Lessons for the writing life

Reading is a mystery, and, to my way of thinking, a holy one. Through a series of inked symbols on thin sheets of pulpwood (sorry, I’m not an e-book reader), I am mysteriously transmitted to the most private of realms, a place only I can inhabit—my imagination—through the work of someone else.

I have been writing books for the last 40 years, so coming up with three books that have shaped my world has taken some thinking, some whittling away (in all honesty, wholesale chainsawing down a good many groves of books), and some making of coldhearted choices I’m nervous to make. There are so many books, and the good ones—every good one—can shape a life.

Loving characters

I read Housekeeping when I was starting out as a writer. This was the fall of 1981, and I was a grad student reading two and three books a week for my coursework. One afternoon I opened up the next of those assigned books, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping—her first book, published only the year before—and read it straight through. When I finished, I looked up and saw the afternoon had changed into night. I had been entranced for hours by Robinson’s lyric prose coupled with the story of two orphaned sisters who are first knit by, then split over, the death of their mother and the divergent ways they grieve, as they’re raised by a hobo aunt whose haunting presence both beguiles and repels them.

After reading this book, I found I cared more deeply than I ever had about what happened and would happen to these two girls. They were real. They mattered. I loved them both. And I understood suddenly, fully, that if I were ever to write a book, I had better be so invested in my characters, whoever they might be, that they mattered at least this much to me.

I have reread Housekeeping more times than any book other than the Bible, and Robinson’s language and story—and the way she brought the two together—showed me that love of language, of story, of people had to be the prime mover in the making of a good book.

Writing with clarity

The story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love came to me that same fall, not as an assignment but after reading Raymond Carver’s short story “Chef’s House” in The New Yorker. The story was so clearly written, the situation and its characters so absolutely genuine, I went out and bought What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which had come out maybe six months before. I was still in the opening and ongoing tumult of trying to figure out who I was as a writer, what my voice might sound like, who my people might be, and suddenly here in my hands was a whole book of stories about real people—working- and middle-­class—my people!—told in language as clear and sharp as glass.

Up to that moment I had believed that my job was to show off how I could handle a metaphor, work in a simile, employ a theme, and milk a symbol—all the rhetorical bling that made the author the star of the show. What an idiot I was.

Carver’s stories were about people whose lives were so starkly revealed that he had no room in them for these sad little rhetorical devices. A few weeks later I wrote a stripped-down story inspired by my childhood. The first real, good, and true, and worthy story I ever wrote.

How did Carver’s book shape my life? I understood now that I had to get Me out of the way of my writing. The story’s people—no longer characters, but people—were what mattered, not my insipid juggling of words. Let the story be the story.

Living with self-doubt

Finally, in this absolutely truncated list of life-shaping books, A Giacometti Portrait is a book about making art, and my next most reread book behind Housekeeping. Unlike either of the other two books, this one came to me mid­career, after I’d published eight books. James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait is nonfiction, a kind of diary Lord kept for the 18 days he sat for a portrait Alberto Giacometti did of him in the summer of 1965 in the artist’s Paris studio. The book isn’t about writing at all, but about the mind of the artist at work: Lord, an art critic and friend of Giacometti’s, simply wrote down what Giacometti did each time they were together, his muttered words, his staring out the window, what he ate for lunch each day at the same café, what he thought of other artists and his own work.

Woven throughout is Giacometti’s self-doubt, his constant belief that he did not know what he was doing, that the work was going badly, that even the idea of drawing a nose was so daunting he wondered if he might even be able to accomplish it. Meanwhile, the world continued to offer him adulation, not to mention money for his work.

Self-doubt? I knew all about self-doubt. I live with self-doubt, am drenched in it, steeped in it. But I found in this book great solace and encouragement and comfort in knowing that I wasn’t alone in feeling self-doubt and, more importantly, that even in the midst of it one can continue making art.

Looking back at this list, I see it is a writer’s list. Forgive me for forging such an insular clutch of books, and such a secular one. But the shaping these books have accomplished on my life has been and always will be bound up in the act of writing, of my attempts to make art. It’s also bound up in doing all I can to remember what makes a lasting work: love, clarity, tenacity, humility. And faith. A lot, I see, like living in and for and through Christ.

—Bret Lott is the bestselling author of 15 books, most recently Gather the Olives, a memoir about food and the Holy Land