![Zugunruhe [zoog.un.roo.ee] - carbon balanced with TerraPass](http://www.terrapass.com/images/partners/white-badge-medium.gif){kind=icon}
An Interview with Novelist Susan Straight
Susan Straight is a busy woman. A single mom with three daughters, she juggles the kids’ basketball practice, teaching, book events, and writing. The first time we talked, her shaggy black retriever, Fantasia, was trying to get her attention. During our second conversation, she was loading the dishwasher. “I don’t get writer’s block,” she said. “I have time block.”
As she described her daily life to me, it’s clear that sorting through the competing demands for her attention are her norm. Back when her oldest daughter (now 17) was small, Susan was full of desire to write but very short on time. Her daughter just wouldn’t take naps. About the only time during the day that the baby slept was when she was riding in the stroller. Susan would push the stroller until the baby nodded off and then she’d write longhand on legal pads. It didn’t matter where she was. “I’d try to find a church so I’d have a bench to sit on, but if there wasn’t anywhere to sit, I’d write anyway. Sometimes,” she said, “I’d sit on the curb.”
With six novels (and another on the way), critical acclaim, awards and finalist honors for a National Book Award, you’d think things would be different now. Not so. Susan estimates that 70% of A Million Nightingales (Pantheon Books, 2006) was written in her van. Forty-five minutes waiting for a daughter’s basketball practice to end? She wrote three pages. Even with carpal tunnel syndrome, everything is written by hand. She’s gotten three voice recorders as gifts over the years but just can’t use them. There is something about the physical processing of the words. Nothing else will do.
Wherever and whenever an idea and a moment coincide, Susan grabs a scrap of paper and writes. The ubiquitous subscription cards from magazines, church bulletins, napkins, or just about anything that will accept ink can become part of the manuscript. Even now, she has three paragraphs from her church’s bulletin dated January 26, 2003. Those paragraphs, transcribed into the computer, are now part of A Million Nightingales. She calls her method “highly inefficient.”
From my own perspective of struggling to find time to finish my own novel, I see her method as just the opposite of inefficient. Susan doesn’t wait for the perfect moment to write. Instead, she makes any moment useful. “About all I do,” she said, is “write and parent.” It sounds like she’s having success in both arenas. That daughter that was so reluctant to take naps is a intelligent, vital young woman. Susan’s younger daughter recently complained that the Christmas vacation was too long because school is so much fun for her.
Even though Susan is a master at grabbing the odd moment and producing something from it, she insists that she have a whole day once a week for writing. She uses that time to process what she’s done over the last six. But the night before that, “I start thinking about it.” She takes her notebook to bed with her, reads, and thinks. The next day she examines what she’s got. A snippet of dialog captured on a napkin might tip her off that more backstory is needed to set up the conversation. She listens to music and looks at photos, reads, and just thinks. Once upon a time, Susan knew that she was going to have Fridays to process but now, it’s catch as catch can.
One of Susan’s strengths is her self-described “desperation” to write. For Susan, not writing is just unacceptable. She’s got too much to say. Besides that “it’s such a high.” I know what she means. There is something magical that happens when fiction writing is going well. Characters and scenes and events show up on the page and surprise the writer. While working on her new novel, she got just such revelation. “Two of my characters are gay,” she explained. “I didn’t know it until one put his hand on the other man’s wrist. I said, ‘Oh my goodness!’”
Another strength that Susan possesses is her ability to be fully engaged with her story no matter what she’s doing. Driving, walking, doing the laundry, Susan is thinking, thinking, thinking about her characters and what’s happening to them. One thing her students want to do is “dive right in and write.” But you can’t do that, she says. “You have to think about your story, let it live in your head all the time.” That engagement is what makes the story and its characters real. All that walking around and thinking about it is what creates the passion that shows up on the page later.
Susan doesn’t just depend on her imagination. It’s imagination and fact and experience all combined. A Million Nightingales was her first historical novel. She read over 150 books in preparation for the manuscript. She called on memories of stories that people had told her. Susan traveled to Louisiana and soaked up the atmosphere of Opelousas and Plaquemines Parish. “Louisiana,” she says, “is not like anywhere else in the world.”
All preparation aside, it’s Susan’s drive, discipline, and determination that get her words on the page. She writes on themes of mother’s love and abandoned children, racism and social justice and creates a living, breathing history. That history goes on, perhaps, to create empathy in the reader, to grant someone the rare and precious experience of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes and being changed by it. Heady and weighty stuff, that. Yet, Susan is humble and self-effacing and sweet. She seems to hold herself and her work very gently.
By the time our first conversation had ended, Fantasia had settled down and stopped asking for Susan to let her out to play. But before we said goodbye, someone else was looking for her attention. The neighbor working outside needed to talk to her about the fence he was building. “If you need to ask another question, let me know,” she said as she got ready to hang up. She was on her way back into the busyness of her life, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she scribbled a few sentences before heading out the door.
