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"If it was a compulsory one page, I would write 10. I just got absorbed in words." //

Studying writing at UCLA, she produced lengthy, thoughtful compositions and multiple drafts of dog-eared stories and poems, but few of them measured up to her own standards.

"I revered writers and the written word so highly that it was hard to call myself a writer, or to see myself as a writer," she said.

Six years as West Coast editor for Mirabella magazine, producing articles on everything from politics to playwrights, and later serving as writer-producer for two award-winning specials for PBS, helped her gain confidence to begin a novel.

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You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term - but you didn't know who?)

Another important question is, If only...
(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)

And then there are the others: I wonder... ('I wonder what she does when she's alone...') and If This Goes On... ('If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman...') and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ('Wouldn't it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?')...

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose ('Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don't they any more? And how do they feel about that?') are one of the places ideas come from.

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All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you've an idea - which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin - what then? 

Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it's finished - whatever it is. Sometimes it won't work, or not in the way you first imagined. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. Sometimes you throw it out and start again.

That's what a writer does. I'm against the solipsistic idea that you find it all in your head. You don't. 

The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of "what is already known." 

Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interestig ideas, after all, are heresies. 

I find it impossible to keep moral feelings out of my desire for pleasure. That is, part of my experience of pleasure is that there are facile pleasures, as there are facile ideas. 
 
 

And you will write about those things from your perspective. Life is not that way. Everything happens simultaneously, in a chaotic way, and you don't make choices. You are not the boss; life is the boss. 

So when you accept as a writer that fiction is lying, then you become free; you can do anything. Then you start walking in circles. The larger the circle, the more truth you can get. The wider the horizon, the more you walk, the more you linger in everything, the better chance you have of finding particles of truth.   ~ ~ ~

I'm just putting together a story, and in order to do that, I grab everything I can. I steal other people's lives. I don't care. You name it, I'll do it. If I have to destroy my mother's life to write a story, I will. Isabel Allende [Oprah.com].......

*related books : ......Conversations With Isabel Allende.......//.....Daugher of Fortune
.......Giving Birth, Finding Form: 3 Writers Explore Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Art - [audio] - by Isabel Allende, Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen

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Kurt Andersen : Yes. It gives a coherence to the thing that as a reader, let alone as an editor, I find helpful. //

There have been many brilliant attempts, like the issue without words. That is what you don't see these days-the sheer, nothing-taken-for-granted ambition. 

If anything, magazines have become less risk-taking and more nervous. That's what's interesting to me-to have a magazine with some resources and impact that isn't about putting Ben and J-Lo on the cover. ///

The thing about this magazine, for better or worse, is that you can do anything and it will survive, because Benetton has decided that it will survive. That restraint and recessiveness has been an interesting way for it to go. ... 

.......

It's.. anomalous. Especially in America where extrarational considerations like "we love this and want to put it out" are nonstarters. But until the day before yesterday, when The New Yorker started making money, it was a vanity operation, I guess. 

Arguably, most benefaction and philanthropy is a vanity operation. It's a phrase that's thrown around to dismiss a lot of good, it seems to me.

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Her debut novel, "Bergdorf Blondes," now in its ninth printing and about to hit No. 7 on the next New York Times list of best sellers, was inspired by the superrich, pencil-thin, husband-seeking Manhattan single girls she's met on her rounds of New York parties -- girls she calls "Park Avenue Princesses." ///

"These girls are all college-educated, smart, well-read," she says. "And yet at the same time, you've never seen a more educated girl get so overexcited about something like a new purse." 

Also, Sykes says, she had to exaggerate, because she was trying to write a funny social comedy, spinning off from her fashion and society writings for Vogue. 

If she had focused on careers and offices, she wouldn't have a funny book. "I'm not an expert on offices," she says. "I'm an expert on, say, silver on the Upper East Side."

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She thought Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was okay, but she hated James Joyce's Ulysses. 

She went to college in Virginia, where she studied creative writing. She got married and then settled down in suburban Roanoke, where she started writing and publishing poems.

In the backyard of her house, there was a tiny stream called Tinker Creek. After she survived a near fatal case of pneumonia, she started sitting by the creek every day, watching the ordinary bugs and birds and frogs and minnows, and writing about them in her journal.

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She eventually combined all of the bits and pieces in the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She's gone on to write many other books of essays, including The Writing Life and For the Time Being.

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That's an emotionally draining way to live. As a result, it isn't necessary to discourage young writers. 

Life will do that soon enough. There are yards of writers under the age of 30, but not many who stay the course.

from The Written Word 12/9/03: A Writer's Life - site

photo by Toshi Otsuki from harpercollins.com

I see that happening a lot -- in India anyway. It's a pity, because then you misuse both literature and politics. 

When I write, I don't even think consciously of being political, because I am political. I know that even if I wrote fairy stories, they would be political. 

Your art is so subliminal; it comes from somewhere you barely understand yourself. I know that for me it's about a way of seeing the world -- everything. It's about a way of expressing or sharing your vision of the world.

The outside world sees literature and politics as two separate things. I don't.

To say 'whatever' because it's easier than actually caring. I find this attitude, and its mass appeal, very unsettling. 

Fear.. only heightens that urge to turn off and withdraw, to choose not to extend oneself. But great books force people to engage in the human conversation. They teach empathy and they teach compassion. They remind us of all the words there are beyond 'whatever.' In a large sense, this is what Man Walks into a Room is about. 

It's about a man who becomes disengaged, and who - after a lot of loneliness and pain - relearns the difficult beauty of engagement. If I could reduce what matters to me most right now to a single word, it would be simply that: engagement.