Witch's Blood

I realized that I had not answered one of your questions, which was probably the most important one: how do you write? Almost as soon as I'd written that I realized that I hadn't told you, and it gave me a whole weekend to think about it.

First now, you must be slightly off because you must be possessed by your people. That's what works. Nothing else will.

I sculpted from the time I was seven until I was nineteen. Then it just stopped. It was gone. I tried to bring it back, but it didn't come back. And then, after I had written A very poor story can come, but a good one comes when the writer is possessed. Most people are afraid to be too possessed, to live in their imaginations too much. There is a mystic belief that our creations create us and that we ourselves create God being his creation. I adhere to this. The Zen Buddhist say that everything that is, is, meaning nothing is fake, so I wholeheartedly know my imagination is real, and useful. I think this is the biggest hindrance to a writer. We block ourselves from imagination and attempt to live in "the real world" meaning, some world that someone else has imagined for us. But there are many worlds we can imagine for ourselves.

Before this gets long I will cut it, but say that what ones puts in her imagination is a powerful shaper. I grew up on British television and the British novel, especial fantasy. I grew up on Lewis and Tolkien, and then Dick King Smythe and Susan Cooper. The secret, to me, is that I always write as a fantasists. Tolkein said that "Faery" was the whole world when we ourselves are enchanted, and so Jamnia and Izmir are really fantasy places. I grew up on children's fantasy, and I try to tell grown up stories as if I were telling them to children: only children who can read about sex and drugs and doubt and what the not.

Helen, in your own native country you have a great wealth of true story and great storytellers to delve into. I just saw the film Beautiful Thing again, and came away impressed by something we can't get in the States: a portrayal of life which is honest and lyrical all at once. Americans feel funny about being American. What I mean is, we do not have the sense of history you do. Our land is just as old. All land, but we are new in it. We live, rather, in the shadow of a dream made by New York on one side and Hollywood on the other, having a slight problem with self honesty. So American stories tend to come out warped and full of special effects or sarcasm that isn't funny. I generally stay away from this.

A few years ago when I set out to seriously write out our lives in the middle of America I couldn't find them. These stories hadn't been told. There were stories about the East Coast and West Coast, about the South. But not about the rest of us, which is most of us. If there ever were, people were living on farms in the middle of cornfields with windmills turning in the distance.

Foolishness.

And then, when I began watching British films and reading English novels again I was surprised. There WE WERE. For better or worse, this was the life I knew. Northwest Ohio is more like Manchester than Manhattan and this part of Indiana is closer to Liverpool than LA.
Jamnia, and my life had gone through some of it's greatest changes, major upheavals, there I was, suddenly sculpting again.

This is what art is like. I may dream of a character. I might see him on a bus, or he might take my order at a restaurant. Then I am haunted by him. I wonder what he is doing. He begins to tell me. I take up a pen and write as him. It is like love, but more than love. I put him or her or a whole town or scenario away, knowing one day they will come up. The visit, now and again while I bathe, or while I make toast, in the middle of a class, while fooling around at the computer. And then, at last, I am writing them. Often I have written a story, thrown it away and then, years later, picked it up again. The writing comes in so many ways. It is a natural force. It is a whirlwind.
Often I think that it is my religion more than anything else.