The Paris Review is a quarterly journal that was founded in 1953 to serve as an outlet for high quality fiction and poetry, but my favorite feature has always been the author interview. Recently, Lorin Stein was appointed editor, and one of his first decisions was to allow free access to these interviews on the journal’s website. The interviews cover a wide range of topics, including the writer’s childhood, his or her early influences, and, most interestingly, the intellectual and physical process of getting words onto paper.
Here is an excerpt from an interview of Martin Amis that was published in 1998:
INTERVIEWER
When you are writing a novel, how do you start out? Is it with character or with theme? Or does something else come to you first?
MARTIN AMIS
The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer’s block. In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he’s sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes, and a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements. In fact, it’s never like that. What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer’s part. At this stage the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about. In the absence of that recognition I don’t know what one would do. It may be that nothing about this idea—or glimmer, or throb—appeals to you other than the fact that it’s your destiny, that it’s your next book. You may even be secretly appalled or awed or turned off by the idea, but it goes beyond that. You’re just reassured that there is another novel for you to write. The idea can be incredibly thin—a situation, a character in a certain place at a certain time. With Money, for example, I had an idea of a big fat guy in New York, trying to make a film. That was all. Sometimes a novel can come pretty consecutively and it’s rather like a journey in that you get going and the plot, such as it is, unfolds and you follow your nose. You have to decide between identical-seeming dirt roads, both of which look completely hopeless, but you nevertheless have to choose which one to follow.
INTERVIEWER
How often do you write?
MARTIN AMIS
Every weekday. I have an office where I work. I leave the house and I’m absent for the average working day. I drive my powerful Audi three quarters of a mile across London to my flat. And there, unless I’ve got something else I have to do, I will sit down and write fiction for as long as I can. As I said earlier, it never feels remotely like a full day’s work, although it can be. A lot of the time seems to be spent making coffee or trolling around, or throwing darts, or playing pinball, or picking your nose, trimming your fingernails, or staring at the ceiling.
You know that foreign correspondent’s ruse; in the days when you had your profession on the passport, you put writer; and then when you were in some trouble spot, in order to conceal your identity you simply changed the r in writer to an a and became a waiter. I always thought there was a great truth there. Writing is waiting, for me certainly. It wouldn’t bother me a bit if I didn’t write one word in the morning. I’d just think, you know, not yet. The job seems to be one of making yourself receptive to whatever’s on the rise that day. I was quite surprised to read how much dread Father felt as he approached the typewriter in the morning.
If you would like to read more of this interview with Martin Amis, you can follow this link, and you can access the remaining sixty years of interviews, including a discussion with his father, Kingsley Amis, here.
David Desmond
Martin Amis
