The Paris Review is a quarterly literary magazine established in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. It’s renowned for its in-depth interviews with prominent writers, known as “The Art of Fiction,” series, as well as publishing original fiction, poetry, and essays. Here is a small sample from interviews I’ve read that may offer some insight and inspiration to those of us engaged in the long tradition of telling stories.
George Saunders, The Art of Fiction No. 245 – Issue 231, Winter 2019
“But I think it’s mysterious, what we end up writing about. I don’t have any big intellectual agenda regarding the Civil War. I just kind of switch on when I write about it. And my feeling is, if something fascinates you, you just should go there—you have to. I don’t think you have to necessarily understand why. We’re looking for language-rich zones, places that get us revved up, places that feel bountiful. You can dress the process up afterward, theoretically and explanatorily, but really we’re looking for a place of excitement and potential, a place that feels language-rich—it takes a lot of words to write a book and a lot of words are going to have to be taken out. So you need a deep reservoir of generative interest. One of the indicators that you’ve chosen a good topic is that you have strong opinions about everything that’s going on in the prose—the language, the form, all of it.”
August Wilson, The Art of Theatre No. 14 – Issue 153, Winter 1999
“I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.”
Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143 – Issue 137, Winter 1995
“Oddly enough, the plot is what seems to come all of a piece—like a gift. It’s very mysterious. Something I hear or see or read conjures up a whole story in all its concreteness—scenes, characters, landscapes, catastrophes. With Death Kit, it was hearing someone utter the childhood nickname of a mutual friend named Richard—just the hearing of the name Diddy. With The Volcano Lover, it was browsing in a print shop near the British Museum and coming across some images of volcanic landscapes that turned out to be from Sir William Hamilton’s Phlegraei Campi. For the new novel, it was reading something in Kafka’s diaries, a favorite book, so I must have already read this paragraph, which may be an account of a dream, more than once. Reading it this time the story of a whole novel, like a movie I’d seen, leaped into my head.”
John Irving, The Art of Fiction No. 93 – Issue 100, Summer 1986
“I write only favorable reviews. A writer of fiction whose own fiction comes first is just too subjective a reader to allow himself to write a negative review. And there are already plenty of professional reviewers eager to be negative. If I get a book to review and I don’t like it, I return it; I only review the book if I love it. Hence I’ve written very few reviews, and those are really just songs of praise or rather long, retrospective reviews of all the writer’s works: of John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut, and Günter Grass, for example. And then there is the occasional “younger” writer whom I introduce to readers, such as Jayne Anne Phillips and Craig Nova. Another thing about not writing negative reviews: grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like. You know, if I were a critic, I’d be angry and vicious, too; it makes poor critics angry and vicious—to have to finish all those books they’re not enjoying. What a silly job criticism is! What unnatural work it is! It is certainly not work for a grown-up.”
Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178 – Issue 167, Fall 2003
“I suppose I think of the notebook as a house for words, as a secret place for thought and self-examination. I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page. Don’t ask me why. It might have something to do with an early confusion on my part, an ignorance about the nature of fiction. As a young person, I would always ask myself, Where are the words coming from? Who’s saying this? The third-person narrative voice in the traditional novel is a strange device. We’re used to it now, we accept it, we don’t question it anymore. But when you stop and think about it, there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing. I was always drawn to books that doubled back on themselves, that brought you into the world of the book, even as the book was taking you into the world. The manuscript as hero, so to speak. Wuthering Heights is that kind of novel. The Scarlet Letter is another. The frames are fictitious, of course, but they give a groundedness and credibility to the stories that other novels didn’t have for me. They posit the work as an illusion—which more traditional forms of narrative don’t—and once you accept the “unreality” of the enterprise, it paradoxically enhances the truth of the story. The words aren’t written in stone by an invisible author-god. They represent the efforts of a flesh-and-blood human being and this is very compelling. The reader becomes a participant in the unfolding of the story—not just a detached observer.”
Stephen King, The Art of Fiction No. 189 – Issue 178, Fall 2006
“I’d say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it’s lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that’s inexplicable to you, whether it’s the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we’re still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.”
Susan-Lori Parks, The Art of Theater No. 18 – Issue 235, Winter 2020
“Anything, anything can change a writer, if one is open to it. The artists I admire most go through their changes. Think about Aretha Franklin. Started out singing gospel in church, went through a change. She grew. She got into secular music, blues and jazz standards, and then pop songs that became clas- sics. Started writing her own material. At first, people had an issue with her secular side, but she had such confidence in her voice and she was able to follow it.
One could say that as a writer, my voice has changed. It’s grown. And the idea that we have to be who we were when we started is bullshit. It’s poppycock. Think of Bob Dylan at Newport. The famous folk singer has an electric guitar and plugs in—and he gets booed by the audience. The artists I admire go through their changes instead of clinging to what they might have started out doing. Like, we are no longer babies, right? We grow. As a human it’s natural, but as an artist, you are known by your “brand,” and it takes a lot of moxie to step out of your comfort zone again and again and again.”
Wallace Shawn, The Art of Theatre No. 17 – Issue 201, Summer 2012
“I love the idea that drama is a form of literature, and I love the fact that plays are published and can be read. But this can create a problem or a conflict. For example, it might be perfectly appropriate for a character in a play to say something like, “Edwin, I’ve always believed that there are tuna-salad men, and there are hamburger men, and I’ve always been a bit of a tuna-salad man myself, so I think I’ll sit this one out.” But it might actually be more effective and better for the actor onstage to say, “No! I won’t do that!” Given the right actor, those words might ring out, they might fly across the stage and devastate everyone. The sound of those words, the rhythm of them, might perfectly and beautifully convey the character’s hopes, needs, and beliefs. To the spectator sitting in the audience, “No! I won’t do that!” might be the most exciting moment in the whole play, even though for the reader sitting at home it might seem like a very flat and uninteresting line.”
Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203 – Issue 192, Spring 2010
“Take Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires—which is a grand idea in itself—and you start him on the adventure of discovering that maybe books shouldn’t be burned. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating.
I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual.”
Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117 – Issue 115, Summer 1990
“You could name almost anybody who has written a great or good novel and see that their lives are imperfect. You can be unselfish and truthful in your art, and a monster at home. To write a good book you have to have certain qualities. Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination. Whereas bad art is the soft, messy self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy. Pornography is at one end of that scale, great art at the other end.”
Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1 – Issue 176, Spring 2006
“Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. You have no notes—or sometimes you do, I made extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer—but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. 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 there in the texture of the thing.”
James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 – Issue 91, Spring 1984
“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, “Look.” I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, “Look again,” which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.”
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“I write only when inspiration strikes.
Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
W. Somerset Maugham
