PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING AND THE WRITING LIFE ARE ALWAYS WELCOME and for me never more so than those presented in The Paris Review The Art of Fiction interviews. All the interviews from 1953 through 2011 are now posted online – no searching through stacks at used bookstores or libraries to find old issues – and no charge. It’s a wonderful resource. Generally you get a back story on a career and sometimes on a book. You’ll learn how other writers manage their days and their projects. Some writers will irritate you and others will charm you. Some will leave you cold and some will spark the writing fire. No matter what, you’ll learn from each interview.

NOVEL PURSUITS 

I think Jonathan Franzen‘s youthful experience at home is one with which many people can sympathize. If that’s so in your case, it might be nice for you to know that someone else got through it and got published.

“I hate the word creative, but it’s not a bad description of my personality type, and there was no place for that in my parents’ house. They considered art of all kinds, including creative writing, frivolous. Art was something I could do in my free time, and if I could get school credit for it, so much the better. But it was actively discouraged.”

LETTERS OF ACCEPTANCE

Truman Capote‘s  story shows us that even things beyond our dreams can happen.

“I realized that I wanted to be a writer. But I wasn’t sure I would be until I was fifteen or so. At that time I had immodestly started sending stories to magazines and literary quarterlies. Of course no writer ever forgets his first acceptance; but one fine day when I was seventeen, I had my first, second, and third, all in the same morning’s mail. Oh, I’m here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is not mere phrase!”

SHORT STORY vs. NOVEL

Ray Bradbury is going strong at 91. Here’s some good advice from his 2010 interview:

“…the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours … write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being . . two or three thousand words in a few hours is not hard. . . If you carry a short story over to the next day you might intellectualized something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

“But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it.”

THE FINAL PAGES

Ann Beattie doesn’t produce as much as she used to, but she’s still writing and she had ideas and insights to share in her 2011 interview.

“I hate to summarize my stories at the end, because I know that stories don’t really have conclusions. It’s only an appropriate moment for stopping. For a while, I would find the typewriter keys had stopped and decide that that would quite suffice. For most of my stories, intellectually I could contrive a superior ending, but I try to resist that temptation. In general I end my stories before I get a change to do something more aesthetically pleasing to me. But I’ve thrown whole stories away when all I lacked was a last line. Often.”

ON GETTING STARTED

I saved the best for last. I like John Steinbeck. I think I came to Steinbeck at fifteen. I had seen a rerun of  the movie The Grapes of Wrath (1940) on television and just went from there. I spent the whole of my fifteenth summer reading him and reading about him. Loved The Grapes of Wrath. I loved every book, and I think I learned something about writing from reading them. Ray Bradbury said of Steinbeck, “I learned from John Steinbeck how to write objectively and yet insert all of the insights without too much extra comment.”

In the fall of 1968, Steinbeck was actually too ill for a standard interview and one was pieced together from the East of Eden diaries (Journal of a Novel) and from some letters, which were later collected and published in one book.

Steinbeck’s Paris Review, The Art of Fiction interview included these six tips:

“1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.”

The current issue of Paris Review (which is not online) includes interviews with Bret Easton Ellis (The Art of Fiction) and Terry Southern (The Art of Screenwriting).