We were delighted to sit down with Donna Miscolta, author of Ofelia and Norma, to chat about all things writing and to share her answers with you.
We’ve all heard the advice that authors should “write what they know.” But fiction emerges from imagination and creation of new worlds. Do you feel a tension between what you’ve experienced and what lives only in your mind?
I think the advice should be “write what you observe.” Aren’t we all the time looking around us, at our surroundings, at the people occupying those surroundings, wondering at their stories? Aren’t we all just spies? Fiction emerges from what we see and the questions we ask ourselves about what set of circumstances brings a person to that moment in time and what choices will catapult them into a crisis. Yes, there is a tension between what I’ve experienced and what feeds my imagination because as a person I want to avoid conflict but as a writer I need to delve into it and let my characters agonize, ache, grieve, and feel remorse and shame, those feelings I would rather not feel—or at least not often.
Observing can be knowing. In Bret Lott’s podcast On Good Writing, there’s an episode based on a quote by the photographer Walker Evans: Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
Are you fluent in any other languages? If so, do you find that knowledge has any effect on your writing?
I live in Spain now and my goal is to be fluent in Spanish before I die, which may or may not happen—the fluency, not the dying. But in trying to speak Spanish at least part of every day, I find that in this transitional state of acquiring a second language, my brain sometimes seems to be giving up space occupied by English. Sometimes when trying to speak, I can think of the word I want neither in English nor Spanish. I don’t have this problem when I’m writing though, and I think acquiring a second language makes you more aware of the words that you do choose to put on the page and of their sound and cadence. It also makes you appreciate the flexibility you have in your native language, the ability to play with a sentence, its content and structure, until it feels just right.
How do you think translation affects a story?
When I was growing up reading Grimm fairy tales and later when I read works by Dostoevsky, Chekov, Mishima, the Latin American boom, and others, I hardly gave a thought to the fact that they first existed in another language. Gradually of course, I began to appreciate translation as the mind-bending thing it is. Since I moved to Spain, I’ve read Spanish authors in their original language as well as Spanish translations of non-Spanish authors. While my Spanish is still not good enough to assess a translation, what I can glean is this: A translator must not only convey the story, the heart of the book, but the style in all its nuances, the soul of the book. I think inevitably there must be something “lost in translation.” And yet how much more would be lost if translations of works were not available. And really, don’t most authors dream of having their works available to readers of other languages? Count me among them.
How much to you is writing a solitary activity and how much a communal one?
Writing is completely solitary for me even when I’m writing in a café or a library among tables filled with other people. There have been times when I’ve been in workshops when we’re writing from prompts and there is a communal energy of everyone scribbling words on paper and there’s a kind of exhilaration in that. Then there’s the communal part when people share what they have written from that prompt and I am amazed at the coherency and craft that resulted from all that scribbling, which in fact was not scribbling but a lucid flow, a clear, bright stream. On the other hand, my output is actual scribble — half-sentences, missing words, doodles. Impossible to share, for my eyes only. A completely solitary activity. As if I were in my own undisturbed room.
Would you rather someone read your book and not like it, or that they not read your book at all?
I think many writers write for themselves, but we also write to be read, and we welcome readers, knowing that not everyone will like our books or some parts of our books. Each reader comes to a book with their own experiences and beliefs which will affect their relationship to the book. Even if they end up throwing it across the room, the book has elicited a reaction and that in itself is a goal. Do we want our book to be loved? Of course. But to provoke discourse, even argument, means a chord has been struck, a nerve touched, and a very human response has been sparked.
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