Why We Write (21 page)

My first big break came in ’79 or ’80 when I was twenty-whatever. A senior editor at
Rolling Stone
who’d grown up in Portland saw my stuff in the
Willamette Week
. He called me and said, “You should be writing for
Rolling Stone.
” I almost fell over. It opened the door for me. I started contributing to
Rolling Stone
, and then the
Village Voice
, and then I began figuring out ways to freelance for other national publications.

I’m surprised by how shrewd I was about how to make my way in the writing world. Portland wasn’t exactly the hotbed of the writing world, but there were stories happening there, interesting stories. So I contacted national magazines and said, “I’m here, and I know some good stories here, so let me do them.” For instance, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a cult leader, had bought a huge, ten-thousand-acre ranch in Oregon and established a community of his followers there. He was a controversial figure who owned forty-eight Rolls-Royces while preaching antimaterialism, and yet many very intelligent, educated people had joined his group. It was a fascinating situation, so I contacted
the
Village Voice
and said, “I’m here, and I’d love to write about it.” They had nothing to lose since they didn’t have to pay to send me out to Oregon, so they told me to go ahead. In the end, my piece ran as a cover story in the
Voice
, and through sheer luck the week it ran happened to be the very first time they used color on the cover, so the piece got lots of extra attention because of that. It was one of many instances when I felt I just had good fortune on my side.

I started getting calls after my story ran in the
Voice
, and I started writing for
Mademoiselle
,
Vogue
, and
GQ.
I was a new, young writer, not living in New York, so for many editors, I offered a wonderful sense of discovery, to find a new writer. I left Portland and moved to Boston. I started itching to move to New York, and in 1986, I finally did.

And then I got luckier

The best time I’ve ever had as a writer—this is strange, but true—was years ago when I was reporting a story for the
New Yorker
, and I traveled with a black gospel group for a couple of weeks, writing about their world.

There was this moment when we pulled into some tiny town in Georgia, and we were having dinner in a local diner and I had an out-of-body experience. I couldn’t stop being amazed, thinking, This is my job. I’m in Georgia with this black gospel group, and I’m talking with people I would never have met as long as I lived if this wasn’t my job.

I was feeling the exhilaration of stepping into an alternate universe. If my life had taken a different path, I might have been having dinner at a country club in a suburb in the
Midwest, but I’m not. I’m here. I’ve had a version of that experience many times, and it’s always so powerful.

And then it got hard

The hardest thing I’ve ever been through in my career was being several years late with
Rin Tin Tin
, and having a young child, and being confronted by my publisher asking where the book was, and feeling simply overwhelmed.

Frankly, that moment was one I’m not sure a lot of men would have experienced:
I can’t do this all.
I don’t know how to be a writer with the demands of having a kid. That was my hardest, lowest point ever as a writer. It’s funny, because I’d like to say that my hardest time ever was struggling with a sentence. But that’s the one situation that I thought would get the better of me.

I got the contract for
Rin Tin Tin
in January 2004, and I got pregnant that spring. It was a challenging book. I loved the idea but I didn’t know how to write it. It was a book I had to wrestle into shape. Then Austin was born, and I realized I’d never figured out how I was going to go do the reporting I needed for the book with an infant to take care of. Time just started adding up.

Originally I’d asked for two years to write the book, which was ridiculous. I said I could do it that quickly because I was trying to make my publisher happy. They’d paid me a lot of money, and I wanted to make it sound as if they’d have their money back in no time at all; they’d hardly miss it. What I should have said was, “Give me eight years because I have no idea how long it’s going to take.”

Your publisher is a frenemy in the most pure sense. You
pretend you’re on the same team but in many ways, you’re not. You don’t want them to see the slightest shred of weakness because you don’t want them to begin to question the project or their belief in you. So instead of saying, “I don’t have a fucking clue how to do this book; give me more time,” you say, “It’s a breeze; I can do it in my sleep.” I wanted them to think I was just the easiest author on earth, that everything about this experience would be easy for them and profitable and fantastic.

I can’t blame publishers; it’s just a part of my personality. I want to please people. I feel like I should always be the good girl. I haven’t developed a diva routine in which I say, “Hey, you should give me a lot of money and I get to be as difficult as I want to be.”

The fact is that I got multiple extensions because
Rin Tin Tin
was proving to be much bigger, more complicated, and much harder to do because I couldn’t travel hither and yon easily to do the research I needed to do. And I didn’t feel I could reveal my vulnerability to my publisher.

I got two extensions for one year each, because I was wary about asking for a much, much longer extension, which was what I needed, because I thought it would indicate that I was having trouble. So then I was late, and then late again.

In a way it was the best thing that ever happened to me. When I asked for yet another extension, my publisher balked, and it became clear that they were no longer that invested in my book. So I got out of the contract and went to another publisher that really embraced the book and understood my need for more time. I took a loss on my advance, but I was philosophical about it. Advances are just that—advances. They’re not payments. They’re not awards.

It’s a job—and an art form

It makes me cringe to call myself an artist. Even if it’s true.

I’m making art of a kind. At the same time I’m very pragmatic. I don’t treat myself as this precious flower. The fact that writing is a
job
doesn’t undercut the fact that it’s also an art.

When I was first getting started, I thought, What’s important for me is to write as much as possible. If that means writing for fashion magazines, I’ll do it, even if that isn’t where I dreamed of writing, but I’ll do a good job of it. I had friends who said, “Ew, you’re writing for women’s magazines? I’d never write for that magazine.” I thought, How nice for you to be so picky. And anyway, I’m going to write a great piece wherever it runs.

I think the content is more important than the context. And I figured that if I wrote well, eventually I’d get to pick where I got published. I can write a really good story for
Vogue
or
Mademoiselle
or anywhere, and I can say with pride that it’s not all about the packaging surrounding the story: my pride is about the story itself. That’s a pretty practical attitude, and I’m glad I have it. It’s served me well. That’s my attitude about life, too.

W
hether she’s stitching silver threads between an opera star, a businessman, and a band of terrorists; bringing a magician out of the deepest possible closet; or shining a bright light on race, class, and family, Ann Patchett is a master of the page. In her novels, in her searing 2004 memoir, and in the 2006 commencement address she delivered to her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College—a speech that gathered so much notice, it grew into a book called
What Now?
—Patchett writes with pure poetry, and pure ferocity.

“‘What now?’ represents our excitement and our future,” she wrote in that book, “the very vitality of life.” The question
represents the essence of Ann Patchett, the human being and the bestselling author as well.

Ann Patchett

Why I write

I write because I swear to God I don’t know how to do anything else.

From the time I was a little child, I knew that writing was going to be my life. I never wavered from it. Making that decision very young made my life streamlined. I put all my eggs in one basket, which has resulted in a great number of eggs.

I don’t like to look back. That’s a big part of my psychology. It’s not because of lurking trauma. I don’t particularly look forward, either. I’m all about the now. But writing gives my life a narrative structure: “Oh God, this happened and then I did that…I shouldn’t have done that, but then I did this.”

You know that old cliché, “I hate to write but I love to have written”? That pretty much sums it up. How I feel about writing depends entirely on what I’m working on. At the moment I’m writing an essay about marriage. It’s excruciating. I feel like I’m
sitting on the asphalt on a pitch-black interstate, typing madly, while the eighteen-wheelers are bearing down on me. Every minute, I’m about to be squashed.

Fiction is different, because in fiction you’re just trying to find what happened. I always feel I’m squinting at something in a snowstorm very far away, trying so hard to make it out.

What if I didn’t write? What would happen to me? I’d get to read all these books that are stacked up all over my office, that’s what! I said to my husband last night: I really just want to take a month off and read.

I love to write. I think of it as a privilege and a pleasure. But if something happened and I never wrote again, I’d be fine. It would be a less interesting life—less dimensional—but it wouldn’t be an unhappy life. I was given the gift of very good brain chemistry. I’ve had hard times in my life, but I’ve never had depression.