How to face the blank page? The Masterclass “An approach to the creative process”, organized by the International University of Valencia – VIU, clarified this dilemma that so many authors live in a conversation between Luz Gabás, the last winner of the Planeta Prize for her novel “Far from Louisiana”, and Espido Freire, winner of the Premio Planeta in 1999 and director of the Master’s Degree in Literary Creation at VIU. The event took place in person at the Salón de Cristal of the Valencia City Council (Spain) and via streaming on the university’s YouTube channel.
During the event, the two awardees talked about the creative process of writing a novel. Both agreed that the essential thing when starting a project like this is the chronological axis and the rundown of the story. “If I want to write a novel that I know will have a story that lasts 40 years, I read and document myself about the society in which it takes place and I make a mosaic of characters,” said Luz Gabás.
When writing this story, according to the writers, the author of the novel goes through two journeys: a physical journey and an emotional journey. According to Gabás, “The emotional journey is the most difficult, especially when you have to trace so many different characters”, however, the winner of the Planeta Prize last year assures that “the idea is for the reader to travel with the characters” .
For Espido Freire, we live in a time where literalness prevails in reading, for which he warns: “this greatly limits the imagination.” As a result of this, historical rigor was the subject of debate during the conversation between the two writers. Luz Gabás assured that it generates “conflict” for her to write about historical figures, which is why she creates her own characters within a context in which they coexist with others who have existed in reality, as is the case of Governor Bernardo de Gálvez in ” Far from Louisiana”, but these do not have an “emotional trip” that the fictional ones do. Likewise, it often happens that when recovering a time from the past with historical accuracy, moments of history that we now dislike are recovered, such as slavery. For this reason, Gabás defended the importance of creating a “heroic” protagonist, so that the reader focuses more on him than on the time in which the story takes place.
The famous Freire raised the question of whether studies in the humanities are necessary to dedicate yourself to the literary world, to which both writers agreed that it is not essential. Despite this, Freire pointed out that “it does determine where she comes from” and Gabás felt that “having studied English philology had given her a voice.”
When is it known that the writing process has finished? Freire asked the author of “Far from Louisiana”. The winner of the 2022 Planet Award assured that this happens when no more words come to mind. For both Espido Freire and Luz Gabás, the most difficult part of finishing a novel is the final discarding of some fragments. While Gabás pointed out that “if one is not capable of being cruel with ‘pruning’, his novels will never work”, Freire assured that something that new technologies offer us is being able to allocate the discarded lines to Internet websites, for example . “They can always be used outside of book format,” she pointed out.
Finally, after being asked by the public what it feels like to be awarded the Planeta Prize, the author of “Far from Louisiana” and “Palm trees in the snow” stated: “It has done me good and has given me energy to know that for the rest of my life I will continue to be related to reading and writing”. Although Gabás warned that “living what you like is much more demanding than it seems from the outside”, she also pointed out: “in the end you get hooked on telling stories. Writers tell stories for those who want to hear them.
