Kate Maloy: A Double Clanger
With today’s guest author, Kate Maloy, I’m branching out a little: she guest blogs not about how she got started writing and/or publishing, but rather about one of the tools she brings to her writing. Her exploration of this is nearly as lovely as her latest novel, Every Last Cuckoo, which won the American Library Association’s Reader List Award for Women’s Fiction, was a top five BookSense (now IndieBound) pick, and is now out in paperback. Enjoy! – Meg
A friend once told me she had a splinter of ice at her core, and it was one of her best tools as a writer. At the time, I was in the middle of writing Every Last Cuckoo, and her remark sounded a gong in my brain.
Remember that scene in Romancing the Stone—the one where romance writer Joan Wilder (played by Kathleen Turner) has just finished writing a novel and is sobbing into one tissue after another while also crowing, “God, I’m good!”? No splinter of ice in Joan—nothing but heat. She is her characters. She feels what they feel, she cries when they cry, she inhabits their skins.
But me? The gong my friend set off was a double clanger. The first clang was a solid, fully resolved note of recognition. I knew right away that I had a splinter of ice, too. I never cried when I was writing, no matter how sad the scene or how intense the anguish of my beloved character, 75-year-old Sarah Lucas. The second clang hung in the air on a rising note—a question. How could ice in one’s heart be a good writing tool? All along, I had thought it was a detriment. I had thought it put too great a distance between me and my character. Readers, therefore, would stay aloof as well.
To my surprise, though, readers said from the start that they felt all the impact of Sarah’s loss after the death of her husband, Charles. They experienced with her the long season of dark grief and despair, and they shared both the pain and the joy of her slow return to light. They struggled through change with her, learned something from her resurging energies, and even saw her as a role model for their own later years.
That’s when I realized that I, too, would have cried and rejoiced with Sarah if I had met her as a reader instead of as her author. As a reader, I am thrilled each time I enter the fictional dream and find it inhabited by people as real to me as those I encounter in my own life. I love nothing more than to feel myself pulled into their reality and to be moved and taught by whatever befalls them.
As a writer, though, I have learned to value the ice within. I’m grateful that it cools my blood, for I understand that dreaming the fictional dream is not enough. Making it fully real to others demands painstaking attention to craft—to structure, pacing, themes, conflicts, resolution, visualization, setting. These technical complexities require ice. If I had given myself over to Sarah, I’d have been like surgeon trying to operate on her own child, unable to wield the scalpel for the trembling of her hands.
As for that romance writer, Joan Wilder—well, consider the difference between an author who gives us a bodice-ripper and one who gives us an Anna Karenina or a Wuthering Heights. I would like to think that Leo Tolstoy and Emily Brontë each carried a splinter of ice inside. Though I am far short of their league, I do think I have made it beyond Joan’s, because I have ice, too. – Kate
Posted in Author Stories
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July 22nd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
oh, I love that analogy. I’ve always thought of it as just another little version of me in my head, one that’s removed from whatever is actually going on and which is coolly observing and recording for future use. (That makes me sound like I’m hearing voices in the schizophrenic sense, which I’m not.) Anyway, I’m with you – I don’t cry writing about something wrenching, nor do I laugh out loud when writing something funny. Re-reading afterwards, though, I will sometimes get teary-eyed or chuckle at my own jokes.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:58 pm
That’s the ticket — if you can write with a dispassionate eye, and then on rereading find yourself laughing or crying, you’ve done the work. When I’m really in the serious throes of something good I’m just a conduit for the muse anyway, as hippie-dippy as that may sound, and you can’t get much cooler than that.
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:28 am
I am not a writer, but a reader. In some books, like Every Last Cuckoo, I am totally living in the character, feeling the characters emotions. In others, not so much. Reading Kate’s explanation of the splinter of ice, I realized that was exactly the reason. Without the splinter, I am watching the author’s emotions, not living those of her character.
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:33 am
I feel as if I dwell on another planet altogether. I cry all the time while I am writing. (I lauigh, too. And I talk to myself a lot.)
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
— Robert Frost
July 23rd, 2009 at 3:47 am
Katharine, I live on the planet with you. When I write, I am totally immersed in the ‘now’ of the piece and every emotion is heightened and sharpened. Whenever I have written something I think is good and real and true I am also near collapse from the sheer feeling of it.
Regardless, Kate, I am fascinated by the discussion of process and how each of us finds our own way to get what is inside of out. So many different ways to travel that road.
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:32 am
Oh, I admire your ability to have distance, as well as your ability to realize you have distance.
When I write, it’s more like Lisa suggested – the muse takes over. Then I wake up and see where we are. I am in awe of people who have learned control. I am definitely not there yet.
Thanks for sharing.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Oh, I don’t mean to suggest that I’m always thinking technically, because I get into that zone where I’m barely aware I’m myself. That place where I feel like a conduit rather than a conscious maker of something. It’s just that I don’t fully engage with a character’s emotions. Not sure why, just that it works for me–I need the distance, maybe to keep the boundaries clear.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
It’s interesting to hear how the process is so different for different authors. I tend to get emotional when I’m writing emotional scenes. I do need to feel it to write it, I guess. I don’t think one way is necessarily better than another; we all have our different methods and need to honor what works for us!