Free This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

she’s doing in the water in the first place, but at least you know she’s going under, so why not go ahead? Here’s why: because then you have to go back and write the boring parts, the lead-up, but you aren’t letting the scene build logically. Instead, you’re steering the action towards this gem you’ve already written. When you write your story in chronological order, you may in fact decide that this girl shouldn’t drown after all. Maybe the boyfriend jumps in to save her and he drowns instead. You learn things about characters as you write them, so even if you think you know where things are heading, don’t set it in stone; you might change your mind. You have to let the action progress the way it must, not the way you want it to. You create an order for the universe and then you set that universe in motion. No doubt Shakespeare loved King Lear, but it was clear that Cordelia would not survive, and how could Lear go on without Cordelia? The writer cannot go against the tide of logic he himself has established, or, to put it another way, he can—but then the book ceases to be any good.
    So if you originally plan to drown the girl and then it turns out the girl doesn’t drown, does that mean the characters are capable of taking over the book? No. And if you’re building a house with a downstairs master bedroom, and then decide to move the bedroom upstairs, the bedroom has not taken over the house. You have simply changed your mind, and your architectural plans, something that is considerably easier to do before the house is completely built/novel is entirely written. No matter what you may have heard, the characters don’t write their story. Oh, people love to believe that, and certain writers love to tell it— I was typing away and then all of a sudden it was as if I had been possessed. The story was unfolding before me. I had been hijacked by my own characters. I was no longer in control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it’s the closest thing to being God you’re ever going to get. All of the decisions are yours. You decide when the sun comes up. You decide who gets to fall in love and who gets hit by a car. You have to make all the trees and all the leaves and then sew the leaves onto the trees. You make the entire world. As much as I might wish for it to happen, my characters no more write the book than the puppets take over the puppet show. (Many books later, I was giving a talk in Texas and a woman raised her hand and said that her minister had told the congregation that they should never read novels with omniscient narrators because the writer was trying to imitate God. “Really?” I said. “No Tolstoy? No Dickens?” The woman shook her head. I have to say it thrilled me to think that narrative structure was dangerous enough to rate its own Sunday sermon.)
    One more thing to think about when putting a novel together: make it hard. Set your sights on something that you aren’t quite capable of doing, whether artistically, emotionally, or intellectually. You can also go for broke and take on all three. I raise the bar with every book I write, making sure I’m doing something that is uncomfortably beyond what I can manage. It’s the only way I know to improve over time, and going back to Russell Banks’s advice, I’m the only person who can make myself do better work.
    M eanwhile, back in Provincetown, winter had set in. The ice cream shop closed. The few bars that hadn’t closed for the season stayed open later. I holed up in my apartment and wrote, and plenty of times I got stuck. Despite all the good plans I had made while waiting tables, I could see now that my strokes had been broad and there were plenty of details that had yet to be devised. Occasionally I panicked. I did not, however, get writer’s block,