Measure and Madness- A Way of Writing

Whenever anyone asks me about writing, I usually start talking about Measure and Madness. The writing teacher, Leon Surmelian, coined that phrase and suggested that writing fiction should be a blend of these two things. That struck me as exactly true. On one hand, when writing The Secret Life of Bees, I relied on some very meticulous “measures,” such as character studies, scene diagrams, layouts of the pink house and the honey house. I had a big notebook where I worked out the underlying structure of the book. I relied more heavily, however, on trying to conjure “madness,” which I think of as an inexplicable and infectious magic that somehow flows into the work. One way I induced “madness” was to leave my desk in order to sit on the dock overlooking the tidal creek behind our house and engage in a stream of reverie about the story. I considered this earnest work. I am a firm believer that the imagination needs time to go browsing. It needs space. It needs the spirit of unfettered play. Before I started the novel, I created a collage of images that vividly caught my attention. They included a pink house, a trio of African- American women, and a wailing wall. I propped the collage on my desk with no idea how, or even whether, these things would turn up in the novel. How did they turn up in the novel? Well, here’s how the Boatwright sisters found their way into it....

When I began the novel, not only did I have no idea of the ending, but I was clueless about the middle. My idea extended only as far as Lily springing Rosaleen free and the two of them running away to Tiburon. I didn’t know where they would end up once they got there. At that point the beekeeping Boatwright sisters had not materialized. After I wrote the scene where Lily and Rosaleen walk into Tiburon, I was stuck. I happened to flip through a book where I came upon a quote by Eudora Welty: “People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel ... but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.” It struck me clearly that I needed to create a place that would do that for Lily. I glanced over at my collage, at the trio of African-American women, and it simply dropped into my head– Lily would find sanctuary in the home of three black, beekeeping sisters.

My way of writing is to nurture and balance both Measure and Madness, the best I can, in my own way.