First the character, then the story

Susan Isaacs

Last Saturday at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg, I had the opportunity to listen to novelist Susan Isaacs talk about writing. Now in her mid-70s, Isaacs said she was a bored housewife on Long Island, reading as many as four murder mysteries a week, when she decided she could write one too. The result, in 1978, was the bestseller Compromising Positions, which like several of her books features a bored housewife as its heroine.

I had a notebook with me, but I wrote down just four Susan Isaacs quotes from that 45-minute presentation. Here they are:

“The character comes first.”

Some other novelists may start with the plot, then find a character to put at its center. Isaacs said that doesn’t work for her. As an illustration she cited her latest novel Takes One to Know One, which she worked on for more than two years without having a main character she could believe in. She knew the plot was good, but while going through it one last time before submitting it for publication she realized she needed to find her character, then start over.

“It’s more like taking dictation than writing.”

This comes after she has her main character and her plot, of course. That’s the hard part for her. Then, once begun, the story seems to flow out of her mind and through her fingers as if she were only the medium. I have heard other novelists says much the same thing, while on the other side are those, like Ann Patchett, who maintain they are very much the captains of their ships, the source of everything that ends up on their pages.

I tend to think both points of view are correct. If the dictation theory were literally true, then anyone, including you and me, could write novels as good as anything both Isaacs and Patchett have written. But we don’t. Rather I think that when a good writer, like a good wood carver or a good clothing designer, has done good work often enough, good work comes to seem natural, requiring less thought, less effort than it once did.

“I write the story I most want to read and nobody else is kind enough to write.”

Isn’t that true of anyone who creates anything, whether it’s a book, a painting or a pot roast? We make what we like. If some else likes it, all the better. The first objective of artists is to please themselves.

“Knowing the ending is a comfort.”

Before writing the beginning of a novel, Isaacs said she knows how it will end. Or at least how it may end. Because she is only “taking dictation,” in her phrase, her novels don’t always end the way she she first imagined in her outline. But having an ending in mind when she begins gives her confidence that she will not, after working months on a book, find herself in a dead end.