Status Updates From The Paris Review Interviews, 1

Joan Didion: Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.

Richard Price: The first book is always the most fun, because when you write your first book you’re just a writer. Then you get published. Then you become an author, and once you’re an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.

Robert Gottlieb: At a certain point you have to face the fact that you’ve turned into an old fart - that you can’t tell whether the zeitgeist has actually changed for the worse or whether you’ve simply fallen behind and aren’t in touch anymore.

Stone: We’re always telling ourselves stories about who we are: that’s what history is, what the idea of a nation or an individual is. The purpose of fiction is to help us answer the question we must constantly be asking ourselves, who do we think we are and what do we think we’re doing.

“… have a solution?”

Stone: America has managed to create a working class with the leisure and money to command the resources of the society. It without the taste to enhance those resources. From that derived pop culture we’ve exported. Now that isn’t evil but it is a form of pollution.

There’s a shared Marxist an American attitude that where there’s a problem there must be a solution. What about the problem that doesn’t …

Robert Stone: I don’t believe this country has simply been some horror story of racism and murder. But we have incurred a blood debt and it is coming up for payment. The end of empire comes for everybody and it’s coming for us. So now we’re face with this area close to our southern sea frontier where people have it in for us and are only too eager to collaborate with our enemies.”

Robert Stone: The idea that young writers ought to be out slinging hash or covering the fights or whatever is bullshit. There’s a point where a class can do a lot of good. You know, you throw the rock and you get the splash.

“… surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade.”

Vonnegut: “When you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are …. And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other…. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say ….

Saul Bellow: I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Eliot: I found that 3 hours a day is about all I can do of actual composing. I could do polishing perhaps later. I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what I’d done after the 3 hours were up was never satisfactory. It’s much better to stop and think about something else quite different.

TS Eliot: “I keep a few notes of such verse, and there are one or two incomplete cats that probably will never be written. There’s one about a glamour cat. It turned out too sad. This would never do. I can’t make my children weep over a cat who’s gone wrong. She had a very questionable career, did this cat. It wouldn’t do for the audience if my previous volume of cats.”

(Contd) But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Hemingway: “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all thing that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of.”

Hemingway: “in writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.”

Hemingway: “Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.”

Hemingway: “Id you describe someone, it is flat, as a photograph is, and from my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what you know, there should be all the dimensions.”