“The Right Time” by Danielle Steel: Protagonist novelist using pseudonym (as Danielle Steel does), transcribes stories she experiences as prewritten inside her.

This novel reveals how Danielle Steel, who has sold more than 650 million books, experiences her writing process.

“…the surprise ending she conjured up even surprised her” (1, p. 71).

“ ‘I finished the book last night, the first draft,’ she said, looking awestruck. She felt as though someone else had done it, channeling through her” (1, p. 88).

“…at times Alex[andra] almost believed [the pseudonym under which she wrote] was real, like some form of alter ego” (1, p. 186).

“The story came out in one piece, already finished in her head, and she hadn’t even begun it…She couldn’t stop writing from the moment she sat down…The story just rolled out of her head and onto the page, and she couldn’t hold it back” (1, pp. 307-308).

“The books were ‘cooking’ even when she didn’t know it and she thought the stove was off. The stove was never off, and there was always a book in her somewhere. That was the magic…” (1, pp. 310-311).

Comment

People may not think of Danielle Steel as writing under a pseudonym, since her birth name—Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel—ends in Steel, but her father’s family name had been Schuelein, and Steel was a name he added sometime between 1940 and 1946 (he was born in 1914).

If I had read this novel five years ago, I would have thought that the protagonist was joking about her writing process. How could novels be prewritten inside the novelist? Prewritten by what or whom?

But since starting this blog four years ago, I have quoted many other writers—e.g., Mark Twain and Edward Albee—who have said the same thing about their own writing process. So it is not a joke. It is how great fiction is written.

The Right Time by Danielle Steel is testimony to the fact that fiction writers have alternate personalities inside them who like to make up stories, and may do so out of the regular personality’s awareness, which the writing personality then works very hard to transcribe and edit for publication.

1. Danielle Steel. The Right Time. New York, Delacorte Press, 2017.