There were times when I wondered if I would have the persistence to write a second novel, and days when I worried that I had charged into the story without giving it enough consideration in advance. Looking back, I see those were confidence fears. In fact, I’m dogged when I want something, and I had considered many possible stories, some at length, before feeling electrified about this one.
When the novel clicked together in my head—that I would use these characters, that the plot would develop in this particular way—I was just racing to get it on paper. I couldn’t write fast enough or get enough writing time to lay it down while it was all in my mind. That was the pressure that never left me through the whole writing period: this thrum of anxiety that I might not have enough time to write it out, or to go back and make of it what I wanted.
We Are Called to Rise has been a book club favorite since it was published, and you speak to several book clubs a month. What have you found most rewarding about speaking with book club members?
I love the stories readers share with me—of their children, their losses, their hopes. It’s quite moving, the way that talking about a book can catapult people into these honest and personal revelations. It’s a privilege. Also, book group folk are nice. I am showered with compliments, which is not at all good for one, but feels wonderful. And many book groups serve dessert.
Can you tell us about your writing process? When you started writing ’Round Midnight, did you know how all of the characters’ stories would fit together?
I had a short period to get ’Round Midnight going, and then I had to write it in all these weird moments and places: on planes, in hotel rooms, between classes. And it drove me crazy not to be able to concentrate for long periods of time in a quiet place. But in the end, it still got written. Which feels unbelievable to me. I half expect to wake up and find out I never did finish that novel.
In general, though, I like to have a strong conception of the story before I begin. I want to know the first page and the last page, and I want to know some of the ways that it is going to get from the one to the other. Writing something as long as a novel is a process of discovery—characters and circumstances grow—but I choose to twist those curling vines around a strong branch. So while I had a plan and a conception for the whole story, I also followed ’Round Midnight where it led. I let the characters evolve, I let the plot change course. That’s the fun of it, really.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? Is there anything that you wish you had been told at the start of your writing career?
I wish that I had not abandoned writing when I was younger and waited until I was fifty to take it up again. I quit because I didn’t see a path to publication. I thought about what I was doing as “writing a book,” and if I couldn’t get that book produced and into the world, I didn’t see the value in doing it. So I stopped writing and turned outward. I started teaching, I did a lot of volunteer work, I focused on my community.
When I’m in the thick of a story, when I’m writing feverishly and surely and intuitively, I am a pure form of myself. I’m both conscious and unconscious of what I’m doing, like a basketball player in the zone. Perhaps we aren’t blank slates when we are born, perhaps we inherit certain kinds of knowledge—as salmon born in a particular river do—and given the chance to be the people we are born to be, we should take it. I turned my back on the person my seven-year-old self knew I was, and I wish I hadn’t.
I hope I haven’t given the wrong impression. I don’t mean that my writing is inspired or even good; I mean that it’s part of me, that it’s natural to me, that I knew I could do it as soon as I was introduced to words on the page. I have always made sense of the world through story.
So, my advice. Write if you love it. Write if it’s your natural gift. Write if it makes you feel as if you are in a conversation with the ages. But don’t write for publication. Don’t write for anyone else at all. These things are out of your control, and they poison the well.
Your descriptions of Las Vegas are so vivid that it becomes another character in ’Round Midnight. Did you base any of the descriptions of the city and its inhabitants on people or things that you encounter in your daily life? Did you conduct any research to create the historical scenes?
Well, I call my research a novelist’s research, which means that I read idly, and listen in on conversations that are not my own, and ask people random questions about the details of things they have casually mentioned. I think my friends are on to me—they suspiciously say, “Is this going in a novel?”
I’ve lived here for three decades, and in a city that has changed as much as Las Vegas has in that time, that’s a lot of acquired but not necessarily verifiable information. So I often write from what I think I know, and later I try to verify that my memories are correct (they aren’t always), and I try not to let this whole question of perfect accuracy get in my head. I want my novels to be grounded in truth, but they aren’t textbooks, and as a fiction writer, I am seeking the subjective not objective view.
Joanna Rakoff praised ’Round Midnight, saying “I’m not one to pull out the term “Great American Novel,” but Laura McBride’s sublime ’Round Midnight demands nothing less." Were you inspired by any “Great American Novels” when you were writing? Can you tell us about them?
I think that anything I could say in response to such a glorious comment would just be piling on. But I love that you asked me a question that included it. I wish everyone would ask me a question that included Joanna’s comment. If I get to meet her in person, I’m going to give her a crushing hug.
’Round Midnight spans many generations and many points of view. Was it difficult to switch between time periods and characters’ viewpoints as you were writing? Did you write the characters’ sections consecutively?
I wrote the story in the order one reads it, and the structure of this novel allowed me to generally be in one character’s head at a time.
I did spend a lot of time trying to immerse myself in the particular area of the Philippines where Honorata grew up, and in the area of Mexico where Engracia is from. I wrote pages and pages based on these explorations, and then deleted nearly all of them in the first revision. That writing was self-conscious in its effort to prove I knew what I was writing about. It interrupted the story; those painstakingly acquired details were things the characters would neither notice nor report. So I would have four or five pages that took me a week to put together, and I would keep one tiny detail about the sound of a particular frog, and be back to the story in my head.