Taking Lessons from Author Interviews
Years ago, when I first got serious about writing, I downloaded a volume of author interviews from The Paris Review onto my Kindle and read portions of them while bike touring through Europe. One of the included interviews was with Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for a little ol’ thing called West Side Story, among other productions. The interview discusses his mentorship by Oscar Hammerstein, who he considered a surrogate father.
At age 15, Sondheim wrote a show and asked Hammerstein to “read it as is he didn’t know me.” Hammerstein took the youngster at his word, tore the musical down to the bones, and taught Sondheim structural ideas he continued to use throughout his career. I’ve never had any interest in writing musicals, but a piece of that interview, and Hammerstein’s advice, stuck with me and shaped my writing path in the years immediately following.
First, he said, take a play that you like, that think is good, and musicalize it. In musicalizing it, you’ll be forced to analyze it. Next, take a play that you think is good but flawed, that you think could be improved, and musicalize that, seeing if you can improve it. Then take a nonplay, a narrative someone else has written–it could be a novel, a short story–but not a play, not something that has been structured dramatically for the stage and musicalize that. Then try an original.
Adapting this advice to my own purposes, I first wrote several fairy tale retellings. And dang if it didn’t make me analyze the structure of the stories, dig into the themes and messages behind Beauty and the Beast, or Little Red Riding Hood. I’ve still got an unfinished trilogy to weave together Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Sleeping Beauty with the perpetual three princes (the youngest of whom is a fool–or is he?). Then I wrote two novels and a novella based on songs of varying ballad-ness. I scrapped another novella when I defected to Romancelandia–I love the power of the old folk songs, but so many of them are so dang tragic!
Recently I’ve been remembering Sondheim’s interview, both because I’ve had several conversations with a 12 year-old who wants to write musicals, and because I’ve been reflecting on the path my writing has taken me on.
When I went looking for the Sondheim interview, I learned that Brain Pickings has an article about author interviews as they were reinvented by The Paris Review when the journal started. In describing how they obtained interviews as a nascent publication,
Some of [the authors] disliked the idea of being interviewed but consented anyway, either out of friendship for someone on the Review or because they wanted to help a struggling magazine of the arts, perhaps in memory of their own early struggles to get published. Others … were interested in the creative process and glad to talk about it. Not one of the interviewers had any professional experience in the field, but perhaps their experience and youth were positive advantages. Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.
E.M. Forster Interviews
Further, I learned that the Review‘s first interview was with E.M. Forster, whose A Room With A View was one of my earlier readings for the Romance MFA. (The Paris Review, naturally, has a great many fascinating looking author interviews, but somehow they’ve skipped over the greats of the romance genre, even after their promising start with Forster. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Forster tells the interviewers,
The novelist should, I think, always settle when he starts what is going to happen, what his major event is to be. He may alter this event as he approaches it, indeed he probably will, indeed he probably had better, or the novel becomes tied up and tight.
Discussing book plotting further, he also says,
That wonderful thing, a character running away with you—which happens to everyone—that’s happened to me, I’m afraid. … Characters run away with you, and so won’t fit on to what is coming.
So there you go: Forster knew that characters having their own minds was a universal. There are probably more good bits in his interview, but you will need to get a subscription to The Paris Review to read the entire thing–although they do provide substantial previews.
The other interview material I’ve been able to turn up for Forster is a BBC interview, which includes some footage of the author in his rooms at Cambridge University, the same location as The Paris Review interview.
If you have JSTOR access, you’ll also be able to read a collection of interviews with Forster from later in the 1950s and 60s, conducted by WIlfred Stone, probably also at his Cambridge rooms.
Now I’m curious about interviews with the other authors whose books are on my reading list. While authors like Jane Austen have had their correspondence published, I am going to look specifically for journalist-conducted author interviews for the folks on the syllabus after Forster, and I’ll be sharing what I find in occasional future posts. Next week, however, I’ll be back with my take on Annemarie Selinko’s Désirée.
