of eating disorders and an over-active fantasy life led me to write my novel, Baby Love)
This is a section for
writers in which I offer thoughts and inspiration that might help you
in your work. I'll talk here about the process of creating a piece of
writing whether it's a 500-word essay, a novel, or a letter to someone
you love.
Fiction — THE CLOUD CHAMBER
No doubt there are far better authorities than I. The one area about which I can unabashedly claim to be the world's number one expert is my own work. So when I talk about a particular writing issue, I ll often use my own work as an example. But I wouldn't want you getting the idea that I regard my work as some kind of exemplar. It's simply the work whose creation I have been intimately involved in. I know how I do what I do, and why I make the choices I make. So those are the choices I'm likely to talk about here.
For starters, I thought I'd tackle the question of starting out and finding one's subject. You have doubtless heard people say, "Write about what you know. Sound advice. But I want to add, "Write about what you want to know about." Because if you want to know about something -- if there is a particular character or situation that fascinates you -- then very likely, someone else will be interested too. If nothing else, the subjects that stir you most are apt to evoke your most emotionally-alive writing.
Writing involves putting down on paper (or a computer screen) what you feel and know. But ideally, it's also an act of discovery. There's a certain deadness to a piece of writing that has been set onto paper, as a kind of set piece -- conceived in the head, transferred to the page, with no evidence that some kind of growth and revelation has occurred for the writer, as it should for the reader. If you read a book of mine, I want you to wonder what will happen to the characters. Know, as you do, that at the moment I was writing, I hadn't completely discovered, myself, where my own writing would take me. How I came to write my first novel, Baby Love, is a good example.
Years ago -- 1981, actually -- I interviewed the writer Ann Beattie, who was a real favorite of mine, about a novel she had just published that I very much admired, called Falling In Place.
At this point in my career, I had never written a novel, and I was earning my living, somewhat dishearteningly, writing articles for magazines. I remember feeling vaguely depressed, heading off to interview this young woman writer, just a few years older than myself, who was clearly doing work she very much cared about, while I was, in my view, hustling to make a buck any way I could. I had a young child at the time. My husband and I were broke. I dreamed of being a serious fiction writer, but my bread and butter was Family Circle Magazine.
Ann Beattie told me something enormously helpful that day. She said she had written this particular novel in a matter of weeks. Just hearing that it was physically possible to write that many pages in so few days (putting aside, for a moment, the question "what kind of pages?) freed me up and gave me hope for myself. Because while I would never have had the kind of financial latitude that would enable me to give over a year of my life to writing a novel, I figured I could give myself a few weeks, anyway.
So I went home and announced I was going to write a novel in three weeks. I gave myself the gift of three weeks in which I would put away my magazine assignments. I'd put my year-and-a-half-old daughter in all-day day care, not cook meals, not clean my house, and write what I really wanted, for once. I set up my typewriter on the kitchen table (having no office, at that point). Only then, with the paper rolled into the machine, did I allow myself to ask the question "What will this novel be about?"
Back to the notion, that you should write about what you know. At that point in my life, I knew about life in a small and apparently very quiet New Hampshire town. I knew about babies (because I had one). I knew about eating disorders (because I'd suffered from them). I knew about small New Hampshire towns, because -- except for a very brief time I'd spent in New York City -- those were the only places I'd ever lived.
I thought about where my passions lay, the things I cared about most. Love being top of the list -- love of a woman for a man, a woman for a child. I thought about the quality of feeling I had for my daughter. I thought about the desolation I'd known at the end of a doomed love affair. Thought about the experience of becoming a mother, and -- a very different experience I'd also had not so long before -- the experience of having an abortion. If I wanted to bring strong, powerful emotion to my story, it seemed like a good bet that tapping into my feelings about those things would be a good place to start.
As for the part about writing not only what you know, but what you want to know: Every day in my town, I used to watch a bunch of teenaged girls sitting on the steps of our laundromat, endlessly brushing their babies' hair and styling it with barrettes, flirting with boys.
I was so curious about those girls. (Hard to call them women, though they were mothers.) As a woman who was having a hard enough time raising a young child, in my late twenties, I wanted to know what it would be like trying to do it, at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Ifigured one way to do it was to get in their heads enough to create voices for them. Then they would tell me something.
I have always been interested in the way one's own personal experience combines with shared global experience: the way, for instance, that when I was a kid, I experienced the assassination of JFK, with a mix of TV images, and images of my fifth grade classroom and our family living room. At the particular moment I decided to write a novel, an event was taking place that seemed to me filled with dark and apocalyptic suggestion: the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which was showering half the state of Oregon with volcanic ash. I decided that if I were following that story, as I wrote, so could my characters.
If Ann Beattie's novel Falling In Place was a strong influence, so were two other books I'd read around this same period. One was a thick volume, decorated with mandalas, and self-published by a little press run by a commune in Tennessee. The book was called Spiritual Midwifery, and it was all about giving birth, and how to do it right. That book -- with its first-person birthing tales, written by men and women living in this commune, and filled with the language of its chief guru -- had been my bible throughout my pregnancy with my daughter.
Around this same time, I had just read a book that could hardly have been farther away from Spiritual Midwifery. That one was the novel Nine and A Half Weeks, the story of a sado-masochistic relationship that manages to be both horrifying, erotic, and strangely romantic. I had never had such a relationship. But the idea of it fascinated me. I wanted to imagine how it might be that a woman would get herself into a relationship like that. I wanted to get into the head of a man who would treat a woman that way, in the name of love.
Sado-masochism and babies. You could call it an unlikely mix. But I figured I'd put them together: Baby love, romantic love, destructive love, self-destructive love. I took all that -- obsession with babies, the experience of becoming a mother. The loneliness and desolation (as well as the beauty) of the rural landscape I inhabited. Small towns. Romantic longings.
Nothing fit into a neat outline, that was for sure. There was no clear story suggested by the set of ideas I'd placed before myself. I was more concerned with thinking about mood and tone, color and voice, than I was with a clear, narrative outline. Maybe because my father had been an abstract painter -- and I'd watched the way he approached a blank piece of board, with paint -- I was less concerned with the creation of a linear plan than I was with sketching in a few rough forms.
If I were a mathematician or a scientist, I'd probably need to follow a highly structured series of steps to solve a problem. But since the problem before me, if that's what it was, involved the writing of a novel, it seemed more important to establish a tone and a mood than an outline. I wanted my novel to have the feeling of a country song: plaintive and filled with longing, romantic, yearning, occasionally funny, but also dark; I wanted my novel to be steeped in the small ordinary details of daily small-town life as I knew it, but possessing a measure of big-time melodrama too.
If I want to get into a mood (for romance, or for writing) the best way I know is to put on a little music. To get myself in the mood for this first novel of mine, the music I chose was a record of greatest hits by my favorite male country singer, George Jones, and an album called Into the Music by Van Morrison, in which he practically sounds as if he's making love, while he's singing.
I write books. But the truth is, I've never been a big reader. In addition to Ann Beattie, the one other writer I had been reading, religiously, at this point in my life, was Raymond Carver, who was and continues to serve as a guide, in the simplicity and directness of his writing, and the subjects he chooses. To this day, I read and reread Carver's stories of so-called ordinary life, and the unadorned, deceptively simple way he has . I love his ear for ordinary talk, and the unglamourous places he locates his stories. As a person who has lived most of her life so far in places like those, I knew I wanted to locate my stories there too.
Carver and maybe Jane Austen aside, however, my literature has always been music, and the movies. When I write a novel, I am actually describing a movie I already see, as if it were being screened in my head . And in fact, my other major influence, in Baby Love, was a filmmaker -- Robert Altman -- and a movie of his I had just seen and loved, Nashville.
Several things I loved about Nashville. One was the way it approximated real time: the way the entire action of the movie took place over a few days, and the time-bomb intensity that gave to the film. So I decided the action in my novel would play out, similarly, over the course of a handful of action-packed days, with the pressure constantly building. I also loved the way, in Nashville, Altman had thrown a lot of characters at us, with no apparent connection to one another, and the fascination that came with watching this group of seemingly unrelated characters move inexorably towards a situation of disaster that would bring them all together.
These were the sorts of things I was thinking about when I wrote down my first sentence. It was very simple: "Four girls sit on the steps outside the laundromat."
I still didn't have a clue what my novel was going to be about, but now there was a place to describe, and some characters to put in it. So I let myself describe those girls. And of course part of what I got into, describing them, were stories. Stories about the boys they'd been with. Their parents. Their feeling about school, and their parents, and cars. What they ate and what their bodies looked like and how they felt about them. What they did at night (watch TV and drive around. ) What they loved. What they thought about sex. What they dreamed for. The direction their fantasies took them.
That took me through a few pages. And the great thing was, it didn't feel like a chore, as it would've , if I were simply putting down what I already knew. I wasn't simply writing; I was reading. Reading my own novel, as I wrote it.
Came a point where I had finished that scene. I wasn't finished with my teenage girls forever, but the spin cycle was finished, down at the laundromat where they were hanging out, and they were packing up. So I took a little break from the story of those girls and started another one. This time it was about a character -- not me, but a young woman dealing with some of the things I had dealt with at one particularly desperate stage of my life. Aching for a man who has abandoned her. Unable to go out into the world. Bulimic. More than a little self-destructive, and bathing in her own unhappiness as she sits in her house all day, watching soap operas and listening to (who else?) George Jones.
When I lived through a similar stage, it was pretty awful. Writing about such a character, on the other hand, was liberating. It's a thrilling thing, actually, to take one's own worst and most painful experiences and transform them into something positive: a good piece of writing. I could take the aspects of my real life that I wanted to use, and spin them into a story that went way beyond my own. I could throw out the parts I didn't want, and bring in parts that never happened. In life, I may have been unable to determine how things would turn out. In my writing, I had ultimate control.
The other interesting thing that happens when you write this way -- which is to say, when you set out to tell a story whose ending you don't know yet -- is that at some point, if you do your job right, what happens in the story will be revealed to you.
What do I mean? If you create a character who has a certain psychological authenticity -- if you give her a background, and a set of circumstances, and an outlook, and a voice -- that character will take on a life of her own. Instead of the writer deciding what a character's going to do, that character's own personality and traits, as described by the writer, will dictate what happens to her. She will actually tell you her own story.
That's what happened when I wrote Baby Love. I set a group of characters into motion: some teenage mothers and the boys who loved or didn't love them. A girl who gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion. A lonely young woman, a few years older than them, recovering from a disastrous love affair, who lives in the same town. A busload of members of a commune whose religion is babies and home birth. As my homage to Nine and A Half Weeks, I threw in the wild card of a man locked up for the murder of a woman he'd loved so much that (in his view of things) there was nothing for it but to kill her. He runs a personals ad. My lonely young woman answers it. Who knew how their stories would intersect? I was as curious as anyone, to find out. I saw myself, like the puppetmaker Geppetto in Pinocchio, creating characters who -- if I did my job right -- would take on lives of their own, and lead me to where my story was meant to go.
They did. Three weeks later, I finished the first draft of Baby Love.
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