Posts by Marisa de los Santos
Flickr Creative Commons: ehpien
Last week, I had a new author photo taken. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was the first one in eight years, a drought that has less to do with my wanting readers to think of me as eternally young (or at least eternally mid-forties) than it does with my being innately stiff and antsy and uncomfortable in front of a camera. But a photographer friend took the photos, out of doors, in natural light, and it was a surprisingly not-excruciating experience. When I got the proofs a few days later, I was a little startled, as I am always a little startled, by the difference between the Marisa in the picture and the Marisa I picture, but while my friend let me know that she could soften and blur and retouch as much as I wanted, I found I didn’t want her to after all. I didn’t mind the way I looked; there were things about it I liked. And in any case, I wanted to look like myself. Like myself with makeup on, turned to the right angle, and bathed in honey-colored late afternoon light, but like myself all the same.
I was never an ingenue writer. When I began writing my first novel, Love Walked In, I was thirty-seven, thirty-nine when it launched, but the writer in the new photo is squarely and unmistakably middle-aged, which alarms me. I really don’t mind the age thing in and of itself. In many, many ways, fifty-three is wonderful. Fifty-three is freedom and choices and true friendship and daily interludes of joy. Unlike other eras of my life, I manage to spend the vast majority of my time with people I love.
No, what alarms me about middle age is the sense that, by now, with all those writing years and eight novels (two co-written with my husband) under my belt, I should be seasoned. I should be capable. Not wise, yet, maybe, but surefooted. At the very least, I should be better at both writing and being a writer than I was when I began. So, as corny as it sounds, seeing that author photo caused me to do what I rarely do: pause and take stock. I decided to be methodical about it. Methodical and brutally honest. I got out a notebook. I made lists: Better, Worse, The Same.
Better
To my relief, the “Better” list has actual items on it. Mostly, these items fall under the category of knowing what to leave out. When I write conversations, I am better at not taking the reader by the hand and guiding them. Despite all the anti-adverb common wisdom, I still like them, but I use them more judiciously. Much of the time, instead of saying “wryly,” I make the dialogue convey wryness and trust the reader to get it. I’ve become less afraid of letting people just talk, without stopping to fiddle with their fork or tuck their hair behind their ears or note the skeletal (or lush or new-spring-lemon-lime-frilled) tree outside the window, unless the moment truly calls for fiddling or tucking or noting. I still love figurative language (I think in figurative language; figurative language is my natural […]
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If I could be anything, if I could have any occupation in the entire world, I’d be a mystery writer.
As a reader, I’ve been devouring detective fiction for over four decades. I started, as so many readers do, with Nancy Drew (her shift dresses! Her convertible!), and then quickly switched allegiances to the more effervescent and adorably human Trixie Belden (her brothers! Her curls!). In high school, it was Agatha Christie. In college and grad school, Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. Discovering Dorothy Sayers was like money falling from the sky (Gaudy Night is still a near-annual read), and now, in my fifties, I am in love with Tana French’s Dublin murder squad, Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brody books, and Louise Penny’s Gamache series. Do I get excited about other genres of fiction? Of course. But this summer, during my head-first plunges into the new Jackson Brody and then the new Gamache, I forgot to eat, which in my world is just this side of a miracle.
And then there is my utter devotion to Law and Order in all its incarnations and to Foyle’s War (when I imagine God, he looks exactly like Foyle), and my much mocked but unshakeable infatuation with Murder, She Wrote.
But I am ninety percent sure that I will never write a mystery, let alone a mystery series, and that little, leftover ten percent is almost certainly composed entirely of wishfulness.
It’s a shame, too, because there are aspects of writing detective fiction that I think I’d be good at. Building suspense, for instance. I could do that, creating sentences like live wires running through fog, sentences full of tension and sibilants and ominous hush. And bringing a detective to full-blown, complex life, with her obsessive nature and her dark past? I could do that, too, although given my sensibilities and track record, she’d more likely be fresh-faced and optimistic with a quick wit, a faith in fundamental human decency, and a happy childhood. Still, that could be interesting, right? A detective like that?
There is a large part of me that believes I was born to write those sentences, to create that detective. Detective fiction is my calling. The problem, of course, is plot.
Once, starry-eyed, I asked the author of an ingenious and intricate historical mystery series how she writes her books, and she said, “I start with the body, a dead body that was murdered in a cool way turning up in an interesting place, and then I work backward to figure out all the twists and turns and chess moves of how it got there.” I could tell by her voice, by the way her eyes gleamed, that she found this piecing together of plot not only fascinating but also fun. To me, however, it sounded not only impossible but also—boring.
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I have spent the last few years wrestling with the word “relatable.” It is a word I find personally irritating. On the occasions when my teenage children use it—to describe a song lyric, a Black Mirror episode, a scrap of wisdom featured in an Instagram meme—I cringe so hard and emanate scorn so nakedly that they either apologize or laugh and use it again, depending on the kid and the situation.
I tell them, “It’s not a real word,” but this is sort of silly coming from me, since I understand and appreciate that language is alive and, therefore, ever evolving, and also since I routinely make up words myself and sometimes even put them into books. But “relatable” feels cheap to me, a shortcut, one of those empty-vessel-type adjectives that can contain almost anything an individual speaker (or writer or Amazon reviewer) wants to toss into it. When my kids say, “That’s so relatable,” I press them to go further, deeper, to be more specific: “This thing speaks to me, resonates with me, attracts me, fascinates me, engages me because . . .”
But when the word is applied, as it has been more times than I can count, to the characters in my novels, I become even more impatient.
I should stop here and say that I am not impatient with the people who use it, the ones who read my books and who are thoughtful enough to share their opinions about them. To the users of the word I am grateful. I know that it is a compliment that they take the time and know as well that word itself is a compliment. While the meaning of it feels ambiguous to me, it is clearly always intended as praise, which is probably where I should leave it: with a thank you.
Instead, though, I parse and sort and analyze. I chase possible meanings around like buzzing flies—lots of irritated flailing on my part, then swat, miss, swat, miss. Does it mean that the reader sees herself in the character? Does it mean that everything the character does makes sense to the reader? Does it mean the reader would like to be friends with the character, maybe sit down and have a conversation? Is it simply another word for “likeable”? For “nice”?
There is nothing intrinsically problematic about any of these responses, and as a reader, I’ve experienced them all myself. I see Lucy Honeychurch having a bad day mostly because her dress is the absolute wrong color for her, and I think, “Yep. Been there, Lucy!” I’ve fallen in love just exactly the way Dorothea Brook fell for Will Ladislaw. I cherish Kent Haruf’s characters for their profound decency. I would hang out with nearly every one of Elinor Lipman’s characters all day long.
But as a writer, I find myself wanting to make a case for messiness, for inconsistency and surprise, for complexity and weirdness, for flaws and tics and obsessions, even for thoughtlessness, self-centeredness, pettiness, spite. I want to say, “Okay, yes, but what about the character who makes you want to shake some sense into her? What about the one who gets in his own way at almost every opportunity? What about the one who hurts people?”
And […]
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We are so pleased to introduce you to WU’s newest contributor, a master wordsmith and bestselling novelist, Marisa de los Santos! This also marks release day for Marisa’s latest novel, I’ll Be Your Blue Sky. Learn more about Marisa on her bio page, and through her exquisite essay. Enjoy!
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness.” – George Orwell
Confession: I have never been a tortured writer.
It even took me a surprisingly long time to realize that I shouldn’t tell people this, that not finding writing grueling and painful marked me, in the eyes of some, as inauthentic, a lightweight. I managed to stay oblivious to this fact all the way through graduate school—which, if you’ve ever been to graduate school, you’ll realize is especially uncanny–and well after I had published my first novel. I think maybe that’s because it took years—and at least two books—for me to be authentic in my own eyes, to fully identify myself as a real, working writer, someone to whom the rules and expectations for writers might actually apply.
It’s not that I don’t find writing hard. Of course, apart from those rare, rare, vanishingly rare hours (or minutes, more like minutes) when it feels as if angels are dropping whole paragraphs into my lap, it is hard, every single sentence, every single day. But mostly it is the kind of hard I welcome; the kind of hard that makes a thing—I’m just going to say it—fun.
And this lack of suffering is also not about arrogance. It really isn’t. I don’t set out writing with the idea that everything I do is going to be a brilliant success. But I also don’t set out thinking it’s likely to be a failure, either. The truth is that, when I’m writing, I don’t think about things like success or failure or brilliance (brilliance, are you kidding?) at all. I think about these things at other times; I am pretty much a champ at being riddled with self-doubt. But never while I’m writing. Writing is just too personal to have anything to do with success or failure. Writing is me sitting smack in the middle of my story, with my characters all around me, making sentences.
And making sentences is joy. Choosing and discarding words, ordering and re-ordering them, listening to them chime or murmur or slice or bang together like rocks, achieving the right combination of vowel sounds, cringing at a hard “d,” substituting a muffled “m,” making the string of words evoke an image, a mood, a meaning, and, most importantly, making the words tell the characters’ story, the characters’ true and only story, telling that one true story sentence by sentence. I love this. I exult in this. I live inside this.
But even as I write these things down, I see that I need to amend it all, beginning with that very first sentence because the truth is that I had never been a tortured writer. Making sentences was joy. I always did love it, until the year I wrote I’ll Be Your Blue Sky.
It was a bad year, the kind of year that shakes your foundations.
My son was a junior in […]
Read MorePlease welcome Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of four novels for adults, including (most recently) The Precious One, Love Walked In and Belong to Me; and one for middle grade readers, Saving Lucas Biggs, which she co-wrote with her husband, David Teague. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with David, their children, Charles and Annabel, and their Yorkies, Huxley and Finn. Connect with Marisa on Facebook and on Twitter.
I’d never been a person to walk away from a commitment, and every novel I’d ever started writing, I’d finished and delivered when it was due. But eighty pages into my fourth novel, I walked away and tried something completely different. I’m not a risk-taker, and this was a huge risk and hard, wrenchingly hard, but it was exactly what I needed to do.
Knowing When to Walk Away
About eighty pages into writing my fourth novel The Precious One, I found myself in a state I’d never been in before. I wasn’t blocked, if being blocked is the complete inability to write. At eighty pages, I had faith my story, and I was already in the mode of experiencing my characters as real people. Not only did I have the two, very different narrative voices down cold, but also I loved my protagonists, Taisy and Willow.
And I could write, eking out a few paragraphs a day. The problem was that I didn’t want to. I confess that I have always enjoyed the act of writing. Sometimes, of course, I’ve hated it, but on a pretty regular basis, it makes me happy, and there are occasional whole stretches of time when it is sheer exhilaration. And even on the most desperate days, it has always felt like home.
Except that eighty pages into The Precious One, it stopped being home. I was slogging, dragging out and slapping down one sentence, then another. When I didn’t feel abject fear of the process, an icy dread, I felt numb. I had lost my joy.
About this time, my husband David Teague, a picture book author, and I started talking casually about what it might be like to write a book together. It was all a series of what-ifs: what if we wrote a book together; what if our narrators were thirteen years old; what if the book were for readers who were around our kids’ ages; what if we put history in it, and time travel, and Quakers, and a cool grandpa . . .. We began to text each other ideas at odd hours and to come tearing into the house blurting out plot twists or historical tidbits we’d dug up. We began to think in the voices of our characters. But it was all a game. How could we write it when I had another book to write, one under contract and with a deadline? We looked at each other, told each other we could not do it, it made no sense, the book would have to wait for another time, another year.
And then I walked away from The Precious One.
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