How did you become a writer? I became a writer the same way children grow up and become parents, the way all life continues on Earth: by the lure of pleasure and the subsequent bridle of responsibility.
When I was a very young child, my single mother was in college. She was an elementary education major, and she would read to me all the books on her syllabi: Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, My Uncle Sam is Dead, The Little Prince, and a hundred others. Some of my earliest and most powerful pleasures were sitting nestled against her, listening to her read these stories aloud. I distinctly remember my five-year-old impressions of The Little Prince; I understood almost nothing of the story, but my mind was filled with endless sunsets, sulky roses, knobby-kneed sheep, foolish men on small lonely planets, a plane crash in a dusky desert. It was a waking dream world, strange and vivid, placed in my mind by a book. I felt positively drunk on the wonder of it.
It was the pleasure of the story that first hooked me, and I believe that is generally the way with artists. Artists encounter the pleasure of a story, a song, a picture, a dance, and find it so intensely pleasurable that they want more of it, so they begin groping their way closer and closer to that pleasure. They consume more and more of it, greedily, breathlessly, as much as they can get, until, out of the inevitable frustration of this horribly unquenchable appetite, it occurs to the nascent artist that it must be inside the story, (the song, the picture, the dance) where the height of pleasure is to be found. It’s no longer enough to stand outside the beautiful thing and behold; union is what must be had because if a story can electrify you so powerfully from without, what must it feel like to have it flowing through you and pouring out of you?
So, the artist begins the work, and the work is hard, and it feels nothing at all like nestling next to your mother while she reads to you aloud. You’ve moved, artistically, from childhood to parenthood. Now it is something like responsibility that keeps you moving forward; all those stories and characters tucked up inside you like eggs in ovaries are yours. They need you and only you. If you don’t bring them out, raise them up, no one else will. They won’t exist, and that, you know at your core, would be an unspeakable tragedy, even worse than children who never existed because even the happiest family has an upper limit to the allowable number of children, but there is no such limit to stories. The world needs every decent story it can get.
Funny, but I believe every writer, feels now and then that he or she has been duped by the pleasures of story, just as every parent with bags under their eyes or poop on their hands feels, at least occasionally, that they have been nature’s fool. Most of us, I imagine, would be tempted to return to childhood, when we only ate the food, and did not cook it. Union with a story is only rarely the ecstatic experience we imagined; more often it’s tempered by the mundane and onerous. And yet, as with the parent, Nature and Story are victorious. Exhausted as we are, we wouldn’t trade the role for anything. We know we’ve never done anything else so deeply worth doing, and it makes us feel rich and proud.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). As is probably clear from my previous answer, my young reading years were the most powerful and formative. I’ve spent my life trying to get back to that feeling. The ones who got me hooked young were Ray Bradbury, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Victor Hugo, William Steinbeck. R. L Stine made writing possible by providing formulaic and delightful stories, which I very seriously view as invaluable. As much as I loved it, I could not have imitated The Hunchback of Notre Dame at eleven years old, but I could and did, imitate Say Cheese and Die. Denis Johnson’s Train Dream and Jesus Son make me want to try harder, and Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov makes me want to go deeper. All of Toni Morrison reminds me to say what I mean and mean what I say, and Ray Bradbury insists that I express my love, shout it from the rooftops! Or else get a new job.
When and where do you write? I am a mother of two children and I have spent most of my writing life in teeny tiny apartments and rentals where space was limited, so I’ve always written when I can, where I can. For years that was during my children’s afternoon naps, then it was coffee shops during their school hours. I now have an office for the first time (that I share with my artist husband) and I’m still trying to get used to writing in it. It’s not been easy. I have so many plants that are always asking to be watered.
What are you working on now? I’m currently working on a science fiction novel, which means that in addition to being a writer, I’m now also an Olympic sprinter as I race against the daily monumental changes and developments of technology and its shaping effects on society.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I’ve suffered from not feeling clear on what to write next, feeling sort of lost among projects. I’ve also suffered from what I might call a kind of artistic acedia, or sloth, where I knew what I had to write, but it was an extraordinary struggle just to lift my hands to the key board.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? This is very brass-tacks practical, but when I started out, I was a summary junkie. A tell-er rather than a show-er. One of my writing instructors described a story as being like a quilt. The large patches ought to be “scene” (people talking, moving about, making choices, doing things). The summary (where the narrator explains, analyzes, comments etc.) should be the needle and thread stitching that holds the larger patches of scene together. Those are the proper proportions, otherwise the story will be slow, cumbersome, and likely irritating. Wrenching my hands free from the overuse of summary was a complete revolution. It transformed me from a fictional essayist to a story-teller.
What’s your advice to new writers? I generally exhort writers to take themselves seriously, even if only secretly. I’m not sure there is anything more embarrassing than being an unpublished or under-published writer. If you dare to tell people that you are a writer, they will smile at you like you are just the sweetest and most harmless lunatic. They nod and coo a lot, indulging you generously in your delusions. Be very nice and polite to these people, but in your head, feel free to say screw you! I am a writer and I don’t need your stamp of approval to know it and believe it. Whether it every makes me money, or not, whether anyone ever knows my name or my book titles, or not, I’m doing something beautiful and extraordinary and meaningful and valuable and daring, and you’re quite welcome. Being a writer is dangerous and costly. Survival requires a good dose of impudence. But do be very kind and polite on the outside. It’s not their fault. People like us, stupid reckless heroic fools living enflamed by passion and purpose, are a rare thing to encounter. How’s anyone to know what to make of us?
Jacqueline Holland is the author of the novel The God of Endings, which came out from Flatiron Books in March. She received her MFA from the University of Kansas. She and her husband, Peter Holland, are a couple of high-strung itinerant artists who live (for now) in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with their two remarkably patient sons.
