I only met Amy Tan once. She was the guest speaker at my college's literary festival, and she had only recently written her smash novel, The Joy Luck Club. I was able to sit in on her reading, and trust me, I hung on every word.
Then I went out and bought a copy.
When I learned about this PBS American Masters documentary, I knew I needed to watch it.
What Is a Writer?
We each have differing meanings of what we are and what we do as a thing called "writer" or "author." When asked the questions, Tan gave perhaps my favorite definition for the term.
During the writing of this book, I delved into the contents. Memorabilia, letters, photos, and the like. And what I found had the force of glaciers calving.I am not the subject matter of mothers and daughters or Chinese culture or immigrant experience that most people cite as my domain.I am a writer compelled by a subconscious neediness to know, which is different from a need to know. The latter can be satisfied with information. The former is a perpetual state of uncertainty and a tether to the past.
The writer, then, is an ongoing nature of curiosity -- an ever-longing, an ever-searching person putting together life's puzzle.
You know, when you're writing, I think you're naturally going through some kind of subconscious, philosophical construct, your own cosmology, how the world is put together and how events happened and what's related, what's coincidental.
I love that.
Beneath the thing we think of as "writer" is a subconscious idea, what Tan calls a philosophical construct, constantly trying to make sense of the real world and put all those truths into a fictional one. That's certainly a better definition than "some yahoo sitting at a laptop for way too many hours at a time fighting against a blank page."
The "Before" Days
How often do we take into account the life stuff that happened to make a writer a, well, writer? It's often glossed over (at least until the memoir is written or a biopic is made) as if authors were born fully formed the day their book (at least the one that "matters") was released into the wild, wild world.
There's a lot of past that formed the bricks of the structure that eventually became the author.
For Tan, that started with reading, in particular, a book she wasn't supposed to be reading:
Two weeks before my father died, a minister came to counsel me because I had been discovered reading a very bad book, "Catcher in the Rye. " Banned book.He was a youth minister, and he came into the room, and we were sitting on the bed, and he was talking about how I had caused my father more pain than the brain tumor.
Just as sacred cows make the best hamburgers, banned books make the best inspiration when it comes to creating writers. But it's not just the reading. She also was already writing, just not in the world of fiction... yet.
She says:
You know, I had another bestseller. It sold. You know what these numbers are. When you have a bestseller, you have to sell a certain amount in the first week. I'd sold 80,000 copies and went in for two reprints. It was called "Telecommunications and You." It was published for IBM, and I was a business writer before I started writing fiction.
She also got a little help from a friend's husband.
Amy was a linguistics and English major. And I remember her wanting to write. John, my husband, started a business. He had one phone line that was Dial-a-Joke, another phone line that was Dial Michael Jackson, and another one that had astrology. So he hired Amy to write astrology. She was very creative, and she would make it up.
Maybe this wasn't the fictional masterpiece that The Joy Luck Club or The Kitchen God's Wife are recognized as, but it was writing. All writing counts toward mastery. All writing gets you closer to locking in technique and talent. All writing moves you closer, step by step, to the place where you can finally, eventually write the stuff you want to.
