I don't usually send out 2 Museletters in one month, but wanted to share this piece on Isabelle Allende which came in on the Writer's Almanac post today. It seemed encouraging, like the story about my Mom who realized when her grandson was born that she might be gone by the time he wanted to hear her stories, so she had to figure out some way to compile them. "Write a book," I said. "I can't write a book," she said. "Can you write a letter?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Then write a letter every day. After one month we'll put them together." Now she has a book called Letters to Chad: Memories from My Childhood which is in its 3rd printing.
Here's Allende's story:
Today, writer Isabel Allende is starting a new book, just as she has
been doing every single January 8th for the past 29 years. On January 8, 1981, when
Chilean-born Allende was living in Venezuela and working as a school
administrator and freelance journalist, she got a phone call that her beloved
grandfather, at 99 years old, was dying. She started writing him a letter, and
that letter turned into her very first novel, The House of the Spirits. She said, "It was such a
lucky book from the very beginning, that I kept that lucky date to start."
Today is a sacred day for her, and she treats it in
a ceremonial, ritualistic way. She gets up early this morning and goes alone to
her office, where she lights candles "for the spirits and the muses."
She surrounds herself with fresh flowers and incense, and she meditates.
She sits down at the computer, turns it on, and
begins to write. She says: "I try to write the first sentence in a state
of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence
usually determines the whole book. It's a door that opens into an unknown
territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly as I write, the
story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me."
She said, "When I start I am in a total limbo.
I don't have any idea where the story is going or what is going to happen or
why I am writing it." She doesn't use an outline, and she doesn't talk to
anybody about what she's writing. She doesn't look back at what she's written
until she's completed a whole first draft - which she then prints out, reads
for the first time, and goes about the task of revising, where she really
focuses on heightening and perfecting tension in the story and the tone and
rhythm of the language.
She said that she take notes all the time and
carries a notebook in her purse so that she can jot down interesting things she
sees or hears. She clips articles out of newspapers, and when people tell her a
story, she writes down that story. And then, when she is in the beginning
stages of working on a book, she looks through all these things that she's
collected and finds inspiration in them.
She writes in a room alone for 10 or 12 hours a
day, usually Monday through Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. During this
time, she says, "I don't talk to anybody; I don't answer the telephone.
I'm just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me."
She's the author of nearly 20 books published since
1982, among them Paula (1995), Daughter of Fortune (1999), Portrait in Sepia (2000), and the recent memoirThe
Sum of Our Days
(2008). Her work has been translated into 30 languages, and her books have sold
more than 51 million copies. She continues to write fiction in Spanish though
she's lived in the United States for decades. Margaret Sayers Peden has done
the English translations of several of Isabel Allende's books.
That's all. One woman's story. It's not yours. You have your own. But what does it look like? What kind of time do you give your work? Do you talk to anybody then? Do you feel like a medium or an instrument?
Remember last month when I wrote about how synchronous my morning prayers/writings were getting to be with the books I picked up after writing? This morning was the same. I wrote in my journal:
What or who calls me to do anything?
I am called to work
by the moans of hungry children,
by the bones in the feet of African women
who walk four miles for foul water,
by the massive and vulnerable
paw of the polar bear,
by the soon to be gone
song of the whooping crane.
I am called to work
by the spirit I commune with
every dawn as I pray to earth, to heaven
to east and west
"Let me be all I came here to be."
True or false, I don't care.
I'm in the habit of believing
I am not alone for any
second of the day.
I walk through the corridors of God's mind.
I am the earth awakening to know itself.
I am the child of doubt and certainty,
wisdom and bewilderment.
I am the one that holds the many,
my feet between the folds
of what is and what will be.
It is the hunger of today
that calls me to work
and the promise of tomorrow
that keeps me going.
So when I read Allende's piece, I felt in the company of the loving faithful. I know there are thousands of us casting new thoughts into the world, writing new stories even as I write this. It's history we are making and it's the future that is calling us. How round and beautiful!
Blessings across the miles,
Jan
