On the heels of t&p’s first foray into literary interviewing we’ve been taking another look at the gold standard of the genre. We’re talking about The Paris Review interviews of course. If you’ve never dipped into any of these before then you’ve missed a treat.

Before I ever tried to write anything I was a reader, and at some point I began to wonder just how the writers I’d been reading do what it is they do; what I wanted to ask them was not so much “Where do your story ideas come from?”, it was questions such as:

• Do you need your own writing room?
• What kind of desk do you sit at? What kind of desk-lamp?
• Is morning the best time to write, or is evening better?
• How about a view: is it good or bad?
• Do you write with pencil? (HB? 2H?), or with pen? (ballpoint, rollerball, or fountain?)
• On a yellow legal pad? A coil-bound shirt-pocket notebook? Or is Moleskine the necessary brand?
• Longhand, typewriter or computer? Mac or PC?

Of course for “you” above, what I really meant was “I”; I wanted to know the mechanics of the process; as if it were simply a matter of learning the rules, acquiring the proper tools.

Years ago Macleod’s Books was having one of their sales and I picked up a couple of the published collections of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. I was then (and still am to some degree) “into” the Beat writers, and the Third Series had interviews with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, while the Fourth Series included a 1967 interview with Jack Kerouac. But the unexpected bonus was all the other interviews which were included in those volumes: writers like Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, William Carlos Williams and Blaise Cendrars to name but a few.

Poring through them all I learned that Blaise Cendrars had this to say (emphatically) about a view:

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be… Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back.

while Norman Mailer advised:

I like a room with a view, preferably a long view. I dislike looking out on gardens. I prefer looking out at the sea, or ships, or anything which has a vista to it.

And so it was from these and other extracts like them that I learned there was no common method, no Standard Writer’s Process agreed upon by all; there were no magic incantations, no sure-fire invocations of the muse. This discovery was a liberation, for it made a writer’s life seem possible for anyone: there were no Rules.

Other biblioblogs have noted that The Paris Review has begun to put their entire trove of author interviews online: a motherlode which covers over 50 years — 300+ interviews. They’re doing it in stages: interviews from the 1950s and 1960s are already available; those from the 1970s (W. H. Auden! William Gass! Joan Didion!) are due for release on March 1st. The final batch of interviews is to be posted on the 25th of July.

Their website refers to these collectively as “The DNA of Literature”, but I prefer the title under which they were originally published: “Writers at Work”. There’s enough food for thought in them to sate the most hungry mind.