Getting History Done

INTERVIEWER

Do you keep a tight work schedule? 

BRADBURY

My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this. — from The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

You have said that you don’t believe in going to college to learn to write. Why is that? 

BRADBURY

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. — from The Paris Review

“INTERVIEWER

Do you outline your novels?

EUGENIDES

I don’t start with an idea and outline it. I don’t see how you can know what’s going to happen in a book or what the book is about beforehand. So I plunge in headlong, and after a while I get worried that I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going, so I begin to make a fuzzy outline, thinking about what might happen in the book or how I might structure it. And then that outline keeps getting revised. I’ll have it there, like a security blanket, to make me feel better about what I’m doing, but it’s provisional. Always you discover things and have ideas of how it might work out as you’re writing, and often the surprise of coming to these conclusions is what makes the book’s plot points surprising to the reader, too. If you can see on your first day what’s going to happen, the reader can likely guess as well. It’s the more complex ideas, the more difficult-to-foresee consequences of your story, that are more interesting to write about, and to read about as well.” — from The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

Do you rewrite your sentences over and over again or do they come out fairly finished in a first draft?

EUGENIDES

The Virgin Suicides was written in a slow, methodical fashion, sentence by sentence. Parts of my other books were written that way as well. There were small transitions in Middlesex, even though they were only three or four sentences long, where I had to spend a long time to get them to move. There are so many time shifts in the book, and it was difficult to give the right signposts so that the reader knew what was happening. I rewrite a lot. That’s why I don’t publish books very often. The fact that I’m working every day and publish so seldom shows that I’m reworking and rewriting a lot on the sentence level, and on the paragraph and structural levels, too. — from The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

Do you always write on the computer?

EUGENIDES

I compose on the computer. Now and then, I print out what I’m working on and make handwritten corrections. There’s usually a period where I make corrections by hand, turn the page over, and write new paragraphs on the back of the sheet. I used to do that almost every day. It seems I do that less and less often. Now I can go as long as a month before printing something out. But there are always handwritten corrections at some point. — from The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any special rituals, or is writing something you just have to hunker down and do?

EUGENIDES

Nothing out of the ordinary. The usual stimulants—coffee or tea. And at the end of a book, when I’m extremely exhausted, mentally fatigued, I sometimes sneak off into the yard and smoke a cigar, maybe six or seven times per book. That’s a bad habit I picked up when I lived in Berlin.

INTERVIEWER

Cal in Middlesex smokes cigars.

EUGENIDES

That’s why that got in there. Occasionally, instead of having a Red Bull, as a twenty-year-old might, I resort to the Thomas Mann method, the Maria Mancinis, but not very often. Cigars are the perfect literary drug. I understand why Mann, Freud, and so many durable people smoked cigars. It really focuses the mind. But I didn’t do it much with The Marriage Plot. I was in healthy, nonsmoking America and stayed mainly clean. — from The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

In the other places you’ve lived, have you done your work in similarly small rooms?

EUGENIDES

In college and in the apartments I lived in after college, I had just one room that was mine—my bedroom. So I’m used to working at a desk that’s not that far from the bed. I worked in the living room for part of Middlesex. Finally, when we moved to Berlin, we got a bigger apartment, and I worked in one of the extra bedrooms. Mainly I’ve written my books in bedrooms of apartments. This is the first house we’ve ever owned, so now I have an actual studio. I was almost fifty by the time I had one. — from The Paris Review

INTERVIEWER

This is a beautiful room. Do you write here?

EUGENIDES

This is my summer office. It’s mostly glass and looks onto the garden. I thought it would be my dream studio, but actually the glass is distracting, so I end up using a dismal bedroom upstairs. Leonardo said that small rooms concentrate the mind. I find that I like working in small, cramped rooms with not much in them, as compared to a pretty studio. But I feel guilty about not using this room, so I come down here in the summer and try to do something useful. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to use my nice studio. Actual composition I don’t want to do in a pleasant space. I’m even thinking of moving up into the attic because it’s the most austere and removed place in the house. — from The Paris Review interview with Jeffrey Eugenides

INTERVIEWER

How important is it to you to follow your own instincts? 

BRADBURY

Oh, God. It’s everything. I was offered the chance to write War and Peace for the screen a few decades ago. The American version with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone said, How could you do that? That’s ridiculous, it’s a great book! I said, Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t read it. I can’t get through it, I tried. That doesn’t mean the book’s bad. I just am not prepared for it. It portrays a very special culture. The names throw me. My wife loved it. She read it once every three years for twenty years. They offered the usual amount for a screenplay like that, a hundred thousand dollars, but you cannot do things for money in this world. I don’t care how much they offer you, and I don’t care how poor you are. There’s only one excuse ever to take money under those circumstances: If someone in your family is horribly ill and the doctor bills are piled up so high that you’re all going to be destroyed. Then I’d say, Go on and take the job. Go do War and Peace and do a lousy job. And be sorry later. — from The Paris Review interview of Ray Bradbury

INTERVIEWER

Do you keep to a strict writing schedule?

EUGENIDES

I do. I try to write every day. I start around ten in the morning and write until dinnertime, most days. Sometimes it’s not productive, and there’s a lot of downtime. Sometimes I fall asleep in my chair, but I feel that if I’m in the room all day, something’s going to get done. I treat it like a desk job.

With The Marriage Plot, the last year or so, I started doing double sessions where I would work all day, have dinner, and then go back and work at night. I didn’t want to put myself through that, but I had so much to do and a lot of things were coming together, so I had to work long hours. I’d go to bed at midnight and wake up at seven or eight and start again. — from The Paris Review interview of Jeffrey Eugenides