Real writers are readers first. Take Julie Orringer, for
example. I met up with the author of the novel The Invisible Bridge at Boswell
Book Company in Milwaukee back in April to talk about her creative process. When
I asked her about her literary influences, she said: “The real answer to that
question could take all night, because it’s a very, very long list.” Beaming,
she gushed about Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, Flannery O’Connor,
Marilynne Robinson, George Eliot (especially Middlemarch), Charles Dickens and
William Makepeace Thackeray.
As for her own writing, Julie is big on keeping notebooks.
You can take a virtual peek at the ones she kept while writing her story
collection, How to Breathe Under Water. See a page of her notes for “The Isabel
Fish,” one of my favorite stories in the book, below.
And fans of The Invisible Bridge will be happy to know that
Julie is working on another historical novel—one that stemmed from her
research for Bridge—about New York journalist Varian Fry’s efforts to arrange
legal emigrations for hundreds of Jewish and anti-Nazi writers, artists and
intellectuals blacklisted by the Gestapo. Among those he helped were Marc
Chagall and Max Ernst.
You can read my full interview with Julie Orringer in the October
issue, which is available now. In the meantime, enjoy some of Julie’s insights
that aren’t part of the final piece:
On her routine:
I get up in the morning, and I go next door to the little
studio that we have in the building a couple doors down from ours. It looks out
at a very quiet backyard, where there’s now a magnolia tree in bloom. And I
work for three or four hours, and I generally try to start by reading a little
bit of what I’ve written the day before, but not too much, and then composing
new work. So I try to spend the majority of that time composing, particularly
because I’m at the beginning of a novel now.
On research:
I try to approach it in a way that’s symbiotic with writing.
In other words, the preface of research is enticing in itself, because it helps
me envision the world in the novel. But then, after a certain point, I start to
get impatient to get back to the writing itself. And that’s the moment when I
know I need to turn my attention away from this pile of books on my desk and
actually engage with the fiction again. And then I’ll come to a point as I’m
writing where I’ll hit a roadblock, and have to go back and study a little bit
more and learn a little bit more. So, there’s a kind of nice exchange of energy
between the two parts of the process for me.
On revising The Invisible Bridge:
I felt like I really needed to get through at least one
version of the story in order to set aside my own curiosity about the story and
to maintain momentum and just to find out what the shape of it was going to be.
And then once that was finished, and I went back and reread it, I immediately
knew that a couple hundred pages needed to be cut and certain characters needed
to be developed a little bit differently and certain lines needed to be a little
more tightly interlaced, and so those were things that I could do before I
showed it to anybody else. And then I handed it over to Ryan [Harty], who found
himself in the not-enviable position of receiving this 800-page draft after his
wife had just worked on it for three years. … He suggested further cuts and
edits, and then it was another year before I showed it to my editor.
How motherhood has affected her writing:
I feel this heightened sense of what is at stake, about everything
really, because now every action of mine matters to a large degree to this
little person, who I spend my days caring for or pining for. … I really have to
be a lot more focused and directed now. … A lot of the work of writing gets
done when you’re not sitting at the screen. But now I feel like I’m happier to
think of that time as actual work time.
—Sarah
C. Lange, associate editor
Author photo by Christa Parravani
