FAQ

No. It’s pure invention. I would never appropriate the experiences of friends or family members, because I think it would damage the trust between us. I work in a different way, starting with theme, weighing big questions that readers might like to interrogate with me. I construct a plot that will bring these questions to light for examination, and then cast it with characters whose motives and life histories make them perfect for their roles. Once I’ve made all this up from scratch and put these actors in my story, they have to do exactly as I say! (I don’t know any real people who would be that cooperative.)

As a matter of research, I do sometimes dip into the wells of my own experience. I wrote a novel about a pianist; she isn’t me at all, but I included a lot of what I know from years of playing the piano. I’ve created characters who were scientists, and weave natural history and science into my stories, drawing on the background of my degrees in biology. When I write about a mother, whether she’s a good or terrible one, I’m quarrying the full, diverse experience of my own mothering (and daughtering) to understand that complex relationship. I have to get inside the heads of all my characters – heroes and villains alike – to make them convincing. I begin with what I know, then embroider to the edges of the imaginable.

My fiction is tied firmly to the real world in one important way: its sense of place. I set it in locations I know well – mostly places I’ve lived. I need more details than any remote research could give me. What does it smell like? What plants are blooming, what birds are singing at dusk? What are the cultural nuances between people? Often, I’ll give a made-up name to a town or a county, but you can always trust that my stories are set in places I know by heart. 

By reading. That is the whole truth. I didn’t study writing in school because I was busy getting degrees in biology that I hoped would allow me to earn a living. I come from a rural, working-class place and practical people, where few of us were lucky enough to go to college. I never imagined a life in the arts was possible, or that books could be written by the likes of me.   

But reading was everything to me. From my earliest memory, I absorbed any books I could get my hands on, including the encyclopedia and the dictionary. I read poems aloud to myself, and got so lost in novels I forgot I had a self at all. I kept a diary and wrote poems and stories all through childhood, adolescence, and secretly into my college years, not for any audience or purpose I could name. Maybe just because what goes in must also, in some form or other, come out. Eventually I honored that principle by reading very consciously, paying attention to what works best on the page, and why. I chose books I wished I could have written myself. I still do. My teachers were Dickens, Steinbeck, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, and countless others who still sit patiently on the shelves behind my writing desk. I check in with them every day.

No. I’m not interested in revisiting characters or writing the same book twice. What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book – new themes, new settings, craft challenges I’ve never handled before. I want to try to do something no writer has ever done before. I’m not much of a risk-taker in the rest of my life, but as a writer I will always choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the possibility of free fall. I love the feeling that I’m becoming a new kind of writer by stretching myself with every book.

Yes, but it takes time. I owe it to my readers, and to the people and places my stories represent, to keep these adaptations faithful, artful, and authentic. In a deeply collaborative medium that’s necessarily underwritten by huge sums of money, authenticity is possible but it’s an interesting journey to find like minds and generous creative spirits. Thanks for your patience.

I’m a workhorse: I get up in the morning, happily go to my desk, and stay there as long as the rest of my life allows. From the beginning of my career, I had to be disciplined about using my time productively, because I got my first novel contract the same day I had my first baby. (What a day!) I could only write while my children were in other people’s care, so I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the muse. My muse was the school bus.

When people talk about “writer’s block,” I think they’re discussing writer’s insecurity – the paralyzing fear that whatever we put on the page will be terrible. This feeling is utterly familiar. Every time I’ve started a book, whether it was the second or the nineteenth, I struggled with the certainty that this time it was going to be a mess. Time after time, my husband has had to watch me stomp around the house declaring, “This novel is stupid! Nobody wants to read about this!!” And every time, the day comes when I have to close my office door, take a deep breath, and tell myself, “Fine, it is probably stupid. Write it anyway.” I give myself permission to write a terrible first draft. Because nobody’s going to read it. Whatever I write will not leave that office until I’ve revised it again and again: from terrible to readable to the very best I have in me.    

As much as humanly possible. Plodding through a first draft is laborious. After that, the fun begins. I rewrite every sentence again and again, listening to the music inside it, finding better words. Every paragraph gets molded into better shape, usually by carving out excess. Each successive draft tends to be shorter, tighter, more energetic and specific. Once I’ve nailed down the final scene of a novel, I love holding the whole draft in my head at once, pulling that ending all the way back through, so that even the very first words of Chapter One are subtly guiding the reader in the direction I want them to go. In my opinion, revision is where art really lives. 

I always give my early drafts to readers – first my husband Steven, then various writer friends, my literary agent, and my editor. The most useful feedback they give me is about clarity. A writer walks a line between saying too little and telling too much; initially I tend to err on the side of too little. (It’s all so clear in my head! I don’t want to insult you by over-explaining.) Early readers can tell me, point blank, if they just don’t follow what’s going on in a scene, or the larger narrative. That’s my cue, on the rewrite, to turn up the lights.

I could keep revising forever, but a day comes when I realize I’m shifting words, then putting them back. The work is exactly where it needs to be. And then I turn it in.

It means profuse, lavish, extravagant even to the point of wastefulness. (Like nature in high season, when everything alive is throwing its seeds, spores, and songs into the air.) The word has absolutely nothing to do with returning home. The “prodigal son” of Biblical fame was a big spender who squandered his inheritance. If he’d stayed away forever, rather than coming home, he still would have been prodigal.

A gap, a hole, a missing part. The lost pages of a manuscript, the part of the story you don’t know. The hole in a porous substance, like bone, or volcanic rock. A narrow passage a boy could swim through, and come out on the other side.

Editors know it, scientists know it, I think we should all know this beautiful English word. I often hear people trying to make my title, The Lacuna, into a Spanish word, but it is not, except in extremely archaic usage, as it comes from Latin. (We ended up titling the Spanish translation “La Laguna,” which has a whole different meaning and is sadly imperfect.) 

It’s a musical composition made up of different parts. They’re usually dance forms, and all different – fast, slow, serious, playful. The performer’s challenge is to make all the parts into something that feels whole. The best-known Partitas we have were written by Bach.

Maybe?