How Writing Improves Your Life, with Anna Quindlen

ANNA QUINDLEN KNOWS HOW writing improves your life. She’s a memoirist, novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, non-fiction and self-help bestseller lists. Her memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012 was a number one New York Times bestseller. Her book, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, to date has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at the New York Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud, and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in Loud and Clear. Her wonderful new book, Write For Your Life, is just out from Penguin Random House. She is here on the podcast to discuss that, and much more. Listen in and read along as we talk.

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Marion: Hey there, Anna, how are you?

Anna: Oh, Marion. I’m so glad to be with you.

Marion: It’s so kind. I just love hearing your voice. So we’re going to talk about your new book, but first I want to set this up a bit. My audience is writers, which means they’re people deeply interested in territory. What to take on what to leave alone. If you had to define your territory, map it for us, how would you describe what you take on in the body of your work?

Anna: Ooh, that’s a good question. I do have to say, my elder son Quinn and I were talking one day about an interview that Amy Bloom had done and Amy was Quinn’s advisor in college. And also I think an exceptionally fine writer. And Amy said, “Every writer has one subject and mine is love.” And Quinn looked at me and said, “Well, mom, if that’s true, if every writer has one subject, then yours is motherhood.” And I was incredibly touched that he said that, but at the same time, all I could think of was motherhood and loss. Those are my big two. Those are the ones that I think have made me think about my own life and the lives of my fictional characters over and over again.

Marion: Yeah. So let’s talk about that loss for a second. We met in the 1970’s. We were both of The New York Times, and we were in our twenties, your mother had died not long before I met you and mine got sick when I was 22, and one of the things I remember clearly was a note. You wrote to my sister, Margaret Roach, with whom you were friends after I wrote about our mother’s illness for The Times.

My sister and I got lots of notes from people, but I remember the language of yours and I won’t share it here, because it’s private. I can almost quote it, because it really meant that much to me, except to say that you brought both humor as well as a really vivid image of your mother’s lipstick into that note. And I remember thinking, Anna knows something I don’t know about loss, and I want to know it too. I’ve read in several interviews, your version of the connection between your own mom’s death and your career choice. So if you would, I’d like you to share a bit about that since there’s no doubt that grief can get in life’s way, but yours seems to be a different tale.

Anna: Well, I think that my takeaway, if you will, from that experience has been less about grief and more about loss. Grief can lose its sharp edges, loss never does. It’s the eternal presence of an absence. And I think that the positive thing that it gave me, and I feel guilty every time I say that. But the positive thing that it gave me was a sense that life could be very short. My mother was quite young when she died, and that therefore, if there was anything you wanted to do, you should just do it. Even if people said you should wait. Even if people said it wasn’t the right move. Even if people said, what you’re doing now is the right thing and you should stick with it. If you just had this itch and this feeling, you should go for it. And I think it made me very propulsive, if you will, as a young woman in terms of the roles that I took on at The Times and afterwards and the way I felt about how I needed to live my life.

Marion: Yes, propulsive, that is fabulous. That language makes sense. And I just have to stick with this for just one more minute, among your more than 20 books, now 21 books, I just think it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. In 2000, you published A Short Guide to a Happy Life. And that’s the one I referred to in the opener that has sold more than a million copies. And in there you talk about mortality and your mom and her death and I interview a lot of memoir writers. And when I do, I always ask in the same question, so I’m going to ask you, what are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to go back and look at a trauma, are we asking her to reanimate it? Are we asking her to relive it? Are we asking her to stand cooly in the here and now and have like a distance view of it? Some people are just afraid to go back in. So why don’t you help them a bit?

Anna: It’s interesting that you ask that question in terms of what the writer is being asked to do, or think, or feel, because I would, pause it more in terms of what you’re asking of the reader? I think that memoir needs to feel lived in, it’s not going to feel, or rarely is going to feel, identical to your own experience as a reader. But if it’s lived in, if you feel like you’ve walked through a door and are living in that room you will be able to have that emotional and empathetic connection that makes memoir so visceral and so important.

I mean, why do we still, after all these decades, why do millions of people still read and take something important away from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank? It’s not because they’re living in an attic. It’s not because they’re being pursued by the Nazis.

It’s because, Anne’s specificity about her life enables us to connect with her emotionally on our own terms. So for example, I would argue that the reason a lot of adolescence connect to that book is because they feel trapped, obviously not in the way that we’re talking about in Anne’s own life. And I wouldn’t want to diminish the vastness of that experience. But they feel trapped in a little room with their parents, with their siblings. There’s that sense of that hermetic experience of being a teenager that’s so powerful in the diary.

So I think that what a memoirist is asked to do is to revisit their own experience in a way that allows the reader to live in it and experience it on her own terms. That doesn’t mean necessarily giving away the store. I mean, for three years I wrote a column for The New York Times, which is kind of a onece-a-week, mini memoir called “Life in the Thirties.” And since my boys, who were appearing in the column, were quite small, I had to be constantly gaming what might be intrusive for them 15 or 20 years hence because I kept telling myself, columns come and go, but your children are forever. And so I do think as a memoir is sometimes you have to hold back for the sake of the people that you love, but that as long as you’re inviting the reader into the room, you’re going to be in good shape.

Marion: Yeah, that’s lovely. So let’s turn to your new book. It’s called, Write For Your Life and it’s wonderful and it’s just out from Penguin Random House. You open with a Flannery O’Connor quote, that’s a beacon stating simply, “I have to write to discover what I am doing.” And many other writers have put it in many other ways, but it’s the word discover in this case that for me knocked my head back, set the quote apart, I’ve read it before, but I love it. So let’s talk about discovery and you’ve touched on it there. And you’ve touched on the responsibility of what we write, which is of course so important as you’re considering memoir, but let’s just drill into discovery for a second because everything we’ve felt read, tasted, heard, seen whatever is in us somewhere. And with that in mind writing, at least the way I think about it, is some form of a grand annotation where we pull things up.

But this word discovery suggests both the adventure we are on as well as the trust that it’s in there. So speak to these writers who are listening about that idea of the trust that we have on us, what we need to write?

Anna: Well, first of all, I think that we should accept the fact that while everything is in us, it hasn’t been processed. A lot of it is just words in a dictionary or programs on a computer. It hasn’t really been pulled together. So I think most writers have had the experience of writing a sentence or writing a paragraph and looking at it and then thinking that’s not really what I think is it? I mean that happened to me over and over again when I was an opinion columnist. I would be very determined type, type, type, type, type, type. And then I’d look over it and say, “Oh my God, this is completely wrong.” It had that pleasing error of conventional wisdom about it, which is sometimes what happens when we write, “Oh, this is how I feel,” “Oh, this is what happened.”

And then when you look at it on the page or on the screen, you realize that’s the raw material in your mind and now it’s time to turn the raw material into the real thing. I think the thing that’s so powerful about that is that when you, if you will, do battle with the real thing, two things happen, particularly if you’re writing about yourself and particularly if you’re writing about difficult experiences. On the one hand you look at it on the screen and say, “My God, this really was a big thing.” On the other hand, having processed it in that way, having put it on the screen, having put it into words, I won’t say weakens it, but it saps it of a little bit of its overwhelming power. So that suddenly it seems tenable in a way.

And that’s one of the things that I wanted to deal with in the book, the idea that we, have at our disposal, this mechanism that can help us with confusion and anxiety and lack of connection, and that we’re not using it enough, particularly if we’re not writers for a living or we’ve talked ourselves into thinking that we can’t write. When in fact it’s this invaluable tool for processing the material of real life in a way that makes it more understandable for us.

Marion: Yes, it surely does. And you talked about the raw material just a moment ago. And you mentioned Anne Frank and you opened this book with perhaps the single greatest example of what writing is. When you speak of Anne Frank and you remind us that she was not writing a book when she began noting things in that red and white plaid, cloth-covered notebook she named Kitty, she was writing to herself. You write, “She was talking to herself in a way that any of us can do too.” And this is where the generosity of your book just really well, it is generous. It’s wonderful. You take that totemic work and remind us of its plain origins. So where do you note and stash things along the way, do you keep a notebook on you? Do you talk into your phone these days? On the subway when something hits you, do you grab the playbill for the play you’ve just come home from seeing, just give us a sense of jotting it down in your own life?

Anna: Oh, I hate this question Marion, because the truth is, I used to very glibly say, “I’m like a sex worker I only do it for money,” but the truth of the matter is I am always working on a book, always. One after the other. And so a lot of what I’m seeing and experiencing and feeling about the world goes right into something that is, if God is good, designed to see the light of day.

Now that doesn’t mean that it all stays in there, but it means that it informs. The whole thing sometimes goes down on the page, sometimes goes into the notes section of my computer and then works its way up to the novel. But my writing tends, overwhelmingly, to be designed for publication. And that’s just a function of having been that person. I started as a copy girl when I was 18 and got the opportunity, even then, to cover some stories. And so the idea of writing for a reader got baked in pretty early on to me.

Marion: That’s a lovely distinction. I just think of those rewrite guys, and they were guys when I was there at The Times. Those rewrite guys who, who pretty much were typing and it was going right onto the front page. I mean, there was almost like a straight pipe, right? So they weren’t knackering around with a notebook they were just getting it on the page. And you mentioned being a copy girl, being a young reporter. And one of the more spectacular pieces of reporting for this book allows the reader to meet Rita Charon of Columbia University who originated that field of narrative medicine, where she teaches residents to keep not only a medical chart, but what she calls a parallel chart, in which residents reflect on their treatment interactions and research shows that students who do this connect with those, they treat. This is a lovely thing that you blend in a lot of reporting.

And I think a lot of writers forget that there’s always reporting involved in writing, even if you’re writing memoir. And so, talk about if you would, give listeners a sense of what reporting you currently do. How you stop and go make that call? Because I think a lot of people think, well I don’t know that I can’t do it, but even in memoir, you pick up the phone and you ask your sister, “What was the name of that dog that bit me when we were in second grade?” That’s reporting. So just give a little nod to the reporting people should be prepared to do when writing anything.

Anna: I have to say that was such a delightful piece of this book. After having done a couple of novels where there kind of is a reporter’s notebook in a novel, but it all has to be the product of your imagination. You have to be saying to yourself all the time, “Oh, well what does that house look like? And how do they interact with each other on the playground?” And it does become a reporting process, but one that is completely driven by you and is, therefore, more challenging, in many ways, than doing nonfiction.

So when I pivoted back to this book and I started doing what I guess you’d call the domino theory of reporting, you know this from experience. So I talked to Rita. Rita turns me onto Laura Vader. Rita also turns me onto Raphael Campo. Laura Vader is a young doctor who I use in the beginning of that medical chapter.

Rafael Campo is the poetry editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. And if you didn’t know, that JAMA has a poetry editor, neither did I. So that I would talk to someone and they would say, “Have you talked to so and so?” It kept reminding me of a comment that was once made by reporter par excellence and one of my oldest friends, David Halberstam. He once said, “If you think you’ve done enough reporting, you’re wrong.” And for this book I just kept saving string on quotes, on people who would send me data, on people who would send me reports and having all that at my fingertips made it so much easier. Not only to write this book, but to feel really on solid ground in terms of my contentions about the power of writing. And certainly, Rita’s work with young doctors where she really felt like writing would help them not only connect with their patients but connect with themselves and not burn out was just invaluable.

Marion: Oh, it’s gorgeous that. And the idea that in JAMA, there is a poem in every issue, right? I just did not know that. No, I didn’t know there was a poetry editor at JAMA. Haven’t read JAMA in a while, but I’m going to go have a look.

Anna: That’s one of the best parts about doing reporting though. That moment when you say, “I had no idea,” over and over again, I mean, that’s been the thrill of the process from the time that I was a reporter when I was a teenager.

Marion: Absolutely. And the damnedest things that people say to you and you just write it down or type it out and say, “Wow, that’s an extraordinary quote.” It’s a wonder and people can interview their relatives for a memoir. People can go down to their local flower shop and find out what it’s like to be a florist. If the florist is a character in your novel. I mean, it’s a joy and a wonder the discovery is there waiting, right?

Anna: Yep.

Marion: I love that. I just love that piece. So one of the other things I love is you have this device in the book that involves your chapter titles and that the titles include “Infinitive,” “Salutation,” “Tense,” “Dash,” “Personal Pronoun,” “Object,” “Conjugate,” “Past Perfect.” And then in each chapter you inhabit those ideas one at a time kind of like putting your hand in the glove of each and guiding us through them.

So take us back to the moment of a-ha, if you would, when you devise that structure because I think a lot of writers have a lot of really good ideas, especially for devices. And then they think, “Oh, that would be so cool, but oh no, I can’t do that.” And they end up with Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three.

So talk about pitching ideas to yourself when you say, “Yeah self, cool idea, look at you go.” Or however, you speak to yourself to get yourself to transact, to act on that cool idea you had?

Anna: That came to me pretty early, that wasn’t grafted on which occasionally does happen. I just kept thinking of parts of speech and how parts of speech do different things. And some of them are active and some of them are passive and some of them move us into the future, like infinitive. And it just seemed to me that they were apt for each chapter. That really, it worked for me and it didn’t feel kitschy. I felt like I could make a case for every one of them. And I guess that’s the thing when you come up with things like that. Can you make the case? I remember when the most out on a limb stylistically, I suppose, that I ever went in a novel was in a novel I wrote called Still Life With Bread Crumbs. And as I began to work on the book, I thought, I am tired of the trope in which the backstory gets folded into the front motion of the book.

I don’t want to do that. I want to have the front motion of the book and then I want to stop and go to the backstory and sort of fill in the blanks. And I want to have this kind of omniscient narrator who knows stuff about the future and about what’s going on and what’s going to happen that only a kind of a godlike omniscient narrator can have. And I thought is this insane? And then as I started to do it, I realized that in terms of this book and how I could tell this story it made absolute perfect sense. So I think that’s what you have to ask yourself, “Am I doing this? Am I tap dancing here?” Or does the material call out for this kind of treatment? And if it does, then I think you just ought let it rip.

Marion: Oh, good. Yeah. I always think, is it a parlor trick or is it real? And so I love that. Am I tap dancing? That’s good. That’s a good question. And I think it’ll guide a lot of people and help a lot of people.

So one of the things I get downright hostile about is all the social media memes on how hard writing is. I don’t think it does anyone a bit of good. But I also get a little sweaty when people get new-agey on writing. You have to touch your angel’s feather, okay left brain or whatever. So I come from the S&M school of writing, hard chair, caffeine, no phone. Your phrase is “Butt in the chair,” butt in chair, right? So follow up on that if you would. Get your butt in the chair and then what?

Anna: Well also the stuff that I hate that makes me crazy when I see it on social media is stuff that says, “When using a first person narrator, it’s important to do-” And I go, oh my God, do not give me precepts. I think somewhere in there is that great quote from Somerset Maugham, “There are three rules for writing a novel, unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” And that’s the bottom line. The bottom line is if you’re looking for someone to give you the rules, to tell you how it’s done, you are going to look in vain.

It doesn’t work that way. And as I know, I say in the book, how it’s done is how you do it.

Marion: Yes.

Anna: And that’s so important because that’s all you have.

Marion: Right.

Anna: I mean, you can’t say to yourself, gee, I’m going to write a novel about something that’s never been written about before, because everything’s been written about before. And you can’t say that about a memoir either. I’m going to do the memoir that no one has ever written or read. It just, we’re too far along the continuum. So what you have to say is, “I bring to the table something that no one has ever had before and that’s my particular personality, my point of view and my narrative voice.”

Marion: Absolutely positively. And speaking of what we bring, it’s this individually wrapped, no two writers have the same critical voice in their heads, but perhaps all writers learned a voice or heard a voice along the way that said, “No.” “No. Writing, don’t write, don’t do it, it’s not good for you.” Maybe it was a second-grade teacher. Maybe it was your gym coach. I don’t know. But you give a little piece of advice that would make a nice needle-pointed pillow, or maybe a tattoo when you write, “Don’t get it right, get it written.” And it’s the antidote to internal criticism. And you say, “Composition first, clean up later.” I just love that. And I love the advice and I’m going to needlepoint the pillow, but not before I ask if after all these years of writing on all these platforms in all these forms, do you still have a voice of doubt?

Anna: Every morning, every morning he’s here. I assume that he’s male. I don’t think any woman would do this to me.

Marion: No woman would-

Anna: No. I mean

Marion: … Do that to you.

Anna: To some extent, I had a very good friend who was a brilliant, legendary musical composer. And I once said, “After all this time?” And he said, “No, no, it’s much worse after all this time,” because now you can not only compare yourself to what the world says. You can compare yourself to what you’ve done before and think to yourself, well, this just isn’t as good as One True Thing, or people liked what you did in Candles and Cake, but this isn’t anything like that. And the naysaying voice lives within you and I think your first, at least for me, my first job every morning as a writer is to tell it to shut up and get on with it.

Marion: Absolutely. Oh, so we have to wrap this up, I would prefer we didn’t, but we do. Let’s get your take on longevity, keeping it up over a writing life. I always encourage people to stop writing that one big book that begins with their great, great, great, great grandfather and ends with what they had for lunch today. That thing they think is a memoir, but it’s really a sinkhole of an autobiography instead break it into bits and have a writing life. An essay here, an oped there, a short piece of memoir, that writing life. So give us a little wisdom, if you would, on the care and feeding needed to keep it going for life.

Anna: Well, first of all, I think that you have to hold tight to the understanding that as time goes on you’re going to get smarter and sharper about some things. Now I am totally on board with the idea that sometimes I’m toodling along and there’s a word and it begins with a C and it has three syllables. And it’s sort of off to the left-hand side of my brain, but it’s not there yet. So I write “TK.” I am an old newspaper woman, and five minutes later I go, consequently, that’s what I wanted, consequently. And that’s clearly not something I used to do when I was 27 or 28 years old.

But in terms of understanding the world and how I see the world, I’m better at that. I’m deeper. I have more perspective. So when I was in my 30s, I wrote a column called “Life in the Thirties.” And when I was 60, I wrote a book called Candles and Cake, which — Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake — which is basically life in the ’60s. And there are two very different ways of looking at the world.

So I think that if, as you say, you break things up into bite-sized bits, what happens is you understand that part of it is fresh and new and kicky, and part of it carries the weight of wisdom and both of those things are really valuable.

Marion: They are really valuable. And, and the TK, I love that reference. TK as in to come is what I was taught. And I still use that TK or I’ll write in the margin, “Marion, be funny here,” because I can’t be funny at the moment. So I’ll see that. I hope I see that when I go back through and don’t hand it in with that.

Well, one more quick question and then I’m going to, unfortunately, let you go. But along the way, I think this memo went out somewhere along the line that writers are supposed to stick to one lane, non-fiction or fiction, memoir or poet, whatever, poetry. And while I’ve read your admiration for poetry, you believe that you do not write it, but some of us would disagree, but you write across all those lines, did you not get the memo? Did you tear it up? Did you like light cigars with it or what that has allowed you to write across genres?

Anna: Boy, the memo was in full force when I first started to write novels.

Marion: Yep.

Anna: A lot of the reviews, that was when I still read reviews, I haven’t in years. But a lot of the reviews reviewed not the novel that was on the page. But the fact that the novelist had been a reporter and had been a columnist, there was a fair amount of either skepticism or resentment about that. But you just do what you do and if readers like it, then you’re fine. And readers have liked it just fine.

Marion: Oh Anna. They have. Thank you so much. It is just a joy to hear your voice. It’s a wonder to read you on the page and I cannot wait to read what you write next. Thank you.

Anna: Oh, thanks Marion.

Marion: Ah, the writer was Anna Quindlen. Her new book is Write For Your Life. Just out from Penguin Random House. See more on her at anna quindlen dot net. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by OverIt Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey.

Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com where I offer online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a star review. It helps others define their way to their writing lives.

Photo credit: Maria Krovatin