The most recent electronic edition of Brain Pickings had a piece on Isabel Allende, a Chilean-American writer of the magical realism school. I have not read any of her novels, although I have read some of the works of one of her contemporaries, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Isabel Allende the writer is a first cousin, once removed of Salvador Allende, who was president of Chile from 1970 to 1973. He committed suicide in the face of a military coup. She is often confused with her cousin, Isabel Allende, the daughter of Salvador Allende.
What Isabel Allende the writer has to say about her craft is valuable to all writers.
I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later.
- "I try to write beautifully, but accessibly. In the romance languages, Spanish, French, Italian, there’s a flowery way of saying things that does not exist in English.
- "Speaking English has made my writing less cluttered. I try to read [her own novel] The House of the Spirits now, and I can’t. Oh my God, so many adjectives! Why? Just use one good noun instead of three adjectives.
- "I start all my books on January eighth. Can you imagine January seventh? It’s hell. Every year on January seventh, I prepare my physical space. I clean up everything from my other books. I just leave my dictionaries, and my first editions, and the research materials for the new one. And then on January eighth I walk seventeen steps from the kitchen to the little pool house that is my office. It’s like a journey to another world.
- "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.
- "Storytelling and literature will exist always, but what shape will it take? Will we write novels to be performed? The story will exist, but how, I don’t know. The way my stories are told today is by being published in the form of a book. In the future, if that’s not the way to tell a story, I’ll adapt."
Now I can add Isabel Allende to the never-ending stack of novelists I want to read.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments