Barbara Kingsolver — “Writing the D.A.B.”

Barbara Kingsolver describes her writing process and, specifically, some of her experiences while creating The Poisonwood Bible.

Writing the D.A.B.

Once I’ve written a book, I don’t look back. It’s a practical matter. By the time a novel has reached the manuscript stage, I’ve spent years researching and creating a world in which to build the story. I write and rewrite, then hand it over to my editor and other selected readers, consider their opinions, then rewrite again. I reconfigure paragraphs and scenes so many times that I’ve memorized much of the manuscript by the time I’m ready to turn over a final draft. Later, tediously, I’ll recheck every sentence twice more in the copyediting and galley stages. Why would I want to read it again, ever? It would be like counting my own fingers and toes when I wake up in the morning: I’m well aware of what’s there.

It’s true that when the published book is released I’m always eager to hold the finished product, stroke its pretty jacket, and (my family would tell you) walk around the house for a few days carrying it in my arms like a newborn babe. I glance into it one last time to mark out passages for readings on the book tour. But once the promotional whirl is over I don’t read the reviews or think much at all about the book’s future. To be honest, I’m no longer on the edge of my seat about the book’s future because by this time I’ve moved on hungrily into new themes, characters, and details: the next novel. Like the mother of a child successfully reared, I send each one into the world to stand on its own merits and speak for itself; it should not need me to follow it around for years making explanations. At the end of each book tour I close another dog-eared reading copy and set it on a special shelf with its brethren, exhaling a quiet promise that I will not touch it again.

Which is to say, I am not about to use these pages to clarify, rectify, or in any way slick down the hair of the intellectual offspring I sent off to seek its fortune in 1998. But I’ll also have to allow that it’s a strange sight, now, to see my dog-eared Poisonwood Bible lying open on my writing desk. After six years on the shelf it came back into my life with a bang when I agreed to study my story, lay its parts out on the table, and make of it a multipart screenplay for a television miniseries. I declined, for years, to try and make it into a two-hour movie, because that would be like trying to stuff a galloping Great Dane into a greyhound-sized skin: there’s too much beast to fit into such a slim shape. But when invited to adapt it into a great, galloping, many hours — long film, I agreed.

I’ve been working at it for several months. What’s required of me is to reenter one of my works to an extent I’ve never before done after publication: to reread every page, bring the characters back alive in my mind’s eye and ear, and even write scenes from their lives that were not originally in the book, since all information conveyed through first-person narration must be translated for the camera into action and dialogue. I let go of the multiple narrations that served me in writing the novel, as I’ve learned to use the magical tools of scene, set, and editing.

The biggest surprise has been that I love doing it. Each day at my desk I risk laughing out loud at Rachel’s ingenuous goofiness. I ache for Ruth May’s innocence and grit my teeth over Nathan’s imperious delusions. This time around, rather than inventing this family, I feel I’m pulling up a chair at their table and saying, “Okay, let’s hear it.” Even the new scenes I’ve had to invent have come fairly easily. These people are like relatives now, in that I can pretty confidently say what they were all doing after I left the room.

I suspect my previous refusal to look back into my finished books was partly based on dread. I quailed at the thought of finding passages that would seem wrong to me after I’d matured more as a writer. In my worst fantasies I imagined wanting to rewrite the whole thing, begging my publisher to send out a factory recall notice. Happily this has not occurred. With the exception of some special material added for this section, the book you’re holding is the same manuscript I turned in years ago. I find, after much review, I’m happy to let the book stand. It’s surely true that I’ve matured, as writers do, by writing more books. But as I reenter the imaginary village of Kilanga that I created out of the real history of the Congo, I begin to remember how completely I lived in that world for the years I was writing about it; I’ll never know that scene better than I did then. I also begin to recall exactly what it took to get me in there, to the Congo.

It wasn’t a plane ticket. I badly wanted to make a trip to the interior of central Africa while I was writing The Poisonwood Bible, in order to revisit sights and smells I’d absorbed in the mid-sixties while living there briefly as a child. I didn’t keep good records at the time, since I never dreamed I’d write a book set in the Congo (or anywhere); I was having too much fun being a kid in an exotic place, collecting chameleons for pets while my dear parents did important medical work and worried themselves sick, surely, about how to keep my brother and sister and me fed and safe in a place without roads, plumbing, grocery stores, or much stability to its government. I was blissfully ignorant of politics, content that I would be cared for by my loving, resourceful parents. I was blessed with normalcy in an outlandish place. When Tolstoy famously implied that happy families are uninteresting, I know he was using an author’s hyperbole but I also know what he meant. We were happy enough to be, in my opinion, nothing to write home about. Though my mother urged me to write letters to my second-grade classmates to tell about our fabulous Congo adventure, I never did it. I couldn’t think of anything that would entertain them. I was lackadaisical even about keeping up my diary. When I look into it now (it’s red, with a small key and a broken spine) I find entries like “Spent all morning doing school, multiplication tables are boring” and “Climbed all the way up the tree in back” and “Robby and I decided to start a newspaper.”(Robby and I never got past the planning stages, as we lacked commodities such as paper, a printing press, and a journalist’s get-up-and-go.)

Soon I returned to the United States and the routine of multiplication tables in a third-grade classroom instead of a jungle, and when we wrote about “What I Did Last Summer,” I fudged it. I left out the spitting cobra on the doorstep and the idea of monkey as cuisine, opting to describe my grandmother’s house. Anybody who really remembers third grade can recall certain unfortunate children being called names like “Cobra-head” and “Monkey-eater, ” if not those things exactly. You get the picture. But the Congo remained an important place in my memory. In the sixties it was renamed Zaire. As I got older I continued to follow its current events, in the way you might keep up with news of a place from which you’d once had relatives or a foreign exchange student. My interest was personal, rather than academic.

Then in the early eighties I read Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by Jonathan Kwitny, a trenchant nonfiction account of how United States economic policy throughout the world has created animosity toward our country. The pattern, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t changed much since the eighties and the story has been updated by other writers. But Kwitny devoted nearly a third of his book to the horrifying details of how the Belgian Congo became independent for some fifty remarkable days and then lost itself — diamonds, cobalt, soul, and all — to indentured servitude to foreign businesses, mostly in the United States. I read this story in a trance, thinking: “I was there… I had no idea.” Few of us did, at the time; even avid, adult news junkies in 1960 would have been hard pressed to learn how President Eisenhower and the CIA helped remove the newly elected Prime Minister and replace him with a puppet dictator named Mobutu. They did it in secret. That’s how it works.

I was so moved by this story — moved to dismay, rage, embarrassment, a hundred shades of emotion — that I ached with a writer’s longing. We aren’t the sort of folk who keep our passions to ourselves, you might have noticed. We shout them from the figurative rooftops. If only I could tell this story to a million people. Mr. Kwitny had told it very well, but I wanted to tell it to all the other people, those who would not normally pick up a book about the historic misjudgments of United States foreign policy. I wanted to tell it my way, in a story readers could connect with emotionally — through characters and plot, symbols and allegory. If only I could get started. First, I would need mastery of a setting so exotic I could scarcely imagine it.

But as I said, no plane ticket. During the years I was researching this book — that is, the last two decades of Mobutu’s malignant reign — any trip into the heart of Zaire would be, at best, a chaotic slog over impassible roads or, at worst, a bullet or imprisonment for any suspected enemy of Mobutu. I was an enemy of Mobutu; I’d said so publicly — this was largely my point. Mobutu was imposed on the Congolese by an appalling coup, for which my country was partly responsible. I wanted people to know.

But I couldn’t write the book if I couldn’t be allowed to see its setting: I tried for years to cling to this excuse. And every time I raised it, it revealed itself as flimsy, a stand-in for the real reason I postponed writing the book, which was, of course: fear of failure. (This sturdy fear goes by many names including “writer’s block.”) The scope of the book daunted me. Earning the attention of readers who didn’t think they gave a hoot about the history of the Congo — that daunted me too. The huge possibility I’d tell the story wrong, make moral or factual mistakes — that was harrowing. And there’s this: the years I’d need to spend in libraries reading musty, arcane books (mostly in French) about the formation and dissolution of African political parties in the sixties, and African linguistics, and toxic snakebite, for heaven’s sake. Why even begin, when I could claim foul: Mobutu won’t let me in! I can’t write the book, and it’s all his fault. For many years I had, instead of a manuscript, a file cabinet; its imaginary label was the “Damned Africa Book”or later just D. A. B. However I might try not to write this book, it kept growing. Clearly this was going to be a matter of keeping a promise to myself, or else it would be something like the albatross that haunted the desperate seaman in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The cabinet would grow and creak and follow me around, perhaps fall over and flatten me in my sleep. I stuffed the drawers with clippings and notes and then, feeling desperate, I began to construct plot outlines and character descriptions to stuff in there, eventually even whole scenes, just to keep the file cabinet quiet. All told, the project ran on for nearly twenty years. For most of that time I remained frankly afraid of the project. I wrote and published other novels in order to support my family without actually writing (or worse, admitting I was writing) the D. A. B.

My husband, Steven, finally called my bluff. (I think he foresaw the effect the file cabinet might have on our golden years.) He said, “Just write the book as far as you can, and when you reach a point where you have to see Zaire to keep going, we’ll get you there.” It seemed like a safe bet. I didn’t expect to get far. But once I began, I kept going, distracted from the large impossibility by the small, daily challenges of craft: voice, tone, and the seductive powers of language. When I saw that I was raising a complex moral question, I decided to construct five narrators who would bring different moral overtones to their answers — and whose voices would be so distinct, a reader would not be confused. I practiced individuating their voices by writing the same scene from each point of view, then doing another scene, and another — this kept me from writing the book for nearly a year. When I got stumped on the question of what teenagers in the United States sounded like in 1959, I first rented movies from the era, which turned out to be hilariously inauthentic. Next I hunted down fifties vintage Life and Look magazines, which turned out to be the real deal. I bought them by the pound at used bookstores and steeped myself in “Poison Green” linen suits, “Immoral Coral” lipstick, and “Aren’t you glad you use Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?” I discovered, while I was at it, America’s attitude of the day toward Khrushchev, racial integration, cigarettes, and waxy yellow buildup. On those slick, faded pages I began to find the heart of my story, which didn’t begin in the middle of Zaire at all. The story I’m entitled to tell, the one I needed to tell, was an American one — what we’ve carried into the world, what we believed, and what we might still learn.

Of course, my characters carried their business into central Africa where the story would take place, and I did need to get the details right. A novel is nothing but details, enormous piles of them, and if they’re wrong it is worse than a pile of lies—it is boring. Readers can spot a fake setting as fast as they can put the book down and walk away.

I did what I could. I studied memoirs written by Albert Schweitzer, Henry Morton Stanley, and many people less remembered in history but better on the quotidian details (including my mother, who’d kept a journal much better than mine). I studied photographs and read natural histories. I read those musty treatises on African political parties, and grew fascinated with writings of African authors on spirituality and religion. I talked with people who’d spent time in Zaire. I spent a whole afternoon in the reptile house of a zoo waiting for a green mamba to open its mouth. (If you’ve read the book, you know why.) I studied the King James Bible. And I found another amazing resource: a thick Kikongo-French Dictionary compiled by a missionary nearly a century before. I found it in the reference room of a university library and had to have it; I spent an hour talking the librarian into allowing me to check it out (reference books do not leave the library, you see). Since no one else had used this book in her memory she eventually relented, and to that dear outlaw librarian my novel may owe its life. The dictionary was a goldmine of words with double and quadruple meanings—the basis for the infinite misunderstandings underlying the theme of The Poisonwood Bible. I fell into a ritual of beginning each writing day by opening the dictionary at random, meditatively studying its offerings. I began to spin plot points from the silk of Kikongolese double entendres.

Finally, I did travel to Africa, several times. I never could get into Zaire, but I could get near enough to meet people whose lives resembled those of the villagers in my story. I could visit forests, manioc fields, and markets where I memorized sounds and scents, bought wares, asked questions, and eavesdropped in about equal measure. On one research trip I happened onto a huge Vodoun festival where I could watch religious dances and comparison-shop for love charms among dozens of vendor-spiritualists. By contrivance or luck, sometimes without even knowing it, I found what I needed. My novel grew. As I neared the end of a first draft, I confessed I was writing the D. A. B.

This is it. It went through four name changes and a dozen or so drafts before I managed to wrestle the thing onto paper and let it go. The response was beyond anything I could have imagined. I was being figurative, earlier, when I said I’d wanted a million people to read it. No literary author seriously believes a million people will read her book. Imagine my surprise. When Poisonwood sales hit the one-million copies sold mark we had a really big party at our house, and stopped counting. I founded a literary prize with the revenues. I couldn’t imagine it would keep going, but it did, moving on into French, Italian, and Dutch, then Finnish, Romanian, Turkish, and some languages I’d never seen in print. (The palindromes gave my translators fits, but that was not my problem.) The book was discussed in seminaries, college classrooms, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and I don’t know where else. It aroused ire in a few people who don’t understand the symbolic nature of literature and presume that a Christian missionary character who behaves badly in a novel is somehow proof of the author’s anti-Christian sentiments. If these people read more novels they would figure out that Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not evidence that Mr. Stevenson hated physicians. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is not about the hypocrisy of archdeacons or the moral benefits of scoliosis, and Moby-Dick is not an anti whale rant, per se.

But I received surprisingly few such complaints — one letter in every five hundred or so. (Probably people who don’t grasp literary symbolism don’t read a lot of novels, including mine. ) The other letters I received about the book were, and still are, endlessly interesting. Some recount life transformations, some tell African stories of their own, a few have sworn Nathan Price was their father. One person told me, in a deeply moving letter, how her mother spoke to her after she died via passages underlined in their shared copy of  The Poisonwood Bible. I’ve written other books now, but this one has its own life and like a dutiful child, sends gifts (and checks) home regularly.

And so it came to pass that what once resembled Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous nightmare has pretty much turned out to be a novelist’s dream come true. I made of it what I wanted. I hope it has meant something to you. Though I’m finished with it, I’m glad to know it’s still out in the world (e. g. Romania!) doing its work. Finally, I’m happy the writing is behind me, rather than still looming out ahead.

Recently my family sold our home and moved across the country, so we had to pack up, give away, or throw out everything we owned. Anyone who’s been through this knows it gets down to some brutal decisions. For months I avoided the file cabinet that still hulked in a corner of my office. One day I yanked open the drawers and started to purge the whole thing. Then I hesitated. You see… I’m writing this screenplay now.

From The Poisonwood Bible. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright © 1998 Barbara Kingsolver. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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