Monstrous Hybrids

In a scrapyard, objects with a mix of organic and synthetic parts are called monstrous hybrids. An aluminum can, for example, with a plastic liner. Unlike pure aluminum, which can be endlessly recast, a monstrous hybrid can’t be turned into anything else. It becomes as mortal as the humans that produced it. None of us are pure aluminum, alas, consisting of a single source material. To come convincingly to life, characters have to consist of mixed-up inextricable elements. We all contain aspects of self that make us anomalies, aspects that don’t separate easily into flaws, flashbacks, and virtues.

IDRA NOVEY

The Blues

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that’s a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have. [...] Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues. If all this were to disappear off the face of the earth and some people two million unique years from now would dig out this civilization and come across some blues records, working as anthropologists, they would be able to piece together who these people were, what they thought about, what their ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain were, all of that. All the components of culture.

AUGUST WILSON

Internet Research

I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes, the lack of direct human discourse, all in an atmosphere of scam and hustle.

ANNIE PROULX

Listen for Stories

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

EUDORA WELTY

Profundity Is Easier than Precision

Pot was a fabulous way to listen to music, emptying out the space between notes. But for writing? I’m a maximalist, and the whole point is to fill the mind. My drug of choice now is a chilled martini, but with the first sip—however shaken or stirred I’ve been at the desk—the day’s work is over. Poetry above all wants clarity of thought and feeling. The worst of it is, drugs and alcohol by midnight will inevitably have led to great insights, and as Paul Valéry once said, profundity is a hundred times easier to get than precision.

J. D. McCLATCHY

The Monster

In order to create poetry, you make a monster out of your own mind. You can’t get rid of him. He stays right with you every minute. Every minute of every day and every night. He produces terrible things—nightmare after nightmare. I’m subject to having them no less than any of the rest of them. But I don’t fool myself. I know what’s doing it. Writers start out taking something to aid the monster, to give them the poetry. Poets use alcohol, or any other kind of stimulant, to aid and abet this process, then eventually take refuge in the alcohol to help get rid of it. But by that time the monster is so highly developed he cannot be got rid of.

JAMES DICKEY

The Mainstream Is the Arena of Action

Since Huckleberry Finn, or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero. I had a vague sense that I wanted to violate that somehow, that I was sick of reading about the alienated hero. I think where I wind up now is writing about people who are trying to get into the mainstream, or they’re in the mainstream, just trying to live their lives the best they can. Because the mainstream itself is the arena of action.

BOBBIE ANN MASON

Silver

When I was in Nevada, I lived about sixty miles out of Reno. There was a guy who had this house on stilts. In the desert. And that was a very curious thing, looking at this house raised up about ten feet above the ground. I wondered, Was he waiting for a flood? Well, it turned out he had a hole in the ground under that house, and there was a silver mine down at the bottom of this hole. He would periodically go down and dig himself out some silver. That was his bank. And I think that’s like a writer. He’s living on top of that hole. He goes down there and sees if he can chop out some silver.

ARTHUR MILLER

Raw Material

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

SYLVIA PLATH

You Write

Write. You write. That’s the only way. You keep writing and if you have any talent at all, which of course is a necessity, you will get better and better as you write. But you got to keep writing. You should not go to those classes or seminars or sit around some guru and talk literature. You’ll never get anywhere that way. It’s pleasant. It’s enjoyable, but the only thing a writing class has to offer is that you have to write. You should instill that in yourself. Be persistent and constantly write in whatever field that appeals to you most. You’ve got to keep writing. That’s the only answer.

RICHARD MATHESON