Why We Write Read Free Page B

me. From those seventeen steps on, I am in another world and I am another person.
    I go there scared. And excited. And disappointed—because I have a sort of idea that isn’t really an idea. The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows up.
    Heaven is when the muse shows up
    When I feel that the story is beginning to pick up rhythm—the characters are shaping up, I can see them, I can hear their voices, and they do things that I haven’t planned, things I couldn’t have imagined—then I know the book is somewhere, and I just have to find it, and bring it, word by word, into this world.
    Then my life changes. Then it becomes a completely different process of excitement, and obsession, and stress. I can work for fourteen hours. Just sitting down for that much time is hard! My son programmed my computer so that every forty-five minutes I have to get up. If I don’t, I get so stiff that I can’t get up at the end of the day.
    I correct to the point of exhaustion, and then finally I say I give up. It’s never quite finished, and I suppose it could always be better, but I do the best I can. In time, I’ve learned to avoid overcorrecting. When I got my first computer and I realized how easy it was to change things ad infinitum, my style became very stiff.
    There’s a certain charm in what is spontaneous. I want the reader to feel that I’m telling the story to him or her in particular. When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and repetitions. I try to avoid that in literature, but I still want it to be a conversation, like storytelling usually is. It’s not a lecture.
    It’s hard to find that balance. But I’ve been writing for thirty years, so now I know when I’m overdoing it. I read it aloud, and if it’s not the way I talk, I change it.
    Channeling an eighteenth-century Haitian slave
    I have to be very careful with dialogue, because my books are translated into thirty-five languages. It’s hard to translate dialogue. Colloquialisms change and the book becomes dated. You never know how your characters’ conversations are going to translate to Romanian, to Vietnamese. So I don’t use a lot of dialogue. What I do use, I try to keep really simple.
    In
Island Beneath the Sea
, the slave couldn’t be more different than myself physically or emotionally. She’s a tall African woman. Yet I know how I would feel if I was in her place. When I’m writing, I
am
a slave. I
am
on the plantation. I feel the heat, I smell the smells.
    Being in the thrall of creating a story, it’s a sickness. I carry the story with me all day, all night, in dreams, all the time. Everything I see, everything that happens, it seems to me the universe is talking to me because I connect it to the story. I feel invincible. It could be the most horrible story, but I feel totally happy.
    When I was writing my latest book,
Island Beneath the Sea
, I got so awfully sick that I thought I had stomach cancer. I kept vomiting. I couldn’t lie down. I had to sleep sitting up. My husband said, “This is your body reacting to the story. When you finish the book, you’ll be okay.” And that is exactly what happened.
    The best time: the first
    I’ve received so many gifts as a writer. I’ve won awards and prizes. My books have been made into movies and plays. I waseven a flag bearer in the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Can you imagine? I walked into the stadium behind Sophia Loren and before Susan Sarandon. I have a fantastic picture of the ceremony. You see Sophia Loren—beautiful, tall, elegant—and then the flag, and then a hole, and then Susan Sarandon, also beautiful. I’m five feet tall, and I am under the flag. I’m invisible.
    But the best time for me was in 1981, when I was writing my first novel. There was no ambition to it, no