Writing Advice: Andrea Barrett, Georges Simenon, Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Robbins

Double Vision and Full Dissolution: Alix Christie interviews Andrea Barrett about “Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction.” 

ALIX CHRISTIE: The title of your new collection refers to dust, a metaphor you repurpose from a 19th-century scientist to refer to the material out of which stories are fashioned: the outward, visible events and characters. Is what this “dust” refracts—the deeper concerns of any story—also the “light” of the title?

ANDREA BARRETT: It is! As long as that also includes the thoughts and emotions aroused in the reader by the story’s formal concerns and techniques. The ways rhythm, structure, diction, image, tone—everything we can do with language—affect us subconsciously.

***

Most writers of historical fiction immerse themselves in research. Yet at the same time, you write that “facts can’t drive a piece.” Why, then, do we spend so much time soaking up all we can learn about a given time and place?

This probably differs for everyone, but for me, all that “wasted” time is in service of trying to immerse myself so thoroughly in my characters’ physical and intellectual worlds that I can try to write from inside their experience. 

***

What is the most important thing you need to know about your characters, for all of these facts to be “dissolved fully into fiction”?

What they love—not who, but what. How does the world look to them? What moves them? What are they most drawn to? What do they want to learn about? What excites them?

Simenon: the man who wrote 400 books By James Aitchison

Arguably, there has never been an author like him.  He wrote more than 400 novels — many in a matter of days — as well as 21 volumes of memoirs and countless short stories.  His sales topped 500 million copies in his lifetime.

 ***

Simenon formed some very fixed ideas about fiction. For starters, a good novel cannot be too short. “A book should be like a play. You do not return to a play every night for a week and you should not have to do so with a book.” Moreover, Simenon believed that if a reader has enjoyed a short novel he is left feeling unsatisfied, wanting more, as opposed to a reader of a long novel who has been sated by that particular author’s imaginary world. That sentiment would put Simenon at odds with today’s market. Nowadays, novels of 90,000-plus words are the norm!

***

Simenon’s advice to beginning writers: “Writing is considered a profession, and I don’t think it is a profession. I think that everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”

Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69 

INTERVIEWER

There also seems to be a journalistic quality to that technique or tone. You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

That’s a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing. That’s exactly the technique my grandmother used. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn’t say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it. When I was writing the episode of Remedios the Beauty going to heaven, it took me a long time to make it credible. One day I went out to the garden and saw a woman who used to come to the house to do the wash and she was putting out the sheets to dry and there was a lot of wind. She was arguing with the wind not to blow the sheets away. I discovered that if I used the sheets for Remedios the Beauty, she would ascend. That’s how I did it, to make it credible. The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything so long as it’s believed.

***

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I don’t think you can write a book that’s worth anything without extraordinary discipline.

INTERVIEWER

What about artificial stimulants?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

One thing that Hemingway wrote that greatly impressed me was that writing for him was like boxing. He took care of his health and his well-being. Faulkner had a reputation of being a drunkard, but in every interview that he gave he said that it was impossible to write one line when drunk. Hemingway said this too. Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health. I’m very much against the romantic concept of writing which maintains that the act of writing is a sacrifice, and that the worse the economic conditions or the emotional state, the better the writing. I think you have to be in a very good emotional and physical state. Literary creation for me requires good health, and the Lost Generation understood this. They were people who loved life.

INTERVIEWER

Blaise Cendrars said that writing is a privilege compared to most work, and that writers exaggerate their suffering. What do you think?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I think that writing is very difficult, but so is any job carefully executed. What is a privilege, however, is to do a job to your own satisfaction. I think that I’m excessively demanding of myself and others because I cannot tolerate errors; I think that it is a privilege to do anything to a perfect degree. It is true though that writers are often megalomaniacs and they consider themselves to be the center of the universe and society’s conscience. But what I most admire is something well done. I’m always very happy when I’m traveling to know that the pilots are better pilots than I am a writer.

The Syrup of Wahoo Keeps Splashing Around: Gary Lippman remembers his friend, the late American author Tom Robbins.

Robbins identified his main themes as transformation, liberation, and celebration, with plenty of paradox and irreverence thrown in. These qualities helped him, as he put it, “bang the Language Wheel like a gong.” The most useful item in his toolbox, he said, was his imagination, which he called his “circus tent-cum-laboratory”—“my wild card, my skeleton key, my servant, my master, my bat cave, my home entertainment center, my flotation device, my syrup of wahoo.”

***

“Personally,” Robbins added, “I ask four things of a novel: that it make me think, make me laugh, make me horny, and awaken my sense of wonder.” His own productions certainly walk that talk, drawing as they do on psychedelic insights, Tibetan “crazy wisdom,” absurdist and slapstick traditions, and creatively sexy behavior. After the appearance of his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction, in 1971, Robbins published seven more delightfully titled seriocomic epics along with, in this century, a collection of nonfiction, Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005); a memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life (2014); and B Is For Beer (2009), a children’s book about drinking the stuff.

***

Meanwhile, here on earth, the syrup of wahoo still splashes around inside Tom’s books. If Tom Robbins had not existed, it would have been necessary for a team of muses, trickster gods, jungle heroes, Zen masters, circus performers, seven-veiled dancers, psychedelic questers, New Orleans chefs, and grateful readers to invent him.

 sch 3/10