We'll always have 'Paris Review'
One little cure I’ve found for writer’s block: visiting The Paris Review website online. With its compendious archive of interviews conducted with famous writers over five decades, it’s a great way to kill two or three hours, sifting through the thoughts of those who willingly take pen to pad, pound a typewriter or tap a keyboard for a living.
Writing, according to many famous authors, is basically about doing just that: sitting down and writing. On a regular basis. Like clockwork. As a habit. Usually in the morning, though some opt to write through the wee hours after midnight. Michel Houellebecq, enfant terrible of French literature, says he likes to get up at 1 a.m. and “write half-awake in a semi-conscious state.” (“Progressively, as I drink coffee, I become more conscious. And I write until I’m sick of it.”) Contrariwise, Ray Bradbury, even at age 90, is an early bird: “I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me.”
Such words, to one afflicted with writer’s block, can have one of two effects: they can inspire you, get you all fired up and ready to rattle off a brilliant metaphor or seize a fresh simile; or they can make you as depressed as hell. I mean, these are the writing habits of Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, John Updike, Don DeLillo… What about that silly article or press release you have to bang out before noon? How does one find inspiration to finish that?
It seems the masters have pearls of wisdom, even for this lowly condition. If you can’t get your motor going on one project — say that cursed press release — more than one author in the Paris Review Archives (www.theparisreview.org) advocates writing something you want to write instead. Anything. Even a few hundred lines of personal regurgitation. As long as it engages you as a writer, it just might get the juices flowing.
Now, I’m not so sure how these older titans of literature would have regarded the blogging phenomenon. Few of them comment on Internet writing, but I tend to think that the relative ease of filing a blog entry — as opposed to composing a blazing paragraph of lasting prose — does not engage the writer’s mind in the same way that, say, T.S. Eliot sat down to write “The Wasteland.” Norman Mailer used to say that writing just for the sake of writing is a very bad habit, leading to mis-trained writing muscles. While it’s great that most people now feel empowered by the Internet as writers, whether to small or enormous blog audiences, I wonder how this direct pay-off changes the quality of prose, when you know you’re writing directly for an online audience. Sure, authors have always written, ultimately, to be read; but they write for themselves first. Ask any of the dozens of writers interviewed in the Paris Review Archives.
The Archives are now open to the public, and they include a rich roster from the 1950s up to the 2010s. The magazine — based in New York City now, not the Paris of long ago — has survived the death of main editor George Plimpton and carries on into the millennium, though perhaps most vividly in the ghostly pages of cyberspace. It’s an online treasure trove, not just of interviews, but of poetry, essays and fiction as well. (The Paris Review prides itself on having “broken” writers like William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace and T.C. Boyle.)
It’s also a time traveling experiment, allowing you to zip freely from, say, an Aldous Huxley interview from 1960 (“I don’t believe for a moment that creativity is a neurotic symptom. On the contrary, the neurotic who succeeds as an artist has had to overcome a tremendous handicap. He creates in spite of his neurosis, not because of it.”) to a chat with Haruki Murakami in 2004 (“Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoyevsky and Chandler together in one book.”).
You find, in the course of your travels, that some writers obsess over certain music while writing novels (Stephen King with his famous Ramones and AC/DC listening habits; or Jonathan Letham, asked what he played while pounding out Girl in Landscape: “A ton of Dylan. I was obsessing on Dylan in that period. But Girl, like several others, had a musical keynote, a song or album I kept returning to. In this case, a John Cale song called Dying On The Vine. Just as Amnesia Moon was a Neil Young book, but the skeleton key was an album by My Dad is Dead, called “The Taller You Are, The Shorter You Get”.”)
This is the kind of meat-and-potatoes trivia that The Paris Review has always excelled at: the magazine’s Q&A indeed follows a certain template, asking authors about specific writing habits, preferred pencils, favorite keyboards, hours of business. Where else will you learn that Hemingway liked to write standing up, leaning over his typewriter, always in motion, as though he were boxing?
Some writers come across as arrogant and self-absorbed, others as completely workmanlike (the tireless P.G. Wodehouse, for example, back in the ‘90s), while others live up to their less-sterling reputations (Raymond Carver on teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Conference: “The entire time [John Cheever and I] were there... I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters. We made trips to a liquor store twice a week in my car.”).
The nice thing about the Paris Review Archives is it gives a little boost to would-be writers — like the literary equivalent of defibrillator panels straight to the writing muscles. You find yourself surprised, and heartened, to discover that these successful and great writers are actually kind of normal, and seem to like what their doing. They come across as committed to the craft, despite all the agonies and doubts and distractions the world has to offer. They mostly seem happy in their work. Something perhaps we should all aspire to achieve.
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