Carol Shields Interview (page: 2 / 6) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction	Print Interview

You have painted some portraits of gentle, warm men in your novels, and you once speculated that perhaps it goes back to relationships that you had with your own father, and husband, and brother. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Carol Shields: I have to say I didn't know my father very well. He was a very remote figure. I don't think -- and this is a very sad thing -- I don't think I ever had a real conversation with him in my life, and I'm not quite sure why that happened. Was it I who didn't initiate that or make him feel at ease? I don't know. But certainly he was a gentleman.

When you read about America as a land of guns, we never had a gun in our house. I never saw a gun at all growing up. My brother is an exceptionally gentle person. I mean, he was a regular brother growing up and used to, you know, liked to give us chops on the arm and wrestle us, but he grew up to be the most wonderful and gentle father of five children himself. I married someone -- we never know, see -- I married so young, that you don't quite realize, perhaps, how you end up with the person you do end up with. It's chance whether it's going to be a fit or not, and again, he is a man of great gentleness.

Were you a good student in school?

Carol Shields: Yes, I was one of those good students. I was not good in certain things; mathematics, for example, and I took the bare minimum that I could, and I would have done very badly if I had gone ahead in physics, I suppose. But I chose those things that I excelled in -- history, English, of course.

Were your parents still around when you published your first poetry?

Carol Shields: No, my mother had died just at the same time, so she didn't see that first publication. My father did, of course, and he also lived long enough to see some of the novels. I'm not sure he ever read them. I know he kept them, with great pride, on the coffee table, but he never said anything about the contents, and I knew enough not to probe. So that was fine with me. A lot of writers tell me this is true, that their own family doesn't really read their books.

Sometimes writers say things that may make people uncomfortable. They say things that are usually left unsaid. It can make the family members uncomfortable. Is that possible?

Carol Shields: Yes, I think so.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think there's a kind of dialogue outside in that novel that has never taken place within the family. I would imagine that family members would read and say, "Oh, I can't believe this is my sister saying this." I suppose this is why I love novels, because novels are not just about what people do, but they're about what people think, and this is what, of course, we don't get in film either, the thinking mind, and perhaps this does make family members or friends uncomfortable. But on the other hand, I was always careful not to write about family or friends because I wanted them to remain my family and friends. I believe the old myth about people not wanting their photograph taken because it's a form of stealing their soul. I think there's something in that. So I always try to be very careful.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

You know, I have frequently taught classes in creative writing, and it is one thing that every student I've ever had has worried about, and I'm talking about people who have no hope of ever publishing anything. They worry about the injury they might cause by writing about, and particularly their mothers, mothers always take a very hard knock in creative writing classes, and so you have to sort of counsel them to set those fears aside and to write without being throttled by them. And you can always go back and change details later. But it is, I am struck with what a common fear that is.

Isn't that probably just a fear of revealing oneself and one's feelings?

Carol Shields: I suppose, revealing one's darker self, the fact that we can have angers, and maybe particularly for women. But I think the fact of violating some of those orthodoxies, such as children must love and respect their parents. When you come down to situations of conflict with those same parents, we don't always like to admit that.

I've heard it said you have to write what you know, and you are saying that you deliberately avoid writing about your mother, father, brother. How can you not write about your family, in a sense?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Shields: Of course we all draw on our own experiences when we write. There's nowhere else to draw from. But I think that for many of us we do not draw directly. This is the thing that's always hard to explain to people who do not write fiction, that it is not simply an account of life as we have seen it. It's an arm and leg of our experience perhaps, but then there is this whole other part of the recipe which is imaginative, the imagination, and that's the piece that's hard to explain. How do you get to that part? And you get to it -- I mean, a simple example, of course, is setting up one's own experience and then saying, "Well, what if..." that important "what if." What if something else intervenes? And that's where somehow you can get to a place which is quite fully imagined, rather than experienced.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

How do you get the ideas for a novel? Do you develop a very clear idea of where you are going to go from start to finish before you begin, or are you developing it as you go?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Shields: I develop as I go. I have a structure in mind, though. I always see the structure before I know what's going to be in the structure, and it's a very physical image that I can call up, just the way you would call up an image on your screen. For example, I'll just give you a simple example. It was this first novel I wrote, which is called Small Ceremonies. I couldn't imagine how you wrote a novel, how you kept track of all of these little pieces of it, and I thought, "I need some kind of a structure." So I took the academic year. The novel has nine chapters, and they are called "September, October, November," et cetera, very easy structure. And in my mind, those chapters looked like the cars of a freight train, and I just lined them up, nine of them, and I knew I would have to fill those freight cars, and that was the image, and it helped me keep things together a little bit. It was just for my own ease, I guess. But for each novel I've had rather a different structure, but it's been important for me to have that. But I don't know where it's going. I don't fully know the character of my main character when I start out. So that character opens for me exactly as it opens for the reader, piece by piece, layer by layer.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

And you don't know the whole plot when you're starting?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Shields: I don't know the whole plot. Sometimes I know where I want to get to, I just don't know how I'm going to get there, and this can be frightening for a writer. Although, after a point, you develop a certain faith in your process, and you know you'll hit those hard times, but you know somehow you're going to work it out as you go. Most writers do say that while they are in the state of writing a novel, or as Dorothy Parker used to say, "undergoing a novel," your antenna are up somehow. And so you are catching all sorts of things that you might not catch if you were not in the process of writing a novel, and some of these experiences seem to be uniquely offered to you. It's as though your whole world is suddenly available to you to use. So the problem is often too much material, not "not enough."

You've said that you're attracted to the idea of the unknowability of the other, and whether it's really possible to tell the story of someone's life. As you said in The Stone Diaries, in a sense, a story of somebody's life is a cheat, because it's so skewed.

Carol Shields: Yes. Yes. Well, that particular novel plays on this sort of problem of illusion and reality working against each other.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. A human life, and this is the only plot I think I'm interested in, is this primordial plot of birth, love, work, decline and death. This is just life working away toward the end of life. What is the story of that life? Can we tell our own life story with any sort of truth at all? And of course, we know we can't. I mean, our life stories, whether we write them or not, are a tissue of evasions, or perhaps, enhancements. So that story that we carry around in our head, the story that we call our life, we can't know our birth and death, but we create them somehow, imaginatively. There are parts of our lives which we're quite happy to erase. There are other parts that we want to touch up just a little bit. So what we end -- it is a fiction. Our autobiography is a form of fiction.

So, in a way, fiction can be just as real, or even more real, than fact.

Carol Shields: I think it is, because, just to go back to what we're talking about earlier, fiction allows us into people's minds, and I suppose nine-tenths of our life is played out inside our heads, and that's the place we can never quite go. If you're writing a standard biography, for example, you can't get into that head. But with fiction, and I think this is why fiction has been such an appealing form since it burst on the scene in the 18th century, it was immediately the primary literary form. And I think it is because we had an entrée into people's most private domains.

It helps us feel less alone, doesn't it?

Carol Shields: Oh yes, it does. And this is what writers always want to get to, I think, to create those moments where the reader connects and says, "Ah ha. I have felt exactly like that, but I've never heard of anyone speaking of this."

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