Trust the Strangeness and the Uncertainty of the Writing Process

Please welcome award-winning author and playwright Victor Lodato to Writer Unboxed today!

Victor is the author of three novels. Edgar and Lucy was called “a riveting and exuberant ride” by the New York Times. Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, was named a “Best Book of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, and The Globe and Mail, and was hailed as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel.”

His most recent release, Honey, released this past April to rave reviews like these:

“Rarely in literature—rarely in our lives—do we encounter someone like Honey Fasinga: fierce, complicated, and out-of-this-world sharp both inside and out. I cried, laughed, and screamed while reading this novel. Weeks after finishing, I am still looking for Honey everywhere. Victor Lodato’s Honey belongs in the halls of other legendary, unforgettable characters. This novel can rightfully be called a masterpiece.” — Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito

“Every woman is free to invent her own apocalypse, says Honey Fasinga, the stylish heroine of Victor Lodato’s new novel. Honey knows where the bodies are buried—she helped bury some of them—and at eighty-two she is still figuring out how to defend herself and those she loves against the dangerous bullies of this world. This novel is a wonder of strange kindnesses, unthinkable cruelties, and familial fracture. A sharply funny, searingly wise story about the way that a life lived on its own terms is the ultimate art form. Irrepressible and romantic, empathetic but refreshingly unsentimental, and ultimately unforgettable—like its heroine, Honey is a true original.” — Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist and NYT Bestselling author of Once Upon A River

Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories.

Learn more about Victor and his body of work on his website.

Welcome, Victor!

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Long before I starting writing novels, I was a playwright.  Fourteen years into my life as a theater artist, I was invited to a writing residency at the Camargo Foundation in the south of France.  I’d been invited there to work on a play—which I finished in the first two months of my three-month residency.  So I decided to use the last month to start a brand-new play.

I began, as I always did, with a voice in my head—the music of a particular character’s way of speaking.  Where some of these voices come from is one of the mysteries of writing.  But, by that point, I knew to trust my process—to follow the characters’ voices until I figured out who they really were, and what the story was actually about.

Which is a way of saying that I always let the characters reveal to me what’s brewing at the back of my mind.

The new play that I started writing during the last month of my residency—it began with a monologue. Pretty quickly, I understood the main character was a child, maybe a twelve or thirteen-year-old girl, and she just wouldn’t stop talking. Twenty pages into the opening speech, no other character had yet appeared. I remember thinking: Boy, this is a really long monologue!

Eventually, I said to myself, Huh, maybe this is a novel. Which terrified me. Because even though I’d been writing for a long time, I never imagined that I had it in me to write a novel. So I just pretended, for years, that it wasn’t actually a novel, but rather a three-hundred-page monologue. Six years later, I had what turned out to be my first novel—Mathilda Savitch.

Writing fiction was incredibly challenging for me, but it lit up all these new parts of my brain—and, in many ways, brought back my innocence as a writer. I knew how to write plays at that point, but I didn’t know how to write novels. I didn’t know what the “rules” were—and this was incredibly freeing for me.

I’ve always taken comfort in something the great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska said in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know’ … this is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly.  It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings.  It expands our lives to include the spaces within us, as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.  If Isaac Newton had never said to himself,  ‘I don’t know,’ the apples in his orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto.

Another way that I’ve embraced the magic of “I don’t know” is that I often write from the perspectives of children. Several of my plays have roles for children—and two of my novels feature children as main characters.  I find it liberating to write from the perspective of someone who is still learning the world and interpreting its complexities for the first time.  As a writer in such situations, I don’t feel compelled to pretend that I have all the answers.

Of course, over time, one begins to understand what one is writing about. With my first novel, I began to see that young Mathilda and I had a lot in common. When I started the novel, it was almost exactly one year after 9/11.  Terrorism hovers in the background of Mathilda’s world as well, and I suppose, by borrowing this child’s voice, I was able to address my own fear and confusion and anger in a very open and innocent way.

Still, the process of writing a novel is never easy.  You will always end up making a mess at first.  And the task of telling a cohesive story can drive you completely bonkers. While writing my novels Edgar and Lucy and Honey, I became so overwhelmed by the sheer number of details and events I was processing, I had to put notes up on the walls of my office to keep track of things—so many notes that the room started to look like the cell of a lunatic.

My only way of working through this madness was to work slowly—to let the stories grow organically, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. I prefer not to play puppet master too much.

I think I’m at my best when I’m writing from inside the characters—when every twist and turn of the story seems to be dictated by what a certain character is feeling.

As I’m working on a piece, I never know what’s going to happen next.  The characters and I edge toward the answers together. It’s this sort of detective work that keeps me interested as a writer—and hopefully it does the same for a reader. I think at the core of all writing and reading is mystery—the ultimate mystery being, who are other people? One writes—and reads—in an attempt to answer this question, or at least get closer to an answer.

It’s a very humanizing endeavor.

I don’t take fiction writing lightly. I truly believe that fiction, both the writing of it and the reading of it, is a very civilizing thing. In it, there’s the possibility of learning to love people who are nothing like you—and that’s where the miracle of art happens, and you change.

I’m a romantic, I suppose.  I want books to change me, to change my life.  I suspect you do, as well.  So I say: Embrace the mystery and the strangeness and the herculean effort of the process—and fight to finish your book!

It’s worth it.