Isabel Allende: Quotations on Creative Writing, Consistent with Multiple Identity Literary Theory

“First of all, I have the feeling that I don’t invent [my characters]. I don’t create them; they are there. They are somewhere in the shadows, and when I start writing—it’s a very long process; sometimes it takes years to write a book—little by little they come out of the shadow into the light. But when they come into the light, they are already people. They have their own personalities, their clothes, their voices, their textures, their smells. I don’t invent them; somehow they are there. They always were there” (1, p. 258).

One of her best-known characters, Eva Luna, “is the woman I want to be. We are so different, in every way but one: we both tell stories. But she is my dreamself” (1, p. 273). She “was always there. I know that the character was within me. She doesn’t resemble me; it’s not my biography. I’m not her. But somehow she was inside me…By writing, [the character] got out of me and existed by itself…So that’s my relationship with my characters—very strange and very powerful. [Sometimes they come out right away, fully formed, and she can’t change them even if she wants to]…sometimes they [start out] ambiguous, but by the end they are so real that my children play with the idea that they are living in the house. And we talk about them as if they were part of the family” (1, p. 259).

Once a novel is started, she hates to interrupt the writing process. For example: “Now, while I’m here in Toronto, the voices keep on talking and I’m not there to take them down. I feel like a traitor when I’m not writing” (1, p. 275).

“I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don’t talk to anybody; I don’t answer the telephone. I’m just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I’m creating a world that is fiction but that doesn’t belong to me. I’m not God there; I’m just an instrument” (1, p. 290).

When she starts one of her novels, does she invent the first sentence?

“When I’ve lighted the candles and turned on the computer, I write the first sentence, which I let bubble up from my intuitions, not from reason. That first sentence opens the door to the story that’s already there—only it’s hidden in another dimension. It’s my task to enter that dimension and to make the story appear. When I wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits, which is “Barrabas came to us from the sea,” I didn’t yet know who Barrabas was or why he had come…It’s something magical that I can’t explain very well, because I don’t control it myself” (1, p. 295).

If you are new to this blog, you might think that the above sounds weird, but it’s not; it’s rather typical. The details are unique to Isabel Allende, but the general process is similar to what I have previously quoted from Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, J. M. Barrie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and other great writers.

This is the psychology of great writers and the process of creative writing, but you wouldn’t know it from other literary theories.

1. John Rodden (ed.). Conversations with Isabel Allende. Translations by Virginia Invernizzi and John Rodden. Foreword by Isabel Allende. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.