A Conversation with:
ISABEL ALLENDE

Copyright © 1994 Off the Shelf Productions. All rights reserved.

As you've traveled around the world and lived in and visited many different places, do you find that people treasure storytelling as a tradition?

I don't think that people are aware of that. But we can't live without stories. We are all the time telling stories. We go to the movies because we love stories. We listen to the soap operas because we love stories, for no other reason. Sometimes I suspect that books as books will disappear, the form of a book, and reading will disappear, will be overcome by other media, probably images or sound, but storytelling won't disappear, because it is so important for humankind. Someone said that stories are to humankind what dreams are to individuals. If you don't dream, you go mad. You need to unclog the mind, to connect to your own unconscious, to the unconscious part of yourself. In the same way, humankind needs to connect with a myth, with the collective dreams and hopes and fears. And all that you get in stories.

Do dreams influence the stories that you've told? Do they have a relationship to your writing?

I can't say if the dreams influence the stories or the stories influence the dreams, because there is a point when I'm writing, when I'm immersed in a story, in a novel, that I dream all the time. And I dream things that are connected with the writing, and sometimes I solve problems of the novel in dreams, but I don't know if these dreams are provoked by the fact that I'm all the time, all day long working with this story. And then at night I just can't rest. I get all those images back. Or, if it's the other way around, that my mind is suffocating with images and I need to write them.

How do stories begin for you? Do they begin with characters, or do they begin with something other than the characters?

They usually begin with an emotion that is pressing to my life. It's a personal experience, something that - I'm transforming the writing. And I'm never any of my characters. I'm not writing about my life. However, I write that story because something happened in my life that forced me to write it. So it always begins with a very strong emotion, that is maybe not bothering me, but is inside me in such a way that I feel like a pregnancy and I have to give birth to whatever I have inside: demons, or angels, who knows?

Your first book was published ten years ago or so. Had you had an outlet for the stories that you wanted to tell, and for that need before novels came along, or before these books came along. Were you telling stories long before that?

I was telling stories but not writing stories. I was brought up in a male chauvinist society, in a very patriarchal family, where women were not supposed to be creative. I didn't even finish high school. I didn't have a proper education. No one expected me to do anything but be a wife, a housewife, mother, a good spouse, and maybe have some job to help my husband along at the beginning. Well I worked all my life and I was telling stories without knowing you could make a living with this. On the other hand, I never thought of myself as a creative person, or I never allowed myself to think that I could write something that would be interesting for anybody. Because that's the way I was brought up. It took me 40 years to realize that I love to do this, and that I know how to do it.

How did the publication of your first book change your life and change the way you thought about creativity?

At the beginning I was not aware of the changes. I was only aware of the incredible joy that I felt. I felt that I had been carrying a load of stones on my back, and by writing, I had been able to get rid of that, and transform those stones into something wonderful that I could use in everyday life. On the other hand, I had the feeling that I had recovered my roots. That my roots were no longer in Chile or in a family, they were in this book, in these memories that I had invented. I realize that I could invent my own life, recreate it every day by writing about it. I realized also that I could never stop doing it. It was like an addiction. Once you get hooked, it is impossible to leave it.

How do imagine an audience when you're in the process of writing?

I don't imagine an audience. I imagine one reader. It used to be a young women, just any young woman, and also my mother. I think of her because she's my editor and she's the only one who reads my books before they are published. But, I can't think of a large audience because that would paralyze me. I need to think of one person. But I need that person, because I don't write for myself. And I don't think a book is an end in itself. A book is just a bridge, that you cross to touch somebody and grab someone by the neck and say, "Hey I believe this. You want to hear this story? You want to share this with me, this wonderful experience of storytelling?"

How did you begin to first get the ideas that became The Infinite Plan? What was the emotion that generated that book?

I think two emotions: love and curiosity. I moved to this country nearly six years ago because I fell in love with a man. It was not in my plans at all. I was on a lecturing tour, like now. So I was spending one night in every city, crushing always. And then all of a sudden this person appeared, and we just locked in, immediately. And I moved to his house, and later we married, and we've been married ever since. And it's working, amazingly. And part of the love I felt for this man was the fact that he was so different. He seemed like a Martian. He spoke another language. He was another color, another size. He was the most unexpected person in my life, and I really wanted to know more about him and about the world from which he came.

I was also in awe of California. California's a weird place. I don't know if you've been there, but it's impossible not to write about California if you stay there for awhile. The air is loaded with stories. All my friends are weirdos; they all have incredible stories. So I had to listen, to open my eyes, to understand a place where I was living now, and I think that out of that curiosity that insatiable need to know more, I got the story.

How do stories grow in your mind before you sit down and start putting them on paper? Do you live with them a long time and then start to write? What's the writing process like for you?

I always start my novels on January 8, but I don't finish them on January 7, so there is some months that I am not writing, that I spend thinking of the next book that I am going to write. And sometimes it happens that I sit down to write the first sentence on January 8th and there is another book inside me. And the one that I had planned so meticulously probably won't ever be written, by me at least. I have learned to relax and to just let things happen on a very organic level.

Right now, I know that when I go back in July, I will start writing - I've already started writing something - and I will write. But, I don't plan. I don't have an outline. I don't say, "In this chapter I will have this and this." I don't make notes about the scenes I will have in the book. I let them grow like a plant inside me. And when the time comes to write, I turn on my computer, and there is something inside of me - I don't know what it is - that i have to let it happen sometimes in spite of myself. And that's how it happens: very slowly. I spend a lot of time writing. I write and correct and eliminate a lot. And I know it's a very hard way of doing it. But I have tried the rational way. I have tried to make an outline, to make notes. It doesn't work for me.

What does it feel like for you when you finish a book and send it out into the world to be read by people?

At the beginning, a little scared. I'm always scared of how it will be received. But it doesn't last a long time because usually I'm already thinking of something else, I'm into something else. And once the book is published, it doesn't belong to me anymore. So, I don't mind, I don't care very much about it. It's strange because people still ask me questions about, for example, The House of the Spirits, and I don't remember. I have forgotten because it was written so long ago.

What's it like when you get reaction from people who have read your books, and your books have touched them in some way?

It's very moving, very moving when someone comes over and says, "I have started writing the story of my family because I read your book." Or, "I decided I'm going to change my relationship with my kids, or with my companion, because I want to be more open," or whatever. It's touching, because, finally, why do you write? You write because you want to have friends. You want to share with another person something that is important to you.

Why is it that people read? Why is that you pick up a book to read, a novel? What is it that we look for in books and novels?

I don't know. I look for the story, and I try to learn something from the story. But I don't do that consciously, that's not my intention. I just want to be entertained. And reading is a wonderful form of entertainment because it's so private, itÿs quiet, you do it alone. You hold the book in your hand as you hold a baby. And it's such a wonderful, private secret. A feast! Nothing compared to the movies, for example, where you share the experience in a dark room with a lot of people and everything is given to you. In the book, half the book is written by the reader. The book changes with each reader. Each reader adds or subtracts according to their own experience, sentiments, biography.

Do you have lots of ideas that sometimes don't turn into a book? How do you know when you have a story that you want to tell in the pages of a book and tell it in that length?

I'm full of stories, and I think they are all good for a book. My problem is, I don't have enough time to write them. Until now, I have never, never felt terror for the blank page, or blocked in any way. On the contrary, my problem is to sort out in this confusion of stories what I need to tell now.

How is the process of writing a book a way of understanding something about yourself that you didn't know, or that you weren't able to know without writing that book?

Ultimately, I suppose that is what happens. Why do you choose that story? Why do you choose those characters? Why is it that you can't write anything else, only that? Because you need to explore something about yourself that you don't even know, that you need to do that. So after the book is published sometimes years after, I realize what the book is really about. I realize that I needed to find out something about life, or about my own life, or about my memories, and that's why I wrote it. While I'm in the process of writing, I'm so fascinated with the storytelling, I'm so entertained myself, that I don't even know what I am doing. Only later I know that I wrote that book because I needed something.

How does reading influence your writing? Or interacting with other authors?

I don't interact with other authors very much. My language is Spanish, so I write in Spanish. Therefore I can't share my writing with anybody in the United States. I don't have an editor and a publishing house. They buy a translation. My publisher is in Barcelona, too far away. So the only person who really reads my books before they are published is my mother, and I can only share that with her after the book is finished. I never talk about the process of writing with her. And when I'm writing, I read a lot that is related to the book because I have to research. I read little fiction while I'm writing. And when I'm not writing, like now on a tour, I read fiction, and I have discovered a sisterhood of great storytellers in the United States. Before, I didn't get those books: book written by women - from minority groups mainly - and now I'm fascinated with that kind of book. I read those books and I think they influence me in the sense that I feel more comfortable with the kind of stories I'm telling. I'm not so lost as I was before when I didn't have this shared female experience of storytelling in this particular way.

Well, Isabel, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

Thank you.

Excerpts from an interview by Steve Moore, Off The Shelf Productions, 1994. Printed here with kind permission.

Kaye Gibbons || Ruth Rendell || Isabel Allende || Alix Kates Shulman
Terry McMillan || Helen Caldicott || Doris Lessing || Kate Clinton || Sara Paretsky

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