Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [213]
SV: Didn’t your mother once demand that you never be seen with a frying pan in your hand, as if you knew what to do with it? Was that loving law laid down the reason why you grew up eating in restaurants? And did you do your first writing in them?
FF: When my mother noticed I was signing up for Home Economics in high school she said with alarm, “Oh no, darling, don’t ever learn to cook or they will expect you to do it!” My mother discovered cafeterias very early on in my life and so I had very few home-cooked meals. I was an only child and my father worked at night and so my mother and I did eat out a lot. I enjoyed it. I still do. I write in restaurants and many chapters have started on a napkin.
SV: I somehow suspect that organization is not your strong suit. Characters, yes. Sheer storytelling, dialogue, subtle everyday poetry, comic timing, yes. But chapters, outlines, transitions, that sort of thing doesn’t hold out much appeal for you. Care to organize an answer?
FF: Organization? Isn’t that like the Elks Club or something?
SV: What devices do you use, if any, to prepare for writing, or once you are well into a book, to stay with it? I heard once something about hanging chapters on a laundry line.
FF: When I am preparing for writing a book I do a tremendous amount of research. I write notes everywhere and on anything and then when I think I have done enough I transfer all my handwritten notes, if I can find them, to the computer. On this last book I wasted an entire hour trying to figure out why I thought a certain kind of bread, eggs, and a can of floor wax should go in the book, only to discover it was nothing but one of my old shopping lists. And it is true that I do use a clothesline down the hall to hang my chapters on. As I said before, I find that I do things backward from most writers. I tend to write a chapter at the end of the book or in the middle before I write the beginning, and the clothesline helps me keep them in some kind of order. I even read magazines backwards. I suppose being dyslexic has caused this or else I am Chinese and just don’t know it.
SV: I know that you tend to disappear into a book and cut off the outside world while in one of your own making. Do you read other fiction while writing, or do you swear off the stuff?
FF: Yes, when I am writing I do cut myself off from everything and just live in the world of my story. I try not to even read the newspaper or watch the news.
SV: Do your stories surprise you? Did you ever start out to write one thing, one place, one time, and find yourself writing about another? Do your characters tend to run away with you?
FF: Yes, my characters never seem to do what I want them to. They are like bad children and do not mind me at all! In this book Hamm Sparks showed up and wanted a bigger part than I had intended.
SV: How do you feel when you start a book?
FF: Excited, scared, wondering if I can do it.
SV: And when you finish?
FF: Great! Even better! I love book tours and I finally get to have lunch with real live people again.
SV: You have some nice touches in Rainbow where characters almost exchange lives. For example the little blind songbird who yearns to see or at least travel the world and the itinerant girl whose idea of the full life is to stay at home. Do you think that many of us would like to exchange lives? Or live at least two? Is this just restlessness or envy or the potential thrill of the unknown life never lived? We are all celebrity-struck while maintaining stoutly that we wouldn’t trade places for the world. Or is it just garden variety schizophrenia?