Allende on Writing Without Fear: Letting the Words Find You

On January 8, 1981, Isabel Allende sat down to write a letter to her dying grandfather in Chile. The letter turned into a novel, The House of the Spirits, and she remembers the moment vividly. The story comes from an excerpt of Allende’s memoir Story Telling: A Writing Life, published by Ballantine Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Allende did not set out to write a novel. She set out to write a letter, and that difference changed everything. She told Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter that she would never have finished a novel if she had tried. But a letter, she said, was something she knew how to do. So she wrote without expectations, and the words kept coming.

Kitchen Work in Caracas

Allende worked long shifts at a school, twelve hours a day. That left little free time, but she had boundless enthusiasm. Each night she came home, sat in her kitchen, and typed away. The story took shape as she recalled events from the past, and the characters appeared one by one, mostly inspired by her extravagant relatives and people she had known.

She did not get scared by the size of the project. Page after page emerged. She wrote for several hours every night and on weekends, and the saga of the Trueba–del Valle family unfolded without strain.

The Unnamed Manuscript

By the end of the year, Allende had over five hundred pages on her kitchen counter. She could not name what she had made. It looked like a manuscript, but only one copy existed, and making more copies was not easy in those days. She carried the pages in a canvas bag on her shoulder, never parted from them, just as she had carried her newborn babies: jealously.

One time, she left the bag at the hair salon and panicked. By the time she could go back to fetch it, they had thrown it in the trash. She had to get into the large container in the street to retrieve it. There it was, intact, mocking her.

A Year of Quiet Work

Since that first experience in the kitchen in Caracas, much more has happened in Allende’s life, and she has written many books. Reading and writing are intimate experiences, she said, done in silence and in private. She converses with her reader across time and space, proposing something that each reader interprets differently. A novel is reborn each time someone reads it.

Allende believes her books do not belong to her. They are living creatures that go out into the world to fulfill their destinies. With any luck, they might provoke the imagination of some readers or move their hearts.

The Freedom That Gave Her Wings

The letter began as a way to honor her grandfather’s stories. He would not live to read it, but that did not stop her. It gave her wings, she said, and she could write anything she wanted without fear of offending him. She could embroider his stories and change them.

Never again, she said, has she had that incredible feeling of absolute freedom to write.

The story also reflects the political turmoil of the time. Many Latin American countries had repressive governments, military coups, dictatorships, and undeclared wars against the poor and the indigenous population, backed by the CIA in the context of the Cold War. The atrocities committed in Chile were similar to those in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Central America, where leftist movements and guerrillas were crushed with incredible brutality.

The House of the Spirits could have taken place anywhere on the tormented continent.

Key Facts

• The House of the Spirits started as a letter to Allende’s grandfather on January 8, 1981
• Allende wrote over five hundred pages by the end of the year
• The novel was excerpted from Story Telling: A Writing Life, published by Ballantine Books
• Allende’s books have been translated into more than forty-two languages
• Her books have sold more than seventy-four million copies

The excerpt ends with Allende’s reflection on the fate of her books. They are living creatures, she says, that go out into the world to fulfill their destinies. That is a generous view of creation, and it captures the spirit of her work.

Allende’s account is a reminder that creative work often starts small. A letter, a postcard, a note to a friend — these humble beginnings can open the door to something much larger. The constraint of calling it a letter was what allowed her to write freely. She did not have to worry about the scale of the novel; she only had to keep writing.

The story also speaks to the power of memory. Allende drew on her relatives and people she had known to build her characters. The story took shape as she recalled events from the past. Memory is the raw material of fiction, and Allende’s willingness to trust it produced a work that resonated across borders.

The excerpt is a fragment of a longer memoir, and it carries the warmth of a writer looking back on her earliest success. Allende found the freedom to write by refusing to call her project a novel. That freedom gave her wings, and the result was a book that changed her life.

The excerpt ends with Allende’s reflection on the fate of her books. They are living creatures, she says, that go out into the world to fulfill their destinies. That is a generous view of creation, and it captures the spirit of her work.

Source material: “Isabel Allende on Finding the Freedom to Write,” Literary Hub.

author interview · Isabel Allende · literature · memoir · writing process