Here at 4 and 20, I've focused on debut novelists and the back stories behind their first books. But now, I'd like to share advice from authors whose writing about writing has been helpful. I'll start with Allan Gurganus who I was lucky enough to study with at Sarah Lawrence College in their MFA program. I learned a great deal from him—not only on the page, but about being a writer and a citizen. I admire how he seems to balance his life elegantly. On his website, he says he rises early each morning to write and garden. He is also a social activist. I'm happy to hear that a long-awaited follow up to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All will be published in September. I can't wait to read it.
In this interview from several years ago, Allan reminds writers how lucky we are to get to do what we love to do. I also love that he says novelists' lives begin at forty. That's my kind of math!
Allan Gurganus:
"What I do is, I get up in the morning and I write the way a bird sings. The bird doesn't say, "Just think, there'll be the collected hits.” They just twitter, twitter, twitter and some of the twitters are better than others and you get clusters and you see how this is related to that and then you have the twitter symphony. It comes out in a way, like yard goods, you mete it out. It's a very intuitive and extremely inefficient process, this business of writing fiction the way I write it....
"It's seasonal work. It comes and goes and I have been very well paid for books and I have also given books away. The great privilege is to be able to get up every morning and do it. How many doctors would go unpaid just for the privilege of being in the examination room with patients everyday? That's what most American writers are doing, they are not writing for money, they are writing because writing is a clarifying experience. It's a second form of dreaming. It's a cultural intuition. It's a way of having the world make brief sense for yourself. It's very hard to give up. If somebody came and told me, "You'll never earn another penny from doing this and you've got to find three day jobs," I would not be able to stop. I have a lap-top on the airplane, as I am on this tour. It's not that I am writing a great masterpiece, it's like a bread maker, I just have to have my hands in the yeast....
"John Cheever used to say, ‘Fiction is a force of memory misunderstood.’ Genuinely—when it's working—when you are in the zone, it is truly like remembering something fourteen times as vivid as anything you have ever lived. It's given to you. All you have to do as a good secretary is just transcribe it and get it down and polish it....
"I'm only fifty, and I feel a novelist begins life at forty. So I'm only ten, really. I'm just getting my sea legs. I have a lot of energy and I have a tremendous sense of commitment. I don't have a career, I have a mission. I'm from a long line of ministers, so I've applied my status as the black sheep—the fallen, queer one—to transforming myself into the ultimate pulpit-pounder."
Thank you, Allan. Now, back to the keyboard we go!