Off the Shelf | 'Writers at Work: Paris Review Interviews' - NYTimes.com

Over the summer, the Toronto-based writer Sheila Heti came out with the genre nonspecific ?How Should a Person Be? to an eagerly waiting indie audience. (It had been released in Canada around two years ago.) Described by Heti as a ?A Novel From Life,? the book is based implicitly on the writer?s life and the frank interactions among her group of young, artistic (and self-involved) friends. Here, we went meta and asked the author and part-time interviewer for The?Believer to discuss her own favorite collection of interviews: ?Writers at Work: Paris Review Interviews, Third Series.?

Q.

Why did you choose this particular set of interviews?

A.

I read these interviews when I was about 17, and I remember I was living in a house with a few friends. I remember being in my room during the middle of the night and reading the Jean Cocteau interview and feeling like I understood something about writing or writers that I had never understood before. I think this was the first interview with a writer that I had ever read, and up until that point I sort of imagined that books were written just from the first words to the last word. I just was very na?ve, and I saw that it was not that at all and that every writer had a different way of going about it; that it was much more complicated than just writing.

What about the Cocteau interview stuck with you?

He said this thing which stuck in my head and became a ruling idea for the next 5 or 10 years of my life. He said something about listening closely to what your critics dislike most about your work and then emphasize that because in that lies your originality. At the time, I didn?t have critics or anything so I don?t know why that hit me so much, but I think his idea that what was original about your work was what was considered bad about it was a very liberating and exciting idea. Especially for a teenager. That?s exactly the kind of thing you want to hear so I just allowed myself to be.

Also, the thing that?s really beautiful about Cocteau is that he is so playful. He does make these pronouncements and he did have this wonderful persona and that persona was full of love, like it wasn?t this artist persona that?s full of disdain or full of superiority, it was just very, very playful or spiritual.

You published your first book, ?The Middle Stories,? when you were 24. I think Cocteau wrote ?Le Potomac? when he was 24, too. How did you get started writing?

Well, I was always writing my whole life but when I was a teenager I wanted to be a playwright and so I was always rereading the Harold Pinter interview in that book. I was reading plays all the time and a year later, I would go to theater school for playwriting. I had written some short stories, but I thought I was going to be a playwright.

How have these interviews from the book influenced your work for your day job?

Every time I went into a bookstore (and I?d go into every used-book store I ever came across), I would always look for more of these and even if I saw a collection of the interviews that I already owned I?d buy it. It was the stuff that I most wanted to read and most needed. Now, I work at The Believer editing interviews. So at a time that I was reading the interviews I didn?t even think about how much I loved the form, but it must have really gotten to me. I think the interview form is so beautiful. I love the first-person voice, I love hearing people speak transparently about their ideas. Before reading these interviews, authors had just been names on a cover page underneath a title. I had never encountered the personality of the artist or the thoughts of the artist until the interviews, so it?s just this whole new depth which is tremendously exciting. They became people; they weren?t just these big names.

Have you ever reused any questions from these interviews in your own interviews for The Believer?

No. It?s usually a conversation that?s very specific to that person, and the stuff at The Believer is much more conversational than it is technical. In The Paris Review interviews are about technique, and the Believer interviews are much more about character. Character is revealed in the interviews but really only through the discussion of techniques. I didn?t even realize that there was such diversity of approaches until I read a collection of them.

There are moments in the series when the interviewer starts describing the writer?s movements during the interviewing session. Do you find these descriptions interesting? What do you think of the interview formats?

I like that. I love the little journalistic introductions and how they also would always reproduce a manuscript page from the writer, and you?d see how they crossed out things and added other things in. It was such an intimate view into those writers? processes. Artists seem like such hard workers and you just see how they?re constantly making choices. You don?t really understand why they crossed out that line but it seems so decisive and related to such a clear instinct, which is interesting. That taught me a lot. There?s not an objective rule any writers follow, it?s just their instincts.

Here is a typical interview question: Would you be willing to reveal your writing process?

I think it?s different for every book, but the thing that?s consistent is that I really don?t have a schedule. I work hard but part of working hard for me is being really sensitive to what each day or what each hour needs. I don?t just sit down every day at 9 a.m. and work until 2 p.m. the way that some of those writers do. I sometimes won?t write for weeks and then I?ll write for a week straight. I really have gotten to the point where I trust that that is what I need to do, and books do and can get written that way. I?m not a very regimented person but when I try to be regimented, I?m just wasting my time. It?s much better for me to be more fluid.

How long did it take you to write your new book?

I guess from the earliest to the publication was seven years.

There?s a part in the interview that mentions that Cocteau?s nickname among friends was ?The Frivolous Prince.? Do you have a nickname?

Oh, I don?t know. I don?t want to be called names. I don?t know.

He also mentioned that he didn?t like the generation that he was a part of or that he started out in. What do you think of your contemporaries?

There are a lot of artists that I really admire and I feel quite lucky to be able to talk with them. When I was younger, when I was a teenager, I wished I had lived alongside the Dadaists and the Surrealists, and part of writing this book was like taking a look at the time I am living in and accepting that I am living now and I don?t have that desire anymore to live in any other time except now, which was a really nice thing to get over. I think we live in an exciting time, and I love the fact that on the Internet, everyone can have a voice. You can read a blog and that?s just as accessible as something in The New York Times. I think it?s a very exciting time to be thinking because you can think alongside people that aren?t just chosen by official outlets. I also live in Toronto, not New York, where everything seems to be happening. If that was 50 years ago, I would feel much more isolated. You would have to go to Paris to have a conversation with someone.

Apparently Cocteau was on opium when he was writing ?Les Enfants Terribles?; I?m not asking if you take drugs, but do you have anything that helps you get on with writing?

No. Writing is stimulating enough. Writing kind of makes you feel high. I wrote one play when I was like 17, during the first time I got stoned and that was the only time I ever had a successful experience writing while on drugs. It worked once and it never worked again, and I haven?t pursued that line.

Do you have some treasured writing instrument or anything that you like to use?

Yeah, my computer. I write very, very rapidly so I need a computer.

If you could give this series of interviews to someone, who would you give it to?

This is a book that I never lent out, but I?d give one to my friend Margaux. But I would want her to give it back to me. I don?t know. It?s kind of like the heart of my bookshelf, I don?t think that I?d lend it out.

It?s hard to find this specific edition.

The cover is really beautiful. The other interview collections, like 1 and 2 and 4 and 5 and 6, are not beautiful in the way that this one is.

Source: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/off-the-shelf-writers-at-work-paris-review-interviews/

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