Writing, Barbara Kingsolver says, is 2 percent magic and 98 percent work.
Kingsolver talked about the magic and the work during a recent appearance in Portland as part of a Literary Arts’ lecture series.
Literary Arts officials pestered Kingsolver for years before she accepted their invitation to speak in one of the organization’s annual author lectures. She’s been the group’s most requested author bar none, Literary Arts officials have said.
It’s easy to see why. Dressed in a bright orange tunic, black leggings and brown boots, Kingsolver mesmerized a SRO audience of more than 2,770 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for 90 minutes last Friday night, discussing her latest book, Flight Behavior: A Novel, writing, her career, the author as activist, and more.
About that magic. When Kingsolver first started thinking about the book that would become Flight Behavior, she says she woke up one morning with a vision about a major biological event. It was a crazy, fact-defying event, like many dreams are. But it got her thinking about whether such an alteration of how the world works – an alteration due to climate change – really could happen, and what the results would be if it did. “Ooh, if that happened, it’d be a novel,” she says she remembers thinking.
That was the magic.
The work came in researching the scientific roots of the event, talking to scientists, and then coming up with a story to fill in what would happen to the people and community surrounding it.
Here are some other writing lessons from Kingsolver’s talk:
1. For a novel to be good, it needs to be simultaneously timeless and new. The best works of fiction, Kingsolver says, tackle timeless issues, such as the difficulty of communicating with people who are different from you. At the same time good novels address universal problems or truths, they also need to include an element of the new, something that’s never been addressed before. In the case of Flight Behavior, that something new is climate change, “which historically hasn’t been the subject of fiction,” she says.
2. For characters to ring true, you have to love all of them, even the bad ones. As a writer, you’ll never be able to completely commit to a character unless you can put yourself inside their head. To do that, you have to love them, or at least sympathize with them – even characters that are pure evil. “You have to so you know what it’s like to be them,” she says. “Everyone in a novel thinks that they’re the good guy.” She empathizes by imagining “that I’m their mother.”
3. Lean heavily on the “Delete” key. Don’t be so in love with your rough drafts you can’t distinguish good writing from bad. Computers have made hiding mistakes a lot easier, she says. “Archivists of the future will never know how bad your first drafts were.”
4. Never show them how hard it really is. Writing is like ballet, she says. “A ballerina looks like she’s levitating, but look at her feet and they’re bleeding.”
5. At some point, stop showing people your unpublished work. If you’re starting out, it’s a good idea to share what you’re writing with your husband, wife, writer friends or anyone whose opinion you trust. “You should listen to everybody. If they tell you it stinks, it probably does.” But at some point you need to start believing in yourself. “You’re the authority, you need to write from a place of authority,” she says.
6. Writer shouldn’t shy away from taking up social causes. It seems strange that everywhere in the world but the United States, people look to artists to be arbiters of social change, to show not what the world is but what it could be. Here, she says, “It’s like art and politics got a divorce in the 1950s.”
Read the New York Times‘ review of Flight Behavior: The Butterfly Effect.
Read more from Kingsolver on writing and her approach to fiction here: About Writing, Barbara Kingsolver, The Authorized Site
[Barabara Kingsolver photo by David Wood.]
Barbara Kingsolver has always mesmerized me. Her intellect and social consciousness have always loomed large. She would laugh if I referred to her as a National Treasure. But so be it. She is. And she is so right about the divorce of fiction and social conscience. It’s like most literary fiction authors are afraid to be blacklisted still. How can that have a hold over our conscience so much? And yet the work of artists in South America is infused with social conscience. Did we export it? Portland is very lucky to have Ms. Kingsolver speak there. We should all count ourselves lucky she is here to jar our own numbed insights. Looking forward to reading this new work!
Nice insights Lee, thanks for sharing.
“Mesmerized” is the perfect word to describe the audience in Cambridge last week, too. I went with my daughter. The invitation to speak was from Harvard Bookstore, so unfortunately the conversation was not as much about writing as I would have liked, because many of the questions from the audience were about science. Ms. Kingsolver did read to us and also emphasized the importance of the first sentence. That it must promise something that is provided by the end of the book. She said she rewrote her first sentences many, many times.
Thanks for sharing that Alexandra. I agree about the importance of first sentences. In my news writing, if I can get the lead, the rest of story falls into place. In these days of diminishing attention spans, getting people hooked from the very first line is more important than ever.
Michelle R.
Great post.
I remember seeing ballet dancers after their classes, with the beat-up feet. So true.
Thanks, Michelle!
As the mother of a dancer, I can attest to this too. My daughter – a modern dancer – has to soak her feet in Epsom salts sometimes they hurt so much – and that’s without point shoes.
Michelle
I wish I could have been there. I have read Animal Vegetable Miracle and The Lacuna over the past year and just love Kingsolver’s writing. I think the part I need to take most to heart here is #5. I suppose writing a novel is a long solitary journey; the sharing comes later. Thanks for posting this, Michelle. I can’t wait to read her newest work, because it is a theme I feel strongly.
Her latest, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle are on my reading list too.
Michelle
“Lean heavily on the Delete key.” Love it! Quite possibly my favorite key, and I promote its beneficial — and sometimes soul-saving — use as often as possible.
Nice piece!
d.