Isabel Allende on Craft, Memory and a Life in Writing

Literary legend Isabel Allende speaks on stage during 2024 Texas Conference for Women at Austin Convention Center.

Getty Images for Texas Conference for Women

Acclaimed novelist Isabel Allende’s new nonfiction book, Story Telling: A Writing Life , was released Tuesday—and even its author was surprised by how it came together. The idea began after Allende completed a 21-video BBC master class devoted to the craft of writing.

For one week, a 16-person production crew cleared the furniture from her office and filmed her in the same chair beneath identical lighting. Her hair and wardrobe were kept consistent to preserve visual continuity. Prompted with conventional writing questions—including how to develop a character—Allende improvised answers that typically lasted 45 minutes to an hour.

“It was all very intuitive,” she says.

Once filming ended, Allende understood that the extensive material—and the hard-won wisdom behind it—came from her own life. Although she could not use the course content verbatim in the BBC programming, she drew on four and a half decades of literary experience. Rather than force those reflections into a rigid instructional manual or formal curriculum, she let them develop naturally. The result is a conversational memoir about writing rather than a prescriptive guide.

“It didn’t have an outline. It was more of a conversation, which was what I wanted,” she says.

Allende Writes Without a Map

This loose structure reflects Allende’s lifelong creative process. She never works from a written outline. Although she admits that one would make research easier and help her avoid narrative dead ends, her method begins with instinct while retaining a disciplined respect for tradition.

She begins each book on Jan. 8, taking her seat before the computer without a plan and relying on patience and discipline until the story takes shape. “I make innumerable mistakes, and I have to go back to correct them, so there’s a lot of wasted time,” she says. “I fill in the research as I write.”

This intuitive approach dates back to her 1982 debut, The House of the Spirits, which she wrote with no prior experience publishing a novel. Allende recalls making comical structural errors, such as leaving characters at age 18 even though 40 years passed in the plot, and then revising the manuscript after it was complete.

Allende Sees Storytelling as a Way to Preserve Memory

Ultimately, Story Telling presents writing as a means of preserving memory. Allende explains that The House of the Spirits grew from her desire to record her family’s legends and homeland while living in exile. Her powers of observation had been honed since age 16 by writing a letter to her mother every day—a lifelong correspondence that eventually reached 24,000 letters.

This extraordinary archive continues to inform her nonfiction. While recently writing a memoir that followed a specific 10-year span, Allende found herself unable to recall why she had made a major life decision. By searching through her boxes of letters, she recovered the exact, day-by-day emotional truth of that period—proof that her written history holds the key to her lived experience.

She hopes readers will similarly explore their pasts and discover a path forward on the page. “I just want to have the reader lose the fear of the screen or the written page or the blank page. There’s nothing solemn or extraordinary about writing. It’s just a craft,” she says.

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