Gabriel Garcia Marquez; thoughts on using tape recorders

Interviewer: How do you feel about using the tape recorder?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The problem is that the moment you know the interview is taped, your attitude changes. In my case I immediately take a defensive attitude. As a journalist, I feel that we still haven’t learned how to use a tape recorder to do an interview. The best way, I feel, is to have a long conversation without the journalist taking any notes. Then afterward he should reminisce about the conversation and write it down as an impression of what he felt, not necessarily using the exact words expressed. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them with a certain loyalty to the person interviewed. What ticks you off about the tape recording everything is that it is not loyal to the person who is being interviewed, because it even records and remembers when you make an ass of yourself. That’s why when there is a tape recorder, I am conscious that I’m being interviewed; when there isn’t a tape recorder, I talk in an unconscious and completely natural way.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez from a 1981 interview; ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol II’.

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Ernest Hemingway on writing

Interviewer: So when you’re not writing, you remain constantly the observer, looking for something which can be of use.

Hemingway: Surely. If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen. If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part hat doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story…..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. (from a 1954 interview in ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol I’)

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Jan Morris on tools for writing

Interviewer: Has technology, notably the advent of the word processor, changed your technique or style in any way?

Morris: I do use a word processor, but it hasn’t changed my writing in any way whatsoever. The belief that style and mental capacity depend upon the instrument one uses is a superstition. I will write with anything at any time. I’ve used then all – the fountain pen, manual typewriter, electric typewriter – and none have made the slightest difference. But with a word processor I won’t type the first few drafts on disk because there is the temptation simply to fiddle with the text, to juggle with it. The word processor is useful to me only for the final draft of the thing. I do think that the word processor for a writer’s last draft is a wonderful thing because you can go on and on polishing the thing. (From a 1997 interview with Jan Morris in ‘The Paris Review Interviews’ vol III) On an interesting side note, Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris in 1926 and underwent a complete sex change in 1972. At the time of this interview Morris still lived with his/her former wife.

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