After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.
After I wrote the book and had given it its title, it was interesting to discover that in France, fairy tales were called 'cahiers bleu', which means 'blue notebooks.'
All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.
Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you're gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.
Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.
Anyway, the sort of love that will not wait is probably best to pass by.
Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art - and books - always help.
Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head.
Everyone is interrelated and I think it's interesting to see how people react when they are thrown together. And I think there are still small towns that are like this.
Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.
I also have the feeling that twelve or thirteen-year-old kids have such vision when they are looking at things and can see the truth of such situations better than adults can.
I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.
I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival them.
I always quit at three when my kids come home from school so I feel pretty spoiled.
I can't really work on more than one thing at a time.
I could lie on my office floor - I could go back and forth from my desk to the floor and I didn't have to deal with people and it was much easier than anything else.
I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?
I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working.
I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned.
I feel like those are the stories I was first interested in as a reader, maybe even as a listener before I was a reader.
I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?
I have had periods of blocks where I had to get back into it and then when I was ill, it was easier to do work than most other things.
I never attended a private school like Haddan, but I'm always interested in what happens when characters are thrown together in a place from which there is no escape.
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.
I often write about islands of one sort or another, and in a way the Haddan School is an island. In a situation like that, people are bound to reveal themselves and conflict is bound to rise.
I really feel like the gift is also the curse. It's always half-and-half. Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay.
I talked to my oncologist about it and I said I didn't just want to be writing about cancer. And I tried to get rid of that character but I couldn't do that - she kept coming back.
I think growing up is difficult and it's a process that I'm always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.
I think it changes during different periods of my life. I always get up at 5 AM and worked before the kids got up. I make myself work every day.
I think it comes down to obsession - there are good ones and bad ones, like bad love affairs. Or you could end up with fourteen novels!
I think it happens more than we know and I think it happens at different levels. I think having an affair and being found out is one level, but he's led a life and everyone finds out that there were maybe two lives going on at one time.
I think it's so mysterious, so impossible to explain and so defies all logic. It's so completely interesting, no matter how many times you examine it. I don't have a clue!
I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life.
I think secrets often come out. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist and I asked her if there were people who came to her and admitted to doing horrible things and she said, 'More than you know.'
I think that this is a universal search, for the blue rose and everything it means, to try to create something that doesn't exist without your intervention, something that's a miracle and impossible, but you keep trying again and again.
I think the title will probably symbolize different things for different people, depending on their reading of the book. Who is the River King? became something of a joke among my initial readers because people had such different interpretations.
I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us.
I was in the middle of writing Here on Earth, and it was so dark and difficult for me to write that I stopped halfway through and wrote Practical Magic.
I was reading different versions of that fairy tale and talking about it with other women, feeling that it was a really resonant fairy tale for a lot of people.
I'm also doing a children's picture book, Moon Dog, with my son, Wolfe Martin, about a puppy who turns into a werewolf, for Halloween 2004.
I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing.
I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.
In all of these gifts, there's a glitch. You realize that it's not exactly what you think it is. Jenny can dream other people's dreams, but she makes a mistake and doesn't know whose dream is whose.
In some ways it's a metaphor for creating, or writing a novel. It's the process that's the important thing, the search, the quest. In a period of about five years I lost so many people that I'd loved.
Ironically, now that my children are older and gone quite a bit, I find it harder to work when they're not around. Too much free time!
It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.
It's also about mothers and daughters, not about contemporary witchcraft. I really felt that in writing this book I completed some circle. I wrote it after my mother had died.
It's complicated but I think one thing that happened for me was that I became much more efficient. People could be screaming, the TV could be blaring, dogs could be barking and I could still work.
It's probably best if I keep my own thoughts about this to myself, because I think it's a conclusion every reader has to come to on his own. I will say, for me, it's none of the above.
Maybe it's how close we are to history here that makes Massachusetts such an interesting place to write about, or the sense that this was the initial American frontier, or the literary legacy of so many great Massachusetts writers.
Maybe it's just those long, white winters which cause the imagination to wander into that territory.
Mothers always find ways to fit in the work - but then when you're working, you feel that you should be spending time with your children and then when you're with your children, you're thinking about working.
My theory is that everyone, at one time or another, has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.
No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.
Originally, in the first draft, Carlin and Sean's relationship was quite different, and then I realized what is most important to Carlin is to take the time to make choices.
Part of the healing process for me was what would I want to read if I was newly diagnosed - I would want to read a story of possibility and one of those possibilities was to have this woman be a romantic heroine.
Roses are important to us all - in a way the evolution of the rose tells the human story. Certainly, here is one instance where we have been successful in controlling nature - from the simple came the elaborate, with varieties as different from each other as they are from lilies or peas.
Stella can see the way people will die, but there's the possibility of intervention. So it's like a process of a discovery, that yes, you have a gift, but things change, and you have to learn how to go with it.
That's how I feel when I read a fairy tale - it could be happening right now.
The adults don't know what's happening on the kids' universe and the kids don't know what's happening on the adults' universe.
The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her - she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don't.
They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined.
This book was a way of figuring out how you go on in this world of sorrow.
When I was growing up, my grandmother and my mother were always talking about the weather - it would add an emotional dimension to things. They would call and say, 'is it raining there?' And I have to say that one of my brothers became a meteorologist.
You can try to take sorrow and make it into something enduring, meaningful and beautiful. I always feel guilty that this is my job, that I get to do this.
You know the funny thing is that I feel like I work so much less than my friends who have real jobs.
You can share a link to this page with your friend!