From The Writer's Almanac from Friday, October 25, 2013
Today is the birthday of novelist Anne Tyler, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941. She's written 19 novels, most of them set in Baltimore, where she's lived since 1967. Her family moved around a lot when she was small, and they finally settled in a Quaker commune in the mountains of North Carolina. Certain myths have sprung up about her childhood, probably because she doesn't give many interviews and people have drawn their own conclusions. Some say she didn't wear shoes or go to school until she was 11. She did, in fact, attend a one-room school for all the children who lived on the mountain. There weren't a lot of books, though, so she read Little Women 22 times. Living in the relative isolation of the commune was good training for a fledgling novelist; she says it gave her a bit of distance from the rest of the world, training her to be a slightly detached observer of it.
She published her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes (1964), when she was 23. In her early days as a writer, John Updike reviewed her, saying she was "not merely good, but wickedly good." But she wishes she could go back and eliminate her first four books; she didn't really believe in revising in those days, preferring to keep her writing spontaneous. She's changed her opinion since then, and now says, "Spontaneity is not always a good thing." Her best novel — at least in her opinion — is her ninth: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982). She published it when she was 40, and it was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her 10th novel, The Accidental Tourist (1985), was also a finalist for the Pulitzer, and she finally took home the coveted award for her next novel, Breathing Lessons (1988).
Tyler keeps a card file in which she's written snatches of ideas or scenes on hundreds of index cards. When the time comes to start a new novel, she turns to her file and flips through the cards, pulling out the ones that resonate with her. Then she enters a monthlong planning phase. When she's ready to begin, she writes in longhand on unlined white paper. Then she types each section as she completes it, and rewrites it again in longhand. Finally, she reads the whole novel aloud to a tape recorder, to see if the dialogue rings true.
In the case of her most recent novel, she told the Guardian: "I was still in the very beginning, the month of looking at that sheet of white paper and saying what can I possibly do? And I heard a voice say in my brain very clearly: 'The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted.' A few minutes later the voice said: 'I have a couple of handicaps. I may not have mentioned that.'" That voice was the voice of Aaron, her protagonist, and the book that arose from it was her 19th, The Beginner's Goodbye (2012).
Unlike many novelists, she says she usually doesn't draw from her own life when coming up with ideas: "Writing is all about getting to do more. It would be very boring for me to have to live my life over again, I just want to live somebody else's," she told The New York Times. "I hate to travel, but writing a novel is like taking a long trip. This way I can stay peacefully at home."
Anne Tyler is currently at work on her 20th and (she says) final novel, which is to be titled A Spool of Blue Thread.
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F10%252F25.html
