Here are excerpts from the interview that particularly struck me as resonant with my own life as I see it or as I wish it to be.
I can’t imagine anyone becoming a writer who wasn’t a voracious reader as an adolescent. A true reader understands that books are a world unto themselves—and that that world is richer and more interesting than any one we’ve traveled in before. I think that’s what turns young men and women into writers—the happiness you discover living in books. You haven’t been around long enough to have much to write about yet, but a moment comes when you realize that’s what you were born to do.
But at one time or another, I tried to write like each one of the novelists I was reading. Everything influences you when you’re young and you keep changing your ideas every few months. It’s a bit like trying on new hats. You don’t have a style of your own yet, so you unconsciously imitate the writers you admire.
I think it [being "reborn" from a poet to a novelist] happened at the moment when I understood that I didn’t care anymore, when I stopped caring about making Literature. I know it sounds strange, but from that point on writing became a different kind of experience for me and when I finally got going again after wallowing in the doldrums for about a year, the words came out as prose. The only thing that mattered was saying the thing that needed to be said. Without regard to preestablished conventions, without worrying about what it sounded like
Screenwriting is a more restricted form than novel-writing. It has its strengths and weaknesses, the things it can do and the things it can’t do. The question of time, for example, works differently in books and films. In a novel, you can collapse a long stretch of time into a single sentence: Every morning for twenty years, I walked down to the corner newsstand and bought a copy of The Daily Bugle. It’s impossible to do that in a film. You can show a man walking down the street to buy a newspaper on one particular day, but not every day for twenty years. Films take place in the present. Even when you use flashbacks, the past is always rendered as another incarnation of the present.
I look at those stories as a kind of ars poetica—but without theory, without any philosophical baggage. So many strange things have happened to me in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I’m no longer certain that I know what reality is anymore. All I can do is talk about the mechanics of reality, to gather evidence about what goes on in the world and try to record it as faithfully as I can. I’ve used that approach in my novels. It’s not a method so much as an act of faith: to present things as they really happen, not as they’re supposed to happen or as we’d like them to happen. Novels are fictions, of course, and therefore they tell lies (in the strictest sense of the term), but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. Taken together, the little stories inThe Red Notebook present a kind of position paper on how I see the world. The bare-bones truth about the unpredictability of experience. There’s not a shred of the imaginary in them. There can’t be. You make a pact with yourself to tell the truth and you’d rather cut off your right arm than break that promise. Interestingly enough, the literary model I had in mind when I wrote those pieces was the joke. The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
I think I had several motives. The most important one was curiosity. I wanted to find out if other people had lived through the same sorts of experiences that I had. Was I some kind of freak or was reality truly as strange and incomprehensible as I thought it was? I’m happy to report that I’m not alone. It’s a madhouse out there.
I’ve spent most of my adult life sitting alone in a room, writing books. I’m perfectly happy there, but when I got involved in film work in the mid-nineties, I rediscovered the pleasures of working with other people. It probably goes back to having played on so many sports teams as a kid. I liked being part of a small group, a group with a purpose, in which each person contributes to a common goal. Winning a basketball game or making a film—there’s really very little difference. That was probably the best part of working in the movies for me. The sense of solidarity, the jokes we told each other, the friendships I made.
The media presents us with little else but celebrities, gossip, and scandal, and the way we depict ourselves on television and in the movies has become so distorted, so debased, that real life has been forgotten. What we’re given are violent shocks and dim-witted escapist fantasies, and the driving force behind it all is money. People are treated like morons.
By giving so-called ordinary people a chance to share their stories with an audience, I wanted to prove that there’s no such thing as an ordinary person. We all have intense inner lives, we all burn with ferocious passions, we’ve all lived through memorable experiences of one kind or another.
I’d never had any interest in working in an office or holding down a steady, white-collar job. I found the idea extremely distasteful. I gravitated toward more humble kinds of work, and that gave me a chance to spend time with people who weren’t like me. People who hadn’t gone to college; people who hadn’t read a lot of books. In this country, we tend to underestimate the intelligence of working-class people. Based on my own experience, I found most of them to be just as smart as the people who run the world. They simply aren’t as ambitious—that’s all. But their talk is a lot funnier. Everywhere I went, I had to struggle to keep up with them. I’d spent too much time with my nose buried in books and most of my coworkers could talk circles around me.
I’m well into my fifties now and things change for you as you get older. Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you than ahead of you—many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren’t there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It’s hard for a young person to understand this. It’s not that a twenty year old doesn’t know he’s going to die, but it’s the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person—and you can’t know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
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.
Every book begins with the first sentence and then I push on until I’ve reached the last. Always in sequence, a paragraph at a time. I have a sense of the trajectory of the story— and often have the last sentence as well as the first before I begin—but everything keeps changing as I go along. No book I’ve published has ever turned out as I thought it would. Characters and episodes disappear; other characters and episodes develop as I go along. You find the book in the process of doing it. That’s the adventure of the job. If it were all mapped out in advance, it wouldn’t be very interesting.
Writing has always been like that for me. Slowly blundering my way toward consciousness.
Every writer needs a trusted reader—someone who has sympathy for what you’re doing and wants the work to be as good as it can possibly be. But you have to be honest. That’s the fundamental requirement. No lies, no false pats on the back, no praise for something you don’t believe deserves it.
Contrary to what many people want to believe, the novel is in good shape these days, as healthy and vigorous as it’s ever been. It’s an inexhaustible form, and no matter what the pessimists say, it’s never going to die. Because a novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can do that. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.
Each book is a new book. I’ve never written it before and I have to teach myself how to write it as I go along. The fact that I’ve written books in the past seems to play no part in it. I always feel like a beginner and I’m continually running into the same difficulties, the same blocks, the same despairs. You make so many mistakes as a writer, cross out so many bad sentences and ideas, discard so many worthless pages, that finally what you learn is how stupid you are. It’s a humbling occupation.
It’s difficult for me to look at myself from the outside. I simply don’t have the mental equipment to do it, at least where my work is concerned. It’s for other people to make judgments about what I’ve done, and I wouldn’t want to presume to have an answer to that question. I wish I could, but I still haven’t mastered the trick of being in two places at the same time.
--Paul Auster
full interview can be found at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/121/the-art-of-fiction-no-178-paul-auster
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