Joan Chase on the Difficulty of Writing Following Success

“I did not approach writing as a career. It came along as a way of expressing myself, the first way I'd found suggestive enough, private and leisurely enough, to be worth the effort of approaching the complexities of living and giving voice to the situation. I never thought of writing as a way to earn a living but as a way of exhausting myself, engaging with my material, using everything I could find, inside and out. I have always had great patience but I think that my patience was squandered and misused without a subject. I imagine too that by the time I began writing, the relief and outlet afforded my morbid and melancholy nature to give rise to an unexpected joyfulness which made the necessary focusing and concentration comparatively uncomplicated.

“The success of Persia was part of what made it difficult for me to begin a second novel. But I think just being published was equally constraining. For the first time I was aware of an audience as an integral part of the process which makes a book a book. After that it was harder for me to focus on my material and fictional intentions without hearing other voices and responses. I became aware of the critic with increased intensity—another interference in the writing process. How I longed for the good old days of anonymity of isolation…except, of course, I was also delighted to have an audience.

“There was too, after writing one novel, the very real question: can I write a second? The first time I had done something in ways that seemed curiously non-reproducible, not even recoverable. Before, one thing had mysteriously led to another, but how to make it happen again? Though it took a long time, starting from scratch, eventually I was able to shut out the outside world and voices and keep to the straight and narrow of following my own concerns…telling the story in the ways that seemed right to me. I found that once again I began to develop a notion of where I was going.”

Excerpted from Contemporary Authors, a bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction.

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