A Conversation with:
KAYE GIBBONSCopyright
©1993 Off The Shelf Productions Well, hello. It's nice to have a chance
to talk with you again.
Thank you.
When we talked last time, A Cure for Dreams was out and in the stores.
Had you started on your new book at that point or did that book exist
yet for you in your mind?
I started on Charms for the Easy Life about twenty minutes after
I finished A Cure for Dreams but at that time it was called
"Eagle Avenue." And it was called that until about twenty
minutes before I turned the manuscript in. That was it's working title.
I learned that I could have a working title from the Beatles. They always
did. So that's what it was.
I don't do well when I don't write - emotionally and physically and spiritually.
For me not working is spiritually corrupt. That's why book tours are draining
because I can't work. I watch TV and we know what that can do.
What was it like when you were in the process of writing Charms for
the Easy Life and working on it?
The first three drafts took eighteen months and with each draft I felt
I was getting closer to the story. But the first two drafts of the three
were heavily laden with historical detail. I knew I wanted to use lots
of historical detail, like rationing during the war, for example. But
I didn't know how to use it.
I thought about writers I knew who were adept at using history. I read
One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera and
I saw how. And also The Mambo Kings,, and I learned how to use
detail. I learned that if you have a man in an orange double-breasted
suit, you can't have him in that just for the fun of it. It has to work.
Then I wrote the third draft and used historical detail properly, but
the characters weren't alive. There was something missing.
Then I went through a divorce and a move to California that didn't work
out and a move back to the South, to North Carolina where I belong, and
I feel that I came alive. So finally, in the last six months of writing
this book, the history from 1917 to 1942 and my own personal history came
together, so voila! After two years of torture I had a little book.
Do your books change a lot from draft to draft? Do you really drastically
revise the story?
Very drastically. There are only two or three paragraphs that survived
all of the drafts. Recently at a party, my best friend, who had read the
first draft, was talking to my editor and I overheard them making disparaging
remarks about that first draft and talking about how lifeless and sketchy
it was. I interrupted, of course, and defended my first draft, but I knew
full well that it was; and I'm so grateful that it wasn't published.
I'm working on a book right now. I say I'm working. I'm pretending to
work on a book right now. I know my process now, but it's still depressing
to think that when I go home next week and work all day - Wednesday for
example - that it may never show up in print; that I may discard it. But
it's like doing a finger exercise or like listening to a symphony warm
up with all those discordant notes. You know that in an hour they're gonna
be playing nice music. And I know that two years from now I'll have another
book. But it's hard getting there.
At what point do you know that it's going to be there? At what point
do you know that what you're working on is really what you're going to
stick with and what's not going to be discarded?
When I hear it. When I hear it and when I see it. When it becomes more
real to me than reality. That's when I know it. And also, I know it's
good when I've gotten to the point that I'm ready to throw it out of the
window or when I start thinking about other career options. I really toyed
with the idea of becoming a doctor during this book and then I thought
about my grades in chemistry in high school and college.
When I don't want to play anymore. When it has almost defeated me, that's
how I know when it's there. I have compared it to running a marathon,
which is something I would never do. Hitting the wall, hitting the plateau,
and finding something inside to push you through the ribbon. It takes
a strength of character that eludes me most of the time. I'm basically
lazy. I'm not. . . people think of writers as being driven, but I'm not.
I try to find ways not to work.
The characters in Charms for the Easy Life are so real. I can see them
in my mind and I can watch them moving when I'm reading the book. How
do you go about creating those people? Do you think about them a lot?
Is that just something that comes out of the writing, or do the characters
form in your mind before you start?
It starts with language. When I hear a voice, then I can create the character
around that and I can create a character around one line. I can build
a story. The first line of what we're calling the new-new book is: "
I haven't been this cold since I got out of the penitentiary."
I'm confident - the only thing I'm confident about with the new-new book
is that I can create a character around that line. I can do it. It doesn't
start with a description, or a funny story I heard. It starts with usually
a peculiar line, like in Ellen Foster, "When I was little I would
think of ways to kill my daddy." All I needed to do was cough up
a hundred or so pages to go with that. And once you have a line like that,
that makes the work easier.
You mentioned your editor a little while ago. What's the process like,
and how does it feel for you to work with an editor on a book?
I feel like I almost killed her writing this. And I feel like I dominated
her time. She's also - and I didn't realize it at the time - was also
editing Alice Hoffman's new-new book and Amy Tan's new-new book and Lee
Smith's new-new book and Kurt Vonnegut's new-new book. I feel like I was
the one who was sitting in the back of the class asking lots of impertinent
questions. I had to realize that she's only got so much patience, and
that this is a job; and although my writing pretty much - outside of my
children - consumes my life, it doesn't consume her life. So I've had
to learn to work with another human being.
And she asks questions. Everything she wrote on all of those manuscripts
were things like, "Well, if she is the kind of woman who would come
into town to reclaim her husband unannounced on Christmas Eve, wouldn't
she stay in a nice hotel?" Questions of logic, because when you write,
you can't see the forest for the trees. And she helps me sort that out.
And she's become an all-purpose person - mother figure, editor - but we
can disagree. It's a very good relationship; the best one I've ever had.
Are there people you would share the book with as it was being written
besides the editors at Putnam to get feedback that wasn't that detail-oriented?
That was more of a feel or a reaction to the book?
When I wanted to show off, I'd let my boyfriend read it and he gave me
family stories and I would write the family stories, write them up, incorporate
them into the book, and then say, "Look what I did!" It's as
if he were giving me ingredients and I said, "Here's the cake."
And he is as in love with language as I am, so when I felt like I pulled
a piece of language off particularly well, I would call him and say, "Here's
one." And he would also help me get closer to the words I needed.
When my brain is tired, I'm not very specific. I tend to stray and generalize,
as we all do these days, because of TV, I think, and he would pull me
back.
My children - my oldest child is reading Ellen Foster right now.
She can handle that. When she's a little bit older, when all the girls
are a little bit older, I think that I'll share it with them. As soon
as they're 14 and the IRS says I can get away with it, I think I'll hire
them as secretaries and typists and mini-editors.
And my agent and my editor and him. That's it. I never did writing programs
because if I want your opinion, I'll ask for it. I didn't see the value
that I could derive from passing a manuscript around a table to sixteen
people who knew even possibly less about what I was doing than I did.
The mystery of writing is you don't know what you do and why you're doing
it, so how can anybody else know any more? I can foresee fistfights so
I don't do them, sharing. . .
There are wonderful writers in my community: Reynolds Price and Clyde
Edgerton, Doris Betts, Jill McCorkle - well, Jill McCorkle is in Boston
now - Allan Gurganus - Allan read some of the book. When we get together
we don't share our work. We drink and we talk about book tours, and we
talk about children. That's about it. We talk about our yards, our flowers,
we talk about other writers, anything but our work. It's an escape, I
think.
We started talking a little bit before we recorded about being on the
road and going from city to city. How does it feel for you as an author,
to be in that kind of public view all of a sudden instead of in the privacy
of your own home where you write?
I write on an old oak table in my bedroom and everything's a mess. My
house is always wrecked. So I'm sort of glad to get to the order of hotels,
but the first thing I do when I hit one is to tear it up, as if I am a
complete rock and roll band. I can make a mess immediately.
And I've learned. . . well, let's see. One of the drawbacks of doing
a book tour is disorientation. When I landed in Denver last week I woke
up as the pilot was telling us we were landing and I thought I was in
Boston. I looked out the window and thought, "What's the deal with
mountains?" And I asked the man next to me why there were mountains
here and he said, "They're the Rocky Mountains and this is Denver,
ma'am." And then I checked my schedule and pulled myself together,
and found out where I was. That's disorienting.
But when I get back home I'll be eager to work, which is not anything
I'm ever eager to do. And I know I'll be eager to work. I don't have to
cook for two months, and that's nice. So when I get back home, I won't
mind doing that. And the children can go with me sometime, and it's an
opportunity for them to visit their grandparents. I don't mind it the
way some people do. It would be sort of dishonest for me to gripe about
it but do it. I get to see other writers - writer friends. I get to hook
up with them in strange parts of the country. And I get to meet the bookstore
owners who have supported my work since Ellen Foster, and I think
that's the nicest part of doing this.
What kind of experiences have you had meeting your readers in person?
The readers tend to be very nice people and they run from academics who
have a tenuous grasp on reality, who tend to live in the nineteenth century,
to women who tell me - a woman told me a few weeks that she reads my books,
Danielle Steele, and the Bible.
So there's a wide range of people. I'm finding out who the readers are.
They're mostly women from 20 to 75. That's who they are. And Ellen
Foster is being taught at so many schools now that teachers are bringing
their students and that's very nice. I've met a couple of nuts - but you
get that sort of cross-section of America and you meet some nuts and I'm
having to learn how to deal with that. I'm meeting children who are reading
Ellen Foster and that's a lot of fun. But they're very nice people
in the main.
Do young kids that read Ellen Foster respond to it in a way that surprises
you, or is it sort of a response you expect? How do they react to that
book when they read it?
My experiences have been pleasing because I'm always pleased when I know
that somebody's had a strong reaction to literature. And usually when
a child has read it and says that it made them cry or upset them, I think,
"Well at least they were moved. They're not going to cry watching
MTV." So I apologize and then sign the book. Teachers tell me so
many times that children jump to read it because it's short. If they have
a choice, they'll pick it because it's short, and the teachers like it
because there are no Cliff Notes.
So they know that the kids are reading the book?
So they know that the kids are reading it.
The daughter in Charms talks a lot about books she's read and books
that have influenced her life. What are maybe two or three of the books
that you remember having most influenced your life when you were growing
up?
When I was growing up the first book I can remember that influenced me
- it didn't make me want to become a writer, it made me want to become
a reader - and reading became the most important thing in my life - was
Jane Eyre, a real normal book. I wish I could say it was something
esoteric or eccentric but it was regular Jane Eyre. Then I moved
on to Wuthering Heights. And then I read The Grapes of Wrath sometime
after that. I think those books got me up to 18. I read many other books
but those books sustained me.
And then from 18 to 30, it was Eudora Welty's Collected Stories.
That book did it for me. And then in the last three years - I chop my
life up in thirds this way - the last three years it's been One Hundred
Years of Solitude. I wish there were One Hundred and Fifty Years
of Solitude. I read it every six months or nine months because I think
if I study it enough, I could figure out how to do it. And maybe when
I'm 75 I can do it.
Did you, in a way, learn how to write by reading?
I'm convinced that's the only way. I defy anyone to show me someone who
has studied writing in a writing program who can analyze their writing
ability and not attribute it in some way to something they read. I don't
believe that it can be taught any other way.
I was on a plane next to a young boy recently who was in the writing
program at Stanford. He knew who I was, and he was reading a book about
how to be creative, and he asked me what the secrets were. What the secrets
to good writing (were), to the process, analyzing the process.
"Get plenty of sleep, don't write drunk. . ." My list disappointed
him because there were no magic answers. "Read One Hundred Years
of Solitude, read this book of non-fiction, read this political biography.
There's a new biography of James Michael Curley by Jack Beatty."
And I explained to him that if you read that, you'll find out everything
you need to know about an eccentric character, about characterization.
And these answers he didn't like. By midway to California, he had turned
his body and his body language said, "just don't talk to me anymore."
It was disappointing.
Do you think there are a lot of people like him? Was he an exception?
No. Lots of time readers come to signings and they have the other books
that they're going to buy, and they are "how-to-write" books
or "how-to-write" magazines. And I tell them "Go put those
back and go get The Remains of the Day to learn about voice, go
get P.D. James to learn about plot, go get Amy Tan and Allan Gurganus
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to learn about detail. Go get a political biography
about anybody whose life took place around the second World War. Get that
to read about setting." And that's hard to make that leap from someone
else's work to my own work. I don't do a "how-to."
Has the way you've approached writing a novel changed at all from Ellen
Foster to Charms for the Easy Life?
I have finally realized that itÿs hard. Ellen Foster was very
easy to write because it had been incubating for so long and A Virtuous
Woman wasn't hard to write because I didn't feel connected to it.
I didn't feel spiritually bound to the book and I don't like it because
of that. A Cure for Dreams was. . . I liked worked on it and it
was grueling and I started getting the point that this writing game is
gonna put dark circles under my eyes and it's gonna put wrinkles on me
and it's gonna put weight on me and it's gonna be a difficult life.
I used to look at picture of romance writers on the back of their jackets
like Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele and they're always so beautiful,
well, gorgeous. Their hair is always done up, and they've got on - they're
bejewelled, and they look so clean and organized and glamorous. And look
at myself most of the time and I look like I've just crawled out of bed.
And it's turning into a hard life, but I don't think I could live another
life.
What's most rewarding about the hardness of that life, the difficulty
of it?
The way I'm able to write at home. I'm able to be with my children. I'm
able to chose my hours. I don't have to punch a clock. I used to. I used
to wait tables and I was always late. I'd come sliding in, notoriously
non-punctual. So I don't have to punch a clock. For that I am grateful.
And my eccentricities and I'm just figuring out that they're coming out
of the closet. They're starting to appear. People accept those because
I'm a writer. If I haven't been to the dry cleaners and I don't have something
I'm supposed to wear to a party, I can anything I want to cause I'm a
writer. I try to not have coffee stains on me, but I can show up in anything
cause I'm a writer. And I can blurt things out and it's excused. You can
hear the whispering, almost: "She's a writer. Watch out!"
Well, Kaye, thanks a lot for talking with me.
Oh, thank you.
Excerpts from an interview by Steve Moore,
Off The Shelf Productions,© 1993. Printed here with kind permission.
Kaye Gibbons || Ruth Rendell || Isabel
Allende || Alix Kates Shulman
Terry McMillan || Helen
Caldicott || Doris Lessing || Kate
Clinton || Sara Paretsky
|
