Anne Tyler

is one of my favorite authors.

I have several authors I devour almost anything they write.

Somehow I missed reading Tyler's Saint Maybe.

I just finished it and loved it.

Tyler's writing seems so simple, yet she provides so many details that the reader really gets to know and understand each character. She is one of those writers of whom you cannot predict how the story will end. I found myself apprehensive as I neared the end, waiting, hoping for all to bode well for this family.

She doesn't grant many interviews and I found this one very intriguing. I am always interested in the writing process for authors and in knowing how they create characters. Characters just don't come to my mind. I'm either not gifted in that way or I haven't tried. It may be a 'gift' or something one must labor. Anyway here is her process:

For a writer who is so protective of her privacy, she is unusually open about her routine, which is so exacting that it might have been devised by one of her characters. A "very mechanical process", it involves revising tiny sections in "quite small and distinct handwriting – it is almost like knitting a novel" (she insists on white paper, no lines, and swears by "the miraculous Pilot P500 gel pen"). When she is happy with each section she types it up, then writes the whole manuscript out in longhand again. She then reads it into a tape-recorder to listen out for false notes or clumsiness. "You think a character would never say that, but you only know it when you speak it out loud." To avoid typing it all out again, she ingeniously plays it back to herself on a stenographer's machine with a pedal to pause so she can put that comma exactly where she wants it. One of the reasons she doesn't like her first novels is that at the time she felt that to revise them was unspontaneous. "Spontaneity is not always a good thing."

Before she starts, she says she feels very sure how a novel is going to end, but is often wrong. She writes detailed background notes on each of her characters, most of which she doesn't use, and she has to like them. Every so often in the plotting stages, she says, "I have come up with a character, looked at him closely and said 'he's out'. I can't stand him for that long." 

It's fascinating to know how she creates a character. Now I want to know more. Does she start with a physical description? Then does she think of present behavior and then create the past that led to this point? I'm sure she would scoff at my questions and think, "Silly girl, if you can't figure it out for yourself, I don't think you are meant to try." Writers are always so vague and I like concrete.

Guess that's why I'm not a published author, eh?

But read Anne Tyler. She's worth it.