Finding Your Inner Author
By Fara Warner ’06
Fara Warner among Wallace House’s famous faces.
I can count on being asked two questions when people learn I’m a published author. First is, “How did you find your agent?” That’s easy—through a friend.
The second is tougher to answer because I know the questioner is desperately seeking the magic recipe for how and when to write so that they, too, can become an author: “So what’s your writing style, when do you write, where do you write?”
It’s both easy and difficult to answer. Easy because I can detail how I found it hard to work at home, so I decamped to my public library where the hushed energy helped me write. I can tell the funny story about learning to love doing laundry because on those days when the words wouldn’t come, I knew I could finish a load of dazzling whites. I can offer up the tidbit that Yo-Yo Ma’s cello music could make the words flow like nothing else.
But it’s difficult because that only answers how I wrote. Finding your way of writing—your own inner author—is a far more lucrative endeavor than mimicking what other authors use to bring forward the writing spirits.
I learned this the hard way. I wasted a week writing—or not writing—in the early morning because I read that was the time many authors were most productive. I spent three days wondering if I needed a weird food to get me going after a friend told me she ate 200 bottles of Nutella while writing her book. I worried for months that I was keeping my house too tidy when another friend told me she simply let everything else fall apart when she was writing her book.
It wasn’t until I examined my own productivity that I found my inner author. And it didn’t include 5 a.m. writing gauntlets, weird foods or unmade beds.
I was trained as a daily journalist, pounding out copy on deadline at The Wall Street Journal. I realized that my writing muscle warmed up about 1 p.m. and didn’t tire before 6:30 or 7 p.m. The library mimicked an office, albeit a quieter one than most Journal bureaus. As for the lack of strange foods and a clean house, I realized that eating Nutella or 200 bottles of anything would just make me sick, and an untidy house would raise the ghost of my neat and tidy grandma—neither of which I needed while speed-writing a 200-page book in six months.
Yo-Yo Ma’s inspiration was a happy accident born out of trying to write like someone else. One dismal day, I had settled myself on a hard chair, laptop on the dining room table, and proceeded to stare at the white wall in front of me. I saw this in the movie The Tango Lesson. But the actor in the movie actually managed to write, while I spent an hour staring at the wall. I decided to turn on some music to inspire a nap. But as the music soared through the house, I pulled myself off the couch, sat down at thetable and pounded out a chapter. I don’t question why it happened. I just thank the writing gods and now turn to Yo-Yo Ma when the words won’t jump from my mind to the screen.
Now when people ask me that second question, I counter with a few of my own: When do you normally write? What place makes the words flow? And I always urge people to look for happy accidents that will draw forth their own writing spirit.
—Fara Warner’s book, The Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers—Women, was published in 2005 by Pearson Prentice Hall. For her next book Warner looks at the effect of globalization and consumerism on Chinese culture.
