As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts I am quite behind on my NaNoWriMo project after not doing enough writing last Friday and no writing on Saturday, I have been battling to catch up and despite loosing at one point 800 words thanks to my computer crashing, I’m nearly back on track and I could have done it yesterday as I had quite a lot of free time, as well as my normal two hours of writing that I’ve been doing in the afternoon, I also had most of the evening free (except for watching the divine Spooks which honestly gives lessons in it self, even though it’s ‘only’ a TV show on the art of plotting, with the amount of divinely plotted twists and turns even though it is beginning to look like the Americans are behind everything). However (back to my NaNoWriMo project) I found that the writing that I had done in the afternoon had just exhausted me, physically and emotionally, so when I had more free time in the evening I just couldn’t write anymore. The story I’m working on is not a happy story, my characters are in a trapped, claustrophobic situation where they are essentially powerless because there is nowhere to escape to and I never realised before how writing something that intense can take it out of you, when I finished writing that afternoon I felt literally shaky, my four year was literally bouncing off the walls and I had to escape into the kitchen and load the dishwasher, never has loading the dishwasher been a form of relief before!
So, what did I do in my free time that evening? Well, I’ve been doing Susan Hill’s Creative Writing Course and one of her latest posts has recommended the Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1 and 2.
Now I thought ‘that’s not my usual reading material’ and to be honest the cultural philistine that I am, the sort of person who tends to only read the nice bright pretty stuff at the front of Waterstones, I haven’t heard or only vaguely heard of half of the authors featured and I’ve only read one of them, Graham Greene and that was on Susan Hill’s recommendation to (see here for my opinions) but so far Hill’s recommendations have been spot on, so I went ahead and purchased and started on volume 1 last night. I’ll write a proper post when I’ve read them but so far I am absolutely in love with these books and I never thought I’d say that, the interviews are works of literature in themselves and you get more of an impression of ‘character’ (which we’ve been studying on Hill’s course) than from a lot of other books (I’m currently also reading Zadie Smith’s The Book of Other People, a collection of short stories about character and so far I’m learning a lot more about character (those of the authors) from the Paris Interviews than from The Book of Other People). In respect to my current issues with my NaNoWriMo project, that I’m finding it too emotionally intense, Truman Capote, one of the authors featured in The Paris Interviews had some interesting words which I’m not sure I agree with, he believed that you should ‘exhaust the emotion’ from the story before writing it, that way the writing is more ‘controlled’, to me that sounds cold but maybe there’s something in it. I haven’t read any of his work but plan to (that’s the other great thing about the Paris Interviews, its suggesting so many new authors to try!).
