Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The late E.L. Doctorow, from The Paris Review, Winter 1986, "The Art of Fiction #94"

INTERVIEWER
Do you have any idea how a project is going to end?

DOCTOROW
Not at that point, no. It’s not a terribly rational way to work. It’s hard to explain. I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

INTERVIEWER
How many times do you come to a dead end?

DOCTOROW
Well if it’s a dead end, there’s no book. That happens too. You start again. But if you’re truly underway you may wander into culverts, through fences into fields, and so on. When you’re off the road you don’t always know it immediately. If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty. So you have to trace your way back, you see. It sounds like a hazardous way of working—and it is—but there is one terrific advantage to it: Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author’s. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer. I’ve just read the latest Ernest Hemingway publication, The Garden of Eden—it’s actually a fragment of a work he never completed—and in this as in the others he spoke with the Hemingway voice. He applied the same strategies to every book, strategies as it happens that he came upon and invented quite early on in his career. They were his triumph in the early days. But by the last decade or two of his working life they trapped him, restricted him, and defeated him. He was always Hemingway writing, you see. Of course at his best that wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? But if we’re speaking of entry to the larger mind, his was not the way to find it.

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