Interview with Isabel Allende

We were delighted when Isabel Allende agreed to an email interview with Women Writers, Women Books.  We asked  you to come up with some questions.  Here is the result!

You seem to be fond of, or at least feel sympathy for your characters, even Esteban Garcia in ‘House of the Spirits’, who you describe as ‘evil’. How much does that literary empathy translate into your own day-to-day life?

In order to create a believable character the author needs to “be” the character, embody it completely with all its complexity, good and bad.  It is much easier to do it in my writing than in my real life. I try to be compassionate and patient, but I have learned to keep at an arms distance the people I distrust.

I read “La casa de Los espiritus” in Spanish, then several of your other books in English and I was wondering how you select translators. Do you get to work closely with them?

Margaret Sayer Peden translated into English most of my books but now she is 86 years old and she has retired.  My editor at Harper Collins selected new translators for Maya’s Notebook and Ripper, the novel that will be published in January. I always revise the translation carefully.

What is the most outrageous lie you’ve ever told?

That once I had long legs.  My grandchildren believed it for years.

Your novels have a huge canvas. Do you plan the whole thing in advance and let it fall apart in the writing, then pull it together at the end? Or do you begin with a cast of characters, bring them out to play and see where they take you?

I don’t have a plan when I start writing.  On January 8th, my starting date, I turn on the computer and open a vein. Books are written with blood, tears, laughter and kisses. Usually I have a vague idea of a time and a place where the story may happen and that’s pretty much it.

In the daily exercise of writing the characters come out of the wallpaper; at first they are vague shadows but soon they become real people. My job is to be flexible, not to impose on them my own ideas, allow them to act and tell me their stories, like actors in a play. I never know when or how the book will end and often I can’t even describe it until I print it and read the whole manuscript on paper.  Only then I know what the story is about.

 Have you ever experienced magic in your own life? Or something that felt like magic?

I am open to the mysteries of life. There is much that we can’t explain or control: premonitions, prophetic dreams, coincidences, the feeling of dejà vue, divination, trance, mysticism, etc. I am always in awe at the unexpected things that happen and connected to the spirit world. That gives magic to my life and my writing.

You get interviewed a lot. What question would YOU ask yourself if you were a journalist,  i.e. what question have you never been asked?

I would ask: Why do you write? And I would answer: because I can’t help it. If I don’t write I don’t feel alive. Telling stories is my karma.

Do you have 5 writing tips for aspiring novelists?

Writing is like training for sports, one has to do it constantly to create the muscle. For every thousand hours of training there is one game.  For every thousand drafts there is one good page. Other tips: write a minimum of a page per day, revise tirelessly, be playful, love the process more than the product, research, and get a good agent if you intend to publish.

—

For more info on Isabel Allende, visit her website www.isabelallende.com

You can follow her on facebook Isabel Allende and twitter @isabelallende

 

 

 

Tags: featured, Isabel Allende

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews, On Writing