Creativity through the phases of life

Writing fiction that reflects various stages of one’s own life

Writing stories like those in Red Car, that reflect various stages of my own life, allows me to connect very easily with my audience because everyone goes through more or less the same stages. I have an immediate bond with readers who feel that they’ve had similar experiences. That’s the easy part. The hard part is that it immediately raises the question that is always raised with fiction writers: “Are these stories based on your own life?” Many readers assume that fiction is just thinly disguised autobiography. We don’t trust the imagination. In my fiction, I may use details from my own experience, but I always create a point of view that is very different from my own. Otherwise I’m just regurgitating my own life, and that’s no fun for me or for anyone else. And it makes a fallacy out of the whole idea of writing fiction.

Whether they are working full-time outside of the house or raising small children, the challenge for creative women is the same. We have no affordable child care and no federal subsidies for child care.It’s a terrible burden on women who have great creative desire and ability, but who have to make a living and/or raise small children. If you’re a mother, you never really get to the point where all the kids are busily occupied outside the house and nothing is happening and the phone’s not ringing and nobody needs to be picked up and comforted. Often the only times that are free are an hour late at night when most women are too tired to do anything, or a brief spate of time on the weekend.

I think the only way it can work for a woman who’s driven by a creative demon is if she’s able to have some kind of office. If an office is just not affordable, she needs to be able to go to the library, somewhere that’s not home, for at least two hours a day. That’s the minimum and would only really work if you were writing short stories or poetry. It wouldn’t work for writing novels because then you’d need to be able to focus for a more extended period. But if you can carve out the minimum, it would at least be a bridge during those 15 or 20 years when you have children who necessarily come first. You need a space and enough piece of mind to be able to focus on your creative work for at least that limited number of hours. But it is grindingly difficult; there is no easy solution.

Many people may disagree with me, but I think putting one’s early years when you don’t yet have children into MFA programs is probably not very wise. A young woman’s precious early years are a wonderful time to gain experience and travel before you are tied down by the demands of a family or a full-time job. Nearly all the young writers being published these days have been through an MFA program somewhere or other, but the truth is, MFA programs (and there are thousands of them) are all more or less the same and they tend to turn out writers who have a certain sameness.

How the creative process has changed for me over the years

I’m still very involved in the lives of my children, but now that they are grown and all have lives of their own, my creative life is very different. I don’t teach or work 9 to 5 any more, so I can devote all my time to writing. It’s blissful. For me, my natural creative rhythm means that I write best in the morning. Finally, I can do exactly that. I start very early – I tend to be at work by 8 a.m. at the latest. By early afternoon I am free to go outside and hike, see friends, and do the philanthropic work that I still do.

It’s at this point that a limited-residence MFA program like Spalding University’s in Louisville can be very helpful. I’m told that students can come for long weekends several times a year and get their degree. I hadn’t really thought of it this way before, but for a 50 or 60 year old woman, say, trying to get back into writing, that might be a great solution. It’s very tough to get back in after you’ve been out of the publishing world for a time– it’s hard even if you’ve been continuously writing for 20 years! So this type of low or brief residency MFA program may be really helpful.

Feminism

I’m a believer in feminism because it makes sense of my life. I remember reading Betty Friedan in the late 60s. She was writing about the “problem that had no name,” about middle and upper class women who “had everything” and still found themselves unhappy with the limitations of their lives. It was a great relief to me to find a voice that was saying, “This has nothing to do with material goods. This has to do with societal expectations of women and the way we women find ourselves or allow ourselves to be limited by those expectations.” Friedan and the first issues of Ms. Magazine were enormously important to me. They addressed things nobody had ever talked about before. Things as simple as conversational patterns between men and women were changing precipitously. It was a real seismic shift: Social gatherings used to be men smoking cigars in one room and talking about serious ideas while the women retreated to a boudoir. Now women had a voice in political discussions that we had never had before.

And yet today, in this culture, we still are in a very unexamined way frightened of powerful women. I am dismayed at all the venom that has been directed at Senator Hillary Clinton, for reasons that often seem utterly ridiculous, misogynistic and petty, never having to do with her political stance. Senator Clinton should be celebrated and honored for her service, not dismissed. I think we all need to think about this. Most of us have a good deal of admiration for powerful men, but we have this almost psychic shrinking from powerful women. We need to decipher what is going on here, because after what has happened with Senator Clinton, it will probably be at least two decades, maybe longer, before another woman tries for the presidency. This has been a real lesson for women about how brutal it is. Women will look at what happened with Senator Clinton and decide they aren’t willing to pay the terrible cost of running for high office as a woman.

The spirit of forgiveness

I think the theme of forgiveness has always been part of my writing, but it may have been more submerged in the earlier years, when I was facing harsher struggles as a woman and as a writer. One thing time and distance do is help you reach a more objective stance with regard to past hurt. You know, if you are still brooding over how someone may have injured you 20 years ago, you have to wonder about your spiritual life. Why are you still caught in this terrible trap of brooding and resentment? I think that’s the worst thing that can happen to an individual, let alone a writer. What I’ve found at this stage of my life are a great release of feeling and new objectivity. I have been able to reconsider other people’s points of view which, inevitably, are very different from what you think they are in the heat of battle.