What You Can Get From Reading Writer Interviews: P.D. James #2

 More from The Paris Review interview with the late P.D. James, P. D. James, The Art of Fiction No. 141 (1995).

My interest this time is on method.

The first section, I think, helps us beginners understand no story, no novel, no play, bursts forth without a lot of work.

INTERVIEWER

Let us talk about your method: when do you write?

JAMES

When I first started writing I got up early and wrote from six to eight, as I had to go to work. The habit has stuck and I still get up early and write in the morning. When I’m writing a book, I get up before seven, go down to the kitchen and make tea, listen to the news on the radio, and have a bath, then I settle down to work. I find that after a few hours I can’t go on and I stop around twelve. The rest of the day is given to all other matters.

INTERVIEWER

Where do you write?

JAMES

I don’t write in a particular place, and I can, in fact, write anywhere provided I have absolute peace and privacy. A favorite place is here (in the kitchen of my London house), since I can easily walk out into the garden when I feel inclined to a break in the fresh air, or make myself a coffee. It also has the advantage that the kitchen table is large enough to spread out my notes, dictionary and reference books. When I am writing a novel I never go anywhere without carrying a notebook in which I can jot down descriptions of places, impressions of the people I may meet, snatches of dialogue or a new sophistication of plot. I prefer writing by hand but my handwriting is so bad, particularly when I am writing quickly, that I can barely decipher it myself the next day. What I do is almost immediately to transfer the handwriting to tape, which my secretary types out to provide the first draft. I write the books out of order, rather as if I were shooting a film, and then put the story together at the end before sending the manuscript to a professional word-processing agency where it is put on disc. Then it is done.

And what Ms. James said about plotting is useful, maybe even more needed:

INTERVIEWER

A number of modern novelists and playwrights admit that they have trouble inventing plots. I remember Tom Stoppard saying this one day. Many dispense with plot altogether and write novels in which nothing in particular happens. In the detective story the plot is all. How do you plot your stories after you have got the setting? Do you start writing immediately?

JAMES

No. Not for months. I think many people don’t know how to plot and can’t tell stories anymore. Some writers could do it but don’t want to, they wish to be different. But there is a tradition of strong narrative thrust in English fiction and all our great novelists of the past have had it. For myself I believe plot is necessary, although it would be easy to write a book without it. In the thirties, the so-called golden age of the detective story, plot was everything. Indeed what people wanted was ingenuity of plot. You couldn’t have an ordinary murder; it had to be done with exceptional cunning. It was the age when corpses were found in locked rooms with locked windows and a look of horror on their faces. With Agatha Christie ingenuity of plot was paramount—no one looked for subtlety of characterization, motivation, good writing. It was rather like a literary card trick. Today we’ve moved closer to the mainstream novel, but nevertheless we need plot. It takes me as long to develop the plot and work out the characters as to write the book. Sometimes longer. So once I’ve got the setting, I begin to get in touch with the people, as it were, and last of all the clues. With Devices and Desires I had fifteen notebooks—I went back to the original setting and took notes about the sky, the landscape, the architecture, the local people . . . It is a curious process—I feel that the characters in the story already exist in a limbo outside my control, and what I’m doing over the months of gestation is getting in touch with them and learning about them. 

Good luck with your own work.

sch 9/22