ON WRITING

This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published. Trust your reader. Stop spoon-feeding your reader. Give them the credit for being as smart as you, at least. Concentrate on sharpening your memory, and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say, then see it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life, and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink. But do I take my own advice? Not a bit.

I answered the question [Bill Moyers] didn't pose. ... Yes, I can write about white people; white people can write about black people; anything can happen in art; there are no boundaries there. Having to do it, or having to prove that I can do it, that's what was embarrassing, or insulting.

When I got that idea, which came from reading a scientific article, which pointed out how the human race is now much less fertile than it was, I realised that there was a wonderful plot there, a story to be told, but it really wasn't very suitable to twist it, to make it into a detective story. So I wrote it as a straightforward novel. ... I never have felt that as it were to extend myself, do something better than crime. I've never felt that. I very much respect the detective story. But, still, if I had a plot, an idea came, that wasn't suitable for it, then I would write another kind of book.

In conversation about the making of An Octaron. Moderated by Raphael Martin, Director of New Work and FEED.

Everything you can imagine failing on, I did. If you can imagine it like a sea of paper coming and filling this whole stage up to my knees, that’s how many times I failed. If it had all gone smoothly, I would have had a two-hundred page book that really meant something to me. But because of getting around all those problems and all those failures, I had a five-hundred-and-eighty-page book that meant everything to me. And that’s what made all the difference.

To lose yourself in a book is the desire of a bookworm. To be taken. That is my desire. I lived in a little town, and the library was the world. This is the opposite way that people are taught to read now. People are consistently told, “What can you learn about your own life from this novel? What lessons will this teach you? How can you use this in–this is a Philistine idea. This is beyond vulgar, and I think that it’s an awful way to approach anything. A book should be the same. It should take you away. A book is not supposed to be a mirror, it’s supposed to be a door. And so that to me is the test of any artist, not just a writer.

I think half of writing a book is just forgetting there’s even a world that exists beyond the book. To be a writer I think has nothing to do with being published, in a lot of ways. If a ray of light came out of the sky and said to me, ‘All right, your next book will never see the light of day. It won’t be published, you won’t be paid a cent, and nobody will ever read it,’ and the question is, would I still write the book? The answer is definitely ‘Yes.’ And that’s what makes me write my next book–knowing that that is true. For me writing should be fun and it should be like you can play with words.