Writer Unboxed

Therese here. Today’s guest is New York Times and international bestselling novelist Lisa Unger. Lisa’s latest novel, FRAGILE, fresh off the printer, was recently chosen by Good Morning America as one of the “Top Book Picks for Great Summer Reading!” We’re thrilled she’s with us today to discuss her process and her latest novel–one she hadn’t realized was personal. Until it was.

DREAMS, MEMORY and FICTION

A great deal of my process is unconscious. I usually begin each novel with a voice in my head. I have no idea how the story is going to end, who is going to show up day to day, or what they might do. I don’t even fully know what a book is about until I’ve been sitting with it for a while. So, when it comes to nuts-and-bolts advice about writing, I’m probably not the person to ask – even though, just a few days ago, I completed the first draft of my tenth novel.

Plot flows from character. And until you get to know the people you’re writing about it, it’s impossible to know what is happening in their lives, how they will act in any given situation, and what story they have to tell you. This is why I was about halfway through the writing of FRAGILE when I finally realized what it was about — and that the story at its center was an event from my own past.

When I was a teenager, a girl I knew was abducted and murdered. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we were friends. But we were acquaintances, played together in the same school orchestra. And her horrible, tragic death was a terrifying and hugely traumatic moment in a quiet, suburban town where nothing like that had ever happened before. This event changed me. It changed the way I saw the world. And I carried it with me in ways I wasn’t aware of until I was metabolizing it on the page — more than twenty-five years later.

This story has tried to make its way out in other partials that I have discarded or abandoned. The voices that had tried to tell it before were never strong enough to center a novel around. It is notable that the voices who finally were able to tell the tale are much older, people with a lot of distance from the fictional event. In other words, it’s almost as if we all — the characters and the author — needed to grow up a little to have access to the heart of the story, to really understand it.

But all that said, FRAGILE is not about the actual abduction and murder. My memories of what actually occurred, the police investigation, the trial and conviction are vague at best. And I did nothing to rectify that fact. I did not track down key players, conduct interviews, find news accounts. I didn’t want it to be that kind of book. I had a fear of exploiting someone who had met a tragic end, of causing pain to people who surely didn’t deserve any more.

So I wrote from my center, as I always do. I honored the voices in my head and let them tell their story — which is similar in many ways to actual events from my past, but so very different. And maybe this is the case for all fiction. It comes from a true and honest place, a soup served from the imagination, experiences and observations of the author. The actual germ of the story, whether inspiration came from within or without, matters very little in the telling.

When I realized what I was writing about, I knew I would only be writing about its essence. And I only knew I was there in the way that we know we are dreaming. Sometimes in dreams we find ourselves in an unrecognizable place. And yet somehow we understand that we are in, for example, our childhood home. But we only know we’re there because we know it on some cellular level. Writing FRAGILE was like that, a kind of dream memory that wove itself into my narrative.

I suppose that makes sense because a major theme in FRAGILE is the power of memories – particularly childhood and hidden memories. They’re misty and vague, but they play a gigantic role in how we define ourselves. Some we hold on to, replay over and over. Others we tamp down, try to forget. In both cases, they have a hold on how we think about the past, the present and the future. Most of the characters in FRAGILE are struggling with lost selves, hidden selves, former selves they can’t escape and events they don’t want to remember but can’t move past.

I don’t think I could have told this story at nineteen when I began my first novel. I don’t think I could have told it at any other moment until I did. In writing FRAGILE I learned that you can have a story in you and not have the ability to tell it. That it can take years and decades to develop the skills, the craft, the talent to bring a story to life. I honestly believe that it took me the writing of eight novels to learn what I needed to in order to write FRAGILE. Maybe I needed that long, also, to come to terms with something so horrifying, so real, so deeply and truly sad. Maybe I needed to be a wife, a mother — a grown up — to have the perspective I needed to do justice to my memory of a lost girl.

And distance may be the key to writing about a real event from the past. As long as we are in it and dealing with it, I don’t think we can write about. If something still hurts, still causes a visceral emotional response, put it down in your journal by all means. But I wouldn’t attempt to fictionalize it. Until we have distance, we can’t have empathy. Until we have empathy for our characters, are strong enough not to judge and seek to control their actions, we can’t write authentic fiction – even if it comes from an authentic place or a real event.

Dreams, memory and fiction all share the same nebulous qualities. They all exert tremendous power, are deeply personal, and mean something different to everyone. But while dreams and memory are things we often keep to ourselves. Fiction is something we share with our readers. The journey from memory to fiction can be a long and complicated one. My advice: take your time, watch your step, and write from your center. When the story is ready to find its way to the page, you won’t be able to stop it.

Thanks for a great post, Lisa! Readers, you can learn more about Lisa’s work, including her new release, FRAGILE, by visiting her website. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Write on.

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