Om skriving

Guardian stilte spørsmål til forfattere om det å skrive, mange spørsmål, lange svar, også i lydform, kjempelang artikkel.
Her er noen biter, (her er hele).

Beryl Bainbridge med barnebarn

Beryl Bainbridge:

When I write a novel I'm writing about my own life; I'm writing a biography almost, always. And to make it look like a novel I either have a murder or a death at the end.

P.D. James

How did you decide which form or genre was right for you?

You're back in this English village with the well-known characters; there's a sense of nostalgia and security about them, and in the end a terrible crime is solved and peace and order is restored. And in real life it isn't, and in modern detective stories, especially mine, it isn't restored, but in most classical detective stories it is restored.

You know it's going to turn out right, that virtue is going to be rewarded and evil is going to be punished. So they do have that ability to provide for the reader some kind of solace. I don't think we choose our genre, I think that a genre chooses us. The idea that you would lose control has always horrified me, and I suppose this is a very controlled form of writing.

Michael Frayn

Where do your ideas come from?

I suppose if people are not writers or painters or whatever they see the life of the artist as being one of great freedom, but it's not really; it's as constrained as anyone else's by the material that's available. The thing seems to have some kind of reality in one's head; it seems to be something that one is discovering, rather than inventing.

I see that as a kind of psychological trick on oneself, because the whole point about fiction is that it's invention. It doesn't really seem like it at the time – it seems as if you are slowly discovering something that already exists and seeing how the different parts of it relate to each other.

Wendy Cope

What makes a poem work and can a poem ever be willed into being?

One thing that makes poems work is strong emotion, and I remember hearing James Berry, I think it was, saying that one characteristic of a good poet is that they feel things intensely, and he said: "Of course poets are not the only people who feel things intensely, but it is one of the qualities," and I think that's true.

Michael Frayn
Do you have a routine? What tools do you use?

It's very difficult when each day you start with a sort of cold brain and nothing happens. In my case I look back over what I was doing the day before and make a few small corrections, often to typing errors, then maybe a few grammatical errors, and then I see a better way of putting something, and gradually you get drawn into the world you've created and you start rewriting what you did the day before and gradually coming up to the point where you left it the day before and going on. And certainly at the end of each day's work I try – when my brain is hot and stuff is happening, but when I'm really too tired to go on – to make hasty notes and write down bits and pieces of what's going to come, anything that's already in one's head, sort of scatter it down on the page so that when you start the next day you've got some stuff there to work on.

Ian Rankin:

You get these writers who say:
"I go to my office at nine and I write from nine till 12 and then I revise from two till four and that's my day, and I do 2,000 words a day and when I've done my 2,000 words a day that's me," and you go: "What?" I have days when I do fuck all. I sit down at a computer, nothing's coming, I'm having to tear each word out, it's like digging for coal, and I'll go: "No, this isn't working," and I'll just walk away.

Michael Holroyd:

What I really like is rewriting, but you cannot rewrite until you've already written, and that is terrible. And then rewriting the rewritten text, and so on, up to 10 times, hoping always to get it shorter, more condensed, pack more energy into it.

Even if it's a sad thing, you want to get the essence of the most dolorous phrases and connect them in some way, [and] so in that way try to perfect something. You have the energy from the first draft, the momentum, the "go", but then you try to shape it more.