STORY TELLING

Musings on the craft and discipline of writing from the venerable Chilean American author.

There aren’t too many surprises in this guide for storytellers, but one of them is a shout-out to Ken Follett, one of whose doorstopper historical novels was the cause of the only time in her life that Allende missed a plane. She attributes Follett’s spellbinding magic to the power of his first few sentences and turns to her own work to see if she passes the test. Her 2017 novel In the Midst of Winter is found wanting, while her early masterpiece, In the House of the Spirits (1982), is quoted at approving length. She didn’t write these sentences first, she notes; they turned up later in the process and were moved. Unlike Follett, who works with detailed outlines, Allende is often hundreds of pages in before she knows what her book is about. She is unpretentious and often self-deprecating, offering in one endearing passage that “My beloved son treats me with the kind of condescension we usually bestow on other people’s pets.” Each chapter is followed by a summary of its tips. Some are familiar—test dialogue by reading it aloud—but the reader might not have thought of listening to audiobooks to analyze how other authors convey mood and tone. Allende writes in Spanish and comments interestingly on the vagaries of translation. One of her translators told her that the dialogue she’d written for a love scene had to be toned down, as “no decent man would say that rubbish.” Actually, comments Allende, “in Spanish they do.” Furthermore, humor doesn’t always translate; what’s funny in Chile is often “simply rude” in Venezuela. She also deals with the response of family members to the representations of themselves they see in fiction. Some of her relatives didn’t speak to her for years after In the House of the Spirits was published. But when the movie adaptation came out in 1993, a portrait of Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons replaced the picture of her grandparents on the mantelpiece.

A companionable and encouraging presentation of tried-and-true advice.