Philip Roth, 1933-2018.
From the Paris Review, 1984
INTERVIEWER
How do you get started on a new book?
PHILIP ROTH
Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.
INTERVIEWER
How much of a book is in your mind before you start?
ROTH
What matters most isn’t there at all. I don’t mean the solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. You’re looking, as you begin, for what’s going to resist you. You’re looking for trouble. Sometimes in the beginning uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn’t difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
INTERVIEWER
Must you have a beginning? Would you ever begin with an ending?
ROTH
For all I know I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it’s still even around.
INTERVIEWER
What happens to those hundred or so pages that you have left over? Do you save them up?
ROTH
I generally prefer never to see them again.
Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
May 26th, 2018 at 10:22
“You tasted it. Isn’t that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.” Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
My first foray into Roth’s genius was The Dying Animal. Never thought that would be in this same work where I’ll find the words to express his, and our, loss.