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 author Isabel Allende’s new nonfiction book, Story Telling: A Writing Life (which came out on Tuesday), was a bit of a surprise even to the author. The work’s unexpected journey began after Allende wrapped up a masterclass for the BBC consisting of 21 video lessons on the craft of writing.
For an entire week, a 16-person crew took over her office, removed her furniture, and filmed her sitting in the same chair under identical lighting, hair and wardrobe to ensure seamless visual continuity. During the filming, she was prompted with standard writing questions—such as how to develop a character—and spent 45 minutes to an hour improvising her answers.
“It was all very intuitive,” she says.
Once the filming concluded, Allende realized that the extensive material and personal wisdom she shared belonged entirely to her own experience. While she couldn’t use the exact course content for the BBC programming, Allende began reflecting on her 45 years of literary experience. Instead of forcing her thoughts into a rigid instructional textbook or structured class plan, she gave her material time and space to form organically, resulting in a conversational memoir focused on 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.
Isabel Allende Works Without A Map
This fluid format mirrors Allende’s lifelong creative process. She famously works without a map, never utilizing a written outline. While she admits an outline would make research easier and prevent hitting narrative dead ends, her process embraces what feels right, with a bit of rigid adherence to tradition.
She begins all of her books on January 8, showing up in front of her computer screen without a plan, embracing discipline and patience until a story finally begins to happen. “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 very first book, the 1982 classic The House of the Spirits, which she penned with zero industry experience. She recalls making hilarious structural mistakes, like having characters remain 18 years old despite 40 years passing in the plot, forcing her to adjust after the manuscript was complete.
Isabel Allende Knows Storytelling Preserves Memory
Ultimately, Story Telling highlights writing as a portal to preserving memory. Allende emphasizes that House was born out of a desire to capture her family’s legends and country while living in exile. At that time, her continuous observation of life was finely tuned by writing a daily letter to her mother starting at age 16—a lifelong correspondence that accumulated a staggering 24,000 letters.
This incredible archive remains a resource for her nonfiction. While recently writing a memoir tracking a specific 10-year period, Allende found herself completely unable to remember the reasoning behind a significant life decision she made. By digging back into her boxes of letters, she recovered the exact, forgotten day-by-day emotional realities of her past, proving that her written history holds the key to her lived truth.
She hopes that readers similarly find ways to excavate their past and find their own way 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,” says Allende—one she has mastered extremely well.
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