ADVICE ON WRITING, FROM ONE OF THE WORLD’S BEST WRITERS

I started the dictation as a way to loosen up, and in the first of the dictated books, Two Against One, there was very little re-writing.  Since then there has been more re-writing, and the dictation has been a method of generating material. Plus, it’s a great tool for ‘naturalizing’ the dialogue, which I suppose is a trick, but it’s a trick that works, so it’s OK.

Much good writing is good editing — cutting a word or two, substituting a phrase for another, swapping two lines of dialogue. So, I do that. I learned from my brother Don first, and then, perhaps more brilliantly, from my New Yorker editor Veronica Geng. She was brilliant, I wasn’t. You want to compress the prose enough so it springs off the page; too much and it remains the unrisen biscuit. So the dialogue is a mating of the two — dictation for the sound, editing and compression for the economy.

I never know the characters ahead of time. What would I do when writing if I did? The writing is creating the characters, reflecting on them, going back and changing stuff in the early going so that it seeds what developed later.

We are all modern writers, all afflicted with too much seriousness aggravated by too little talent. I place a premium on ‘charm’, and also ‘grace’, both of which are mysteries in short supply these days, and install them wherever possible in my work. I keep wanting to write a really grim book. Doesn’t happen. Maybe I’m a real life music man, maybe I believe too much. Even the horrible things we do seem wonderful to me, somehow. That explains the ready employ of Jen’s horror stories — I have some sense of the terrifying grief of these grisly murders, beheadings, tortures, and yet their presence reminds me of what it is to be human, of the range of humanness. So in a peculiar way, every unspeakable act is a reassurance.

If you’re interested in more advice, take another look at The 39 Steps , which is from the Mississippi Review , which Barthelme edits.