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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Joan Didion on writer’s block and rewrites

From a 2006 interview with Joan Didion; ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol I’.

Rewrites can plague all writers. If you get blocked, they can be effective tools to at least keep you writing. Is it better to put something on the page vs. staring at your blank screen/page for hours? I prefer long walks in the forest, let the sounds and sights of nature clear my head and make space for new material. Didion had the following interesting take on rewriting and evading what she accurately calls “blank terror”. To each their own.

Interviewer: Do you do a lot of rewriting?

Didion: When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done – pages or page – all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past the blank terror.

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Jack Gilbert some thoughts on poetry and people

From a 2005 interview in ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol I’. The poet Linda Gregg had this to say about Gilbert: “He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench.” That may have been an easy life in the 60’s. I question whether such a philosophy would work today. In any event here’s what Gilbert had to say about socially interacting, simple but direct.

Interviewer: You don’t get lonely.

Gilbert: No. I really don’t like chitchat. Often when I went places with people I liked, they would chat the whole time. It’s very human, but if there’s going to be talk I want it to be interesting. I don’t want to know that so-and-so spilled milk or how sad it is that she didn’t get the dress she wanted. All of the things that people are shamed by or don’t think they’ve succeeded in – I don’t want to talk about that. I like to meet people, to be with people, but I don’t want to be chatting all the time. I like it when people talk about things.

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Thoughts on writing…..Robert Stone

From a 1985 interview with Robert Stone; ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol I’.

I use the white space. I’m interested in precise meaning and in reverberation, in associative levels. What you’re trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You’re trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

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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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William Faulkner on the best environment for a writer.

Interviewer: Then what would be the best environment for a writer?

Faulkner: Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn’t care where it is. If you mean me, the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and go once every month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in this society; he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him “sir”. All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him “sir”. And he could call the police by their first names. So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey. (William Faulkner interview 1956 in ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol II’)

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John Gardner on how some plots just have to get written.

One plot will just sort of rise above all the others for reasons that you don’t fully understand. All of them are interesting, all of them have interesting characters, all of them talk about things that you could talk about, but one of them catches you like a nightmare. Then you have no choice but to write it – you can’t forget it. It’s a weird thing. If it’s the kind of plot you really don’t want to do because it involves your mother too closely, or whatever, you can try to do something else. But the typewriter keeps hissing at you and shooting sparks, and the paper keeps wrinkling and the lamp goes off and nothing else works, so finally you do the one that God said you’ve got to do. And once you do it, you’re grounded. It’s an amazing thing. (from ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol II’)

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What makes it art?

Good art, as we all know, weds form to content, either through the dissonance of irony or the consonance of harmony. What makes such fusions possible is that our ways of apprehending and sharing experience are themselves a crucial part of what we call experience. (James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny: “Points of View’)

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More musings on the art of writing

From a Paul Auster interview, 2003.

Each book I’ve written has started off with what I’d call a buzz in the head. A certain kind of music or rhythm, a tone. Most of the effort involved in writing a novel for me is trying to remain faithful to that buzz, that rhythm. It’s a highly intuitive business. You can’t justify it or defend it rationally, but you know when you’ve struck a wrong note, and you’re usually pretty certain when you’ve hit the right one.

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