Up until I started writing a book titled Forever, I liked to think I was a perfectly well-adjusted person. Maybe I did have a lot of stories running through my head, but to me, the people who don’t have these stories are missing something.
Anyway, I like to think I was happy and relatively well adjusted. I was thirty-seven years old, had a great career, had friends, and best of all, I had met a wonderful man named Steven.
Steve was a dream come true: smart, funny, talented, caring. If I’d made him up he couldn’t have been better. And he adored me. He laughed at all my jokes, thought I was beautiful, smart. You name it, everything was perfect between us. There was no question that finally, at last, I wanted to get married. When he asked me to marry him, while riding in a hansom cab through Central Park, I threw my arms around his neck and said, “Yes, yes, yes!” with such enthusiasm that I embarrassed Steve.
But that night, actually, early Sunday morning, I awoke at 3 A.M. with an IDEA. That’s unusual for me. When I first started to write I was plagued with Ideas, and I was so afraid that I’d forget them when I awoke that I got out of bed and wrote all night. But after I’d written about ten books, I’d wake up with an Idea, then fall back asleep.
But that night of my marriage proposal, with my left hand weighted down by Steven’s ring, I had an IDEA. It was so big that I couldn’t relax against Steve’s warm body and go back to sleep.
So, tiptoeing, I got out of bed and went to my computer to write down my thoughts. What I was really thinking about wasn’t so much a story but a character. Well, okay, a man. A wonderful man, a man unlike any I’d ever written about before. A man who was more real to me than any other man I’d created.
In my books, I write about one family, the Tavistocks. When I first started writing, every time I finished a book I’d get depressed because I knew that I’d never again see the characters in my book. So one day I had the brilliant idea of writing four books about four brothers in one family. However, I had not taken into consideration that when I finished the series I would be quadruply depressed. When I reached this point, the only way I could figure how to recover was to write more books about the same family.
At the time I didn’t realize what I was getting into. As the number of books about this family increased, the mail brought me thousands of requests for family trees. And people kept pointing out that I’d have a man and woman with a little boy in one book and in the next book their child would be a girl. I had to buy professional genealogy software to keep up with all of my people, since within a few years I had over four hundred characters, all related to one another.
Over the years I had come to love my Tavistocks and their cousins, and they had become very real to me. So on the night of my engagement it wasn’t unusual for me to start writing about a man named Tavistock.
I named him James Tavistock, to be called Jamie, and he was a great big gorgeous sixteenth-century Scotsman running around in the Tavistock plaid, and the heroine was a modern woman of today who travels back in time to meet him.
When Steve awoke the next morning I was still at my computer, trying to get down dialogue and notes for the book. He’d never seen me like this because over the years I had learned to treat writing like a nine-to-five job. I took off weekends and holidays just like everyone else. I found that this worked better for me than the lunacy of “waiting for inspiration.” The rent I pay each month for my apartment is all the inspiration I need.
Steve was very understanding. He’s an investment banker (no, I do not allow him to handle my money; I said I was in love, not insane) and was a bit fascinated by the creative process. So he ordered his own breakfast from the delicatessen (in the real world the woman fries eggs for her man; in New York we dial the telephone for our men), and I kept typing.
After a while he got bored with hearing the keys of my computer, so he tried to get me to go out with him to see a movie or walk in the park. But I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t seem to stop writing about Jamie.
Steve said he understood, then decided to leave me to my work; he’d see me the next day.
But I didn’t see him the next day, or the next. In fact I didn’t see him for nearly two weeks. I didn’t want to see anyone; I just wanted to write about Jamie.
I read books on Scotland until the wee hours of the morning and everything gave me an idea about Jamie. I thought about him, dreamed about him. I could see his dark eyes, his dark hair. I could hear his laugh. I knew what was good about him and what was bad. He was brave and honest; his honor was such that it was a life force. He was proud to the point that it hindered him. But for all his many virtues he was also vain and at times as lazy as a cat. All he wanted was me—I mean, the heroine—to wait on him.
After two weeks I went out with Steve; I don’t know what it was, but it was as though I couldn’t really see him. It was as though I was seeing all the world through a Vaseline-coated lens. Nothing seemed real to me. All I could seem to hear and see was Jamie.
Over the next months my obsession with this man only
deepened. Steve did everything he could think of to get my attention. He talked to me, pleaded with me to stop working and start paying attention to him.
“Where is the woman I fell in love with?” he asked with a smile, trying to make light of what was hurting him so much.
I couldn’t really answer him. I just wanted to get back to my computer and my research books. I don’t know what I was looking for in the books; maybe I hoped to “find” Jamie in them.
I have to say that through all of this Steve was wonderful. He really did love me. After about four months of complete inattention from me, he begged me to go with him to a counselor. By this time I was feeling guilty. No, correction, I was feeling that I should feel guilty; what I was actually feeling was that I wanted everyone on the earth to go away and leave me alone with Jamie.
For three months, Steve and I had weekly visits with a therapist, talking about my childhood. I was completely uninterested in any of it. I sat there and told them what they wanted to hear, that my mama didn’t love me and my daddy didn’t love me, et cetera. The truth was, in the back of my mind, I was thinking only of what I wanted to write about Jamie. Had I fully explored the way the sunlight played on his hair? Had I described the sound of his laughter?
Steve knew very well that I was paying no attention to any of the therapists, so, after eight months of receiving nothing from me, he told me he wanted to break our engagement. In a scene that I felt as though I were looking at from a distance, I gave him back his ring. The only thought that was in my head was, Now I can spend all my time with Jamie.
When I first told my friend and editor, Daria, about my obsession with this hero, she was thrilled. Obsessed authors write great books. The authors who fail are ones who call their editors and say, “What do you want me to write next?”
Daria was the only person on earth who wanted to hear about this man as much as I wanted to talk about him. Of course, to be honest, Daria had learned to listen to authors while line editing other people’s manuscripts, eating a bagel, and directing her assistant about covers and cover copy. Daria has one humdinger of a brain.
But then something odd happened. After about three months of my talking nonstop about this book, Daria said, “I want to see what you’ve done.”
“No!” I snapped at her request. Now this is very odd. Writers act as though they have lots of self-confidence, but we all have clay feet. We are in awe of the power of our editors, those first people who see our work. Daria always raves about the first section of a book I turn in to her. Later she may tell me it all needs to go into the trash, but not at first. It’s like, you can’t tell your best girlfriend that the guy she’s madly in love with is a creep. After she breaks up with him, you can tell her.
Anyway, I usually sent Daria my book in fifty-page clumps and started pestering her for her opinion (i.e., lavish praise) before the express service had even picked it up from my door. One book, I sent her the whole five hundred pages in ten-page segments. Wisely, Daria refuses to have a fax machine in her apartment or else all her insecure, praise-hungry authors would be faxing her their books page by page then demanding an hour’s praise for every paragraph that they hope is wittily written.
By all of this you can see how unusual it was when I didn’t want Daria to see what I had written. I told her I wanted to finish the section I was writing before I sent it to her.