Brad Pitt & Tom Cruise will forever be immortalized in the film version of Anne Rice's "Interview with a Vampire" (the book was completed in 1974, edited for two years with Knopf, and finally published in 1976).
Despite a negative review from the New York Times, the book's outrageous success put vampires on the literary map at a time when they were only marginally accepted by the industry.
"As writers, we spin the straw of life into gold, or we try to."
-Anne Rice
"...with each death they learn more and more the value of life."
Born in New Orleans into an intensely Catholic Irish-American household, Anne Rice (1941-2021) was named "Howard" at birth after her father. But when she enrolled in school, she changed it to Anne. At 14 she was orphaned of her mother. It was then that she started writing horror/science fiction and frequented the local cemetery at all hours (which is no longer permitted).
She attended North Texas State University, left her studies to marry the love of her life, returned to school, but the young couple found it impossible to make a living there. She finished her political science degree at San Francisco State.
How did she start with the vampires? By reading about the history of New Orleans.
To clarify, while "in exile" she dreamed New Orleans vividly. Memories of walking to school through the Garden District's "almost unreal neighborhood of Greek Revival houses and oak trees and beautiful cast iron fences and ever-blooming azaleas, it seemed, and then you would emerge into the streets of the Irish Channel without trees and the sun beating down and yet there was a very wonderful kind of architecture there too, the shotgun houses with their gingerbread eves and then I would enter St. Alphonsus or St. Mary's Church, these two marvelous churches...step into this almost fantasy world of Romanesque architecture....This had a profound effect...Later when I began to think about it, it seemed fantastic. I couldn't quite understand it. First of all, why were there two churches side by side? A magnificent Gothic German church and a magnificent Irish church right across the street. What was all that about?"
Trying to remember the exact landscape, she went to the library to research the city and soon found herself obsessed with it. But trying to capture the essence of New Orleans in a realistic contemporary novel sounded unbelievable.
It wasn't till she viewed the neighborhoods through the eyes of a vampire that she "was able to touch the reality of the strange texture and glamour of New Orleans."
"I always felt more alive and less isolated when I was writing about New Orleans."
One night, she wrote a short story about "what would it be like to really get a vampire to tell you what it was like" to be him.
Then she lost her 6-year-old daughter to leukemia. 9 months later, she pulled the short story out and the journey began.
"I didn't know it at the time, but it was all about my daughter, the loss of her, and the need to go on living when faith is shattered." For some reason, the alternative reality freed her to deal with her pain.
Anne Rice sees vampires as a powerful metaphor for the outsider within us. She's "in love with the supernatural novel...to write the best books you can write. Obviously, when I'm writing about a supernatural theme, it becomes very, very intense and I'm able to tell all I know and all I feel about life....I'm totally involved with what I care about."
All of her books have a strong moral compass. Even in the midst of great confusion, the only choice is between truth (peace, kindness, support, love) and illusion (war, revenge, cruelty, fear). That's just how things function.
Her books "talk about the struggle of people to live in a world where there is no clear revelation, They talk about the struggle of people to 'be good' in spite of finding themselves to be bad, like Lestat when he finds himself a vampire against his will really. They talk about people trying to band together, trying to love each other, trying to overcome isolation...always seeking just a couple of other vampires who understand the way they feel....They always fail because they're damned, they take human life in some way. They cannot be redeemed, but they know it. And dealing with the conscience of Lestat or the conscience of Louis...that's very important to me. How it tortures them to have to kill. How with each death they learn more and more the value of life."
She sees herself in Lestat (Tom Cruise), the man she feels she would be if she were a man. "I really cannot write about a villain too long without trying to find the good side of that villain, and the side that will confuse us."
"Lestat's always wrestling with the question of God. He always is. And he's always wrestling with how can he live a meaningful life when the world sees him as a monster."
Her mother taught her that pain either makes you unfeeling and closed off if you sink into it, or you can rise above it and let it give you compassion and real understanding of the pain of others.
"The Feast of All Saints": A Forgotten History of Free Blacks
Next, Anne Rice accidentally discovered that the very first literary magazine published in Louisiana was produced before the Civil War by free people of color in French in the French Quarter. This resulted in her novel "The Feast of All Saints."
She revived the forgotten history that free Blacks had attained significant wealth and prestige as artists, playwrights, craftsmen and sculptors of tombstone statues even as they were segregated, could not vote, and were banned from many professions. Nonetheless, they found a way to flourish.
Tellingly, the only thing locals remembered about them when Rice was growing up was that their women were highly-sought mistresses by white land owners.
Writing "The Feast of All Saints" required more research and more work than any book Anne Rice had ever written, and its sales always lagged behind, but everywhere she went people would express their thanks to her for uncovering this important chapter in American history.
Spiritual Evolution
In an agonizing process that took one year, she lost her faith in "the one true Church," the Roman Catholic Church, but remained open-minded about spiritual truth. Her only certainty at the time: that thinking she could be certain that there was nothing beyond this life was very cocky.
She came to associate her vampire books with her time of grief and loss, a vehicle for exploring her nihilism and her atheism, and was eager to move on from vampires. But eventually she went back to church and realized she missed Lestat and wanted to talk with him again through her writing.
What are Anne Rice's greatest books in her view? "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" & "Christ the Lord: the Road to Canaan." These two books gave her the greatest joy she's experienced as a writer. Being able to bring Jesus to life on the page "in Nazareth on a hot day," with the small-town gossip and all, gave her the greatest consolation of her career.
In her later years she came to "feel a great love for Jesus," the greatest love story she's ever heard, but without the worldly institution that was subsequently built around him. She felt very alone in this decision, but discovered that many, many believers bid farewell to Christianity and organized religion.
But "seeking with one's whole heart. That's maybe worth more than consolation."
In researching 2000 years of Christianity for the books, she saw how the Church has genuinely evolved and changed through the centuries, and will continue to do so. "But one of the problems you run into...with your co-religionists is that they insist it's not evolving, it's not changing, it's always been the same, and you're out of step...."
What is the secret to her success? In the big picture, Anne Rice's willingness to question everything, including everything about herself, is one of the keys to her enduring success.
"Every night of my life I pray to God to show me if I'm wrong about anything I'm doing and everything that I'm doing. Please show me if I'm wrong."
A lot of her fans, however, just won't go there and refuse to read her "Christ the Lord" books. "They are as biased against those books as some of my Christian readers are against books about vampires." But there are readers who love them all!
Here are 8 of Anne Rice's best writing tips, in quotes:
1. "The great thing about our profession is that there are no rules." Freedom of thought, freedom of expression and creativity with no medium to wrestle against (unlike painting, ballet, filmmaking, music making, etc), but there are some rules sometimes. Truman Capote, for example, learned you can't satirize your ridiculously carnal friends without them ostracizing you from High Society. And JK Rowling learned how sensitive the transgender issue is. If people are (1) committing crimes and/or (2) actively working to insure the tide of public opinion turns against them, you can call a spade a spade. It is very important for writers to be on the right side of history.
2. "Write the book of your dreams. Write what you want to be known for. Go where you really want to be with your writing."
3. "Create through writing the person that you want to be." Words are very powerful. And writing really can help us grow and be our best selves.
4. "You may write 2 or 3 chapters of a book and decide you hate it. Don't throw it away -- save it." It could be that the writing is not gelling because you aren't yet ready to write up the idea yet, or maybe it needs a slightly different approach.
How to reconcile this advice with Margaret Atwood's advice that the wastepaper basket is your best friend? For me, brainstorming and pre-writing are done first on paper. Then the real writing is on the computer. If it's worth typing up, save it.
Even if it's easy to delete as you write, there's merit in saving first, second and third drafts as you go. Make back up copies on thumb-drives as well as in the cloud, rather than relying exclusively on the cloud.
A highly recommended online word-processing site: calmlywriter.com -- just begin typing, pasting photos, etc. on the blank page.
"Writing is like sculpting: the picture emerges the more you take away." -Elie Wiesel
5. "Never, never bury a key revelation or surprise or important physical gesture by a character at the end of an existing paragraph. Make a new paragraph." Don't be afraid of super-short paragraphs. This will highlight the revelation so the reader does not miss it.
6. "Never revise that book because you got a rejection from an editor with a bunch of negative advice. Any editor who rejects your book doesn't 'get it.'" Take advice very selectively. Try to find people who appreciate your work to give suggestions on it.
7. "If the plot takes a highly improbable turn, acknowledge that through having the characters acknowledge it." Even if what is considered improbable varies, acknowledge the obvious.
8. "Never get trapped into thinking that if you have a character open a door he necessarily has to close it later on. You're creating a visual impression of a scene and you don't need to spotlight every gesture." As author, you get to decide what the contours will be. Just bear in mind, less is almost always more.
Dear Reader,
If you have enjoyed this content, please like, subscribe, and pass it on. Many thanks and happy writing!
Best,
Laura
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Incredibly awesome article, Laura. You rock!