Shadowing Practice: This Is What a Harvard Writing Masterclass Feels Like (Francine Prose Interview) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Francine Prose has written more than 30 books and she's taught both at Harvard and Bard College, and my god is she well -read.
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Now if we ask her, how do I become a better writer?
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You've done so much of it.
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What do I do?
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And she'll say, well you gotta start by reading like a writer.
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Look at words and sentences, characters and details, study them, dissect them.
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Then find books that you love, ones that have stood the test of time, and ask yourself, why has this book endured?
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Why has it stayed popular for so long.
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But how do you actually do that?
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Well, this interview is an answer to that question.
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I want to start with in Reading Like a Writer, you have this section where you talk about positive models and negative models of books.
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And obviously, there's a lot of writing manuals basically saying, hey, if you want to learn to write, read this.
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But you say that the problem with those is that they're negative models, meaning they're not bad books.
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They just tell you what not to do.
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So let's start there.
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Well, that's what Reading Like a Writer is about it, but close reading, which is like you slow down and you just say, why this word and why not another word?
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Or why a semicolon instead of a period?
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Or why, you know, just looking for how someone does something.
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And then especially if you have a kind of problem
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or area yourself where you just don't know how to do a certain thing.
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I mean, there are certain things that are hard, like party scenes.
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Party scenes are really, I mean, there are a lot of people and they're all talking at once
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and there's all this interaction and how do you follow it
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so that you look at I mean I guess James Joyce's the dead is the all -time great party scene
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and then there are great party scenes in Anna Karenina
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so you just take a party scene
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and you go okay how did you know what's the camera
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eye in a way following people around this party scene
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and who's talking and when are they talking and how do you know
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when the guests arrive and how do you know so you just use them as models.
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I mean those how to write books, in general how to write things.
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My kids and grandkids are always coming home and saying, what's a topic sentence?
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I don't know.
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I really do not know.
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I've never figured out what topic sentence is.
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Or how to organize things paragraph by paragraph.
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I think it's much more amorphous.
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You're trying to tell a story
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and you're trying to make someone interested in the story and how you tell that story in the most interesting language, the most economical way.
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One of the things that I started out doing, my first novel was like this, and I think of it because I just told a student to do it,
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is as one kind of little exercise is to try writing the kind of story that people used to write
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which is that somebody is telling someone else the story.
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I mean, it doesn't happen so much anymore
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because you're going out of your way not to talk to the person sitting next to you on the airplane.
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But it used to be these long train rides, and Tolstoy, the courts of Sonata.
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And it solves a lot of problems because I think a lot of times people are thinking, like, who's talking, who's listening, who's the audience?
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But if you have someone talking and someone listening,
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and the person listening can interrupt the speaker to get clarification or to ask to move the story along or whatever.
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It's like this quick trick.
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And then, I mean, you don't have to do it all your life.
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But I think it's something you learn from.
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Can you tell me more about party scenes?
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What makes for a good party scene?
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Well, since I mentioned Anna Karenina, you know, Anna is dancing with Vronsky, right?
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She's met Vronsky on the train and there's this instant attraction and Kitty, who is in love with and I guess at that point still engaged to Vronsky,
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is the one who would most notice the two of them are dancing. So wisely,
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Tolstoy chooses to write big parts of the scene from her point of view
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because no one else at that party is really particularly interested in that particular couple dancing, but she's the one who would focus in on it.
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Right.
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I mean, Joyce's the Dead is more a sort of cacophony of voices, but pretty soon you learn who everybody is.
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I mean, you know, again, without going through the story line by line, it would be pretty soon you learn who everybody is and you learn what the concerns are.
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And also this story is called The Dead.
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So you know there's something going on having to do with death.
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And of course the hostesses are ancient.
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So everyone at the party is at some point thinking, how many more of these parties are they going to give?
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And then there are all these sort of themes that are going through the party like Ireland, Irish history, Irish politics, music, religion.
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And, you know, it's an Irish story.
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So and then they all come together in that insanely beautiful ending.
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What don't students understand about how to read that you're trying to impart on them?
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I mean, my students have to apply to get into the class.
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So I'm a couple of steps ahead.
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You don't have students like how I was in college.
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No. And I mean, I don't know, but I don't think so.
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And next, well, I'm teaching a class in ghost stories.
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Ghost stories?
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Ghost stories, yeah.
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And usually I get, you know, like I have a limit of 15 kids in class.
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And usually I get 20 applications and I have to decide, I've got like 60 applications.
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You know, I don't know.
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I have no idea what people think ghost stories are or what we're going to do.
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But we're going to talk about all the implications
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and all the different kinds of ghost stories and stories in different cultures and so forth, how that works.
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I mean, for example, there are a lot of South American
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and Latin American ghost stories because I think we spend a lot of time in Mexico.
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My daughter -in -law is Mexican, and I think in Latin cultures, the people live much more closely with their dead than they do here.
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We don't have a Dia de los Muertos in America.
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Although that part of my family has an altar every year.
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And in fact, I guess a few years after my mother died, my daughter -in -law and granddaughter put one of my books on the altar in case my mother came back.
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And I'm going like, what's that doing here?
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and my granddaughter said oh in case in case she comes back
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and needs something to read
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and i went i've wept of course do you believe in ghosts yeah really yeah what do you think ghosts are
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you know just the law of average there can't be
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that many people who believe in them and have seen them
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if they're not i mean it just can't be in everyone's imagination they're pointing at something yeah yeah
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and and also i mean they're about people's relation with the dead and the afterlife and so forth.
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But I think I'm going to begin the class by asking the kids
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if they've ever seen a ghost or if they have a direct connection to a ghost of some sort.
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Why is it that in so much of the writing advice that you give, you focus on clarity, clarity, clarity?
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Because not clarity, whatever that is, is so annoying.
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I mean, you know, if you can't understand it.
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It's not that everything has to be simple.
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Although I have to say, I mean, here's where I lose all your listeners.
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If someone put a gun to my head and said, you have to read Finnegan's Wake now, I go, shoot me.
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Go ahead, shoot me.
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So I have a certain limited patience for the obscure.
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I mean, I just don't feel like working that hard anymore.
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But, you know, I mean, I think it often happens that when people sit down to write, they think they have to do a lot of,
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like, writing with a capital W.
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You know, like fancy words they would never use or, you know, weirdly convoluted expressions they would never use.
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I mean, the one thing, again, I tell my students is read it aloud.
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You know, if you wouldn't say it and if you can't get it out of your mouth, there's a good chance that it shouldn't be on the page and don't, don't, unless you're writing something from,
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you know, point of view of somebody who lived a million years ago, don't use words that you would never use in conversation because, you know, who wants to read that?
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Yeah.
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One of the, I'm working on a documentary now.
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And one of the things, whenever we were writing it, one of the things that we always say is just say the thing plainly, just say the thing plainly.
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And where do we go?
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We went to some art exhibit, me and the team.
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And this is what it was.
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We went to the one Vanderbilt building and it was the tour of the top of the building.
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Right.
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And they have this line in there about the spire of one Vanderbilt, how it's a nod to the spire of the Chrysler building next door.
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But the whole thing is much a hoopla.
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And we were just looking at it.
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We said, what does this actually mean?
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It's a bunch of fancy words, but it doesn't mean anything.
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And I feel this way all the time
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when I read a plaque at the museum or the entry thing when you walk into an exhibit.
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I'm like, you're not telling me the thing directly.
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And so we just, whenever we're writing, we say, what are you trying to say?
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Just say it clearly, state it plainly, and the rest just follows.
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Yeah.
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Well, jargon is like death.
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I mean, I used to give an assignment, which I'd say like, bring a passage of jargon, historical jargon, art, historical jargon, a bad one, you know,
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literary jargon and then just translate it into English and see what you get.
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And the jargon would just collapse like this big meringue because they didn't have anything.
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You know, it was just like four words that were just pumped up by verbiage.
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Tell me about reading to understand why that piece of work endures.
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Well, you know, one year I taught Jane Eyre and and Great Expectations in the same year.
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And Jane Eyre is the greatest representation of female rage ever.
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And that hasn't gone away.
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And my students got it immediately.
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I mean, they were hilarious because there are these long sections between Jane Eyre
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and Mr. Rochester that you can't figure out what they're talking about except they're really talking about sex, but they're not saying it.
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So it turned out that two of my students could do these dead accurate Alan Rickman imitations.
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And they would read Mr. Rochester in the voice of Alan Rickman.
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And it was so perfect that we just had tears streaming down our faces.
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But it was so current to them.
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I mean, it was so alive to them.
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So those books are still engrossing.
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They're still powerful.
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They still seem to say something about our lives.
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They're still beautifully written.
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They're still surprising, no matter how many times you read them.
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Tell me about your writing.
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You seem to be able to write for a long amount of time when you're in the flow.
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It depends what stage of the book I'm in.
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I mean, first drafts are hard and first drafts like two or three hours.
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I'm done for the day.
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It's just too exhausting.
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But revision revision.
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Why are the first drafts so much harder?
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Because you're just cranking it out.
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And also, I think a friend of mine said something like that you're constantly resisting cliches,
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like that you're just being barraged with cliches and that you're just fighting them off.
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Right?
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I mean, I thought too bad that doesn't burn calories.
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But it's true.
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I mean, it's like the stupidest way of saying the thing is the first thing that comes to mind.
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And then you have to think that's the stupidest way of saying the thing.
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And it's not the way I wanted to.
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Mm hmm.
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And then after the first draft.
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I you know what?
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I still I mean, this book is probably and now what is my 23rd novel or something?
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It's still probably gone through 40, 40 drafts.
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I mean, I number them now, so I actually know.
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But but yeah.
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Do you write by hand
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or on the computer? on the computer i can't read my handwriting how is revision different for novels versus non -fiction
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it's the same it's the same
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because again it's clarity as you said it's all about clarity it's like this sentence doesn't mean anything
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and then the joy of of cutting you know i mean
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speaking of calories it's like losing weight without having to not eat you know and the word counter the greatest invention ever.
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You go, oh my god, I've just lost 2 ,000 words and I don't miss a single thing.
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One of the earliest things I wrote,
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this was back in the 70s and it was back when Mademoiselle was a really good magazine that published very,
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very high quality fiction and they bought a story that I wrote and it was like, I don't know, 20 ,000 words.
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It And they said, well, we can only publish 3 ,000 words or 5 ,000 words.
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And I said, well, and then they said, well, we'll pay you $800, which was like a million dollars back in the 70s.
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And I said, oh, fine, I want to go to Mexico.
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So I took the money and I went to Mexico and I came back and I published it.
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And I never noticed a single word that was missing. So.
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you know what can i say they had a great editor
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what part of the book do you find to be the
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hardest introductions endings all it's really all endings are impossible endings
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are really really hard endings are big for all sorts of
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reasons i mean one thing is i really like indeterminate endings
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you know i mean there's the ending of uh uh checkoff's lady with the pet dog
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which is and they realize that the hardest part was still before them.
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I think that that should be passed a law, that that's the end of every single book. But people don't.
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A lot of people don't.
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I mean, I wrote a YA novel that had an indeterminate ending
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and I was getting these packages of letters from like eighth grades, like whole eighth grades would write to me and they'd say like, I really liked your book until the end.
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Is there going to be sequel?
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Because they want to know what happened.
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Yeah.
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I mean, it was perfectly clear what was going to happen, but they wanted to be told what happened.
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So I just stopped opening the packages, basically, because I knew what they were going to say, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do anything about it.
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But you know something?
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The ending of Five Weeks in the Country, the new book.
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And I have a wonderful editor, Noah Eaker, and he denies that this happened,
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because I keep saying, I've been calling you the guy that wrote the ending to my book.
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But there's a series of letters in there.
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And the last, and it ends, I mean, it ends, it was about to end with this fairy tale that Hans Christian Andersen,
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I mean, that I wrote a fairy tale in the persona of Hans Christian Andersen because, you know, a fairy tale that combined all the horrible,
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embarrassing misery that he'd experienced at the home of Charles Dickens, except he transformed it into something glorious.
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So that was going to be the end.
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And Noah, my editor, said, it needs one more turn.
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There just needs to be one more turn.
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And he said, what about a letter from Catherine Dickens?
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I mean, Dickens' poor, abused wife, who he had nine surviving children with, and he was about to dump for an 18 -year -old.
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And I thought, oh, okay.
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And that's how the book ends now.
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I said, let me just try it.
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And I wrote this letter from Catherine Dickens' point of view.
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And also there's the youngest Dickens' child who was five years old, whose name was Edward, who everyone called Baby.
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He doesn't really speak very much in the novel, but he's kind of a major character because he's the only one of the children who's nice to Anderson,
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and he's this only one who Dickens is still amused by because he's the baby.
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and the last line of the novel, Catherine Dickens says, essentially, and by the way,
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Baby doesn't want to be called Baby anymore.
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He wants to be called Edward.
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And when I wrote it, I was like, because, you know, having raised kids and now my grandchildren and getting older,
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there's something about that moment when Baby doesn't want to be called Baby anymore, which is just devastating.
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So to end that novel on this whole kind of emotional note that really hadn't been there before was...
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So it's one of the few novels that I feel like I'm really, really happy...
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With how it ended.
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With how it ended, even though I didn't exactly write it.
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I mean, I did write it, but I had a suggestion about how to write.
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That is a kind of dialogue, obviously.
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What makes for good dialogue?
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Like when you read dialogue that sucks
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and you just want to throw the book against the wall and then you read dialogue that just sings.
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You're like, OK, now I want to study this.
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What is the difference between those two?
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Well, I think I think I talk about it.
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Someone really like a writer.
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I mean, the worst dialogue is just like exposition, you know, masquerading as dialogue.
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You know, someone's telling us, you know, you know, is it true that you live in the West Village?
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Is it true that I'm going to have a hard time getting here?
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Is it true?
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You know, that is it's not a conversation.
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It's just information that's pretending to be exchanged between people.
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And the best is just like someone says something unexpected or, you know, the same way it's in life.
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Someone says something unexpected or interesting or so.
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I mean, one of the things that I learned about dialogue was that if you really, I mean, writing dialogue, it makes you listen to people.
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You know, we were talking about eavesdropping before.
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It makes you listen to people.
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And there's certain things that I think writers think that they have to do when they're writing dialogue.
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I mean, that is character A speaks and then character B speaks and then character A answers B.
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Yeah, but ping pong.
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Yeah, exactly.
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But in fact, often character A will say something and character B will say something completely unrelated.
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and you think that character B hasn't heard what character A says, and then like five lines later, it'll turn out that character B has heard exactly what character A has said,
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but hasn't been able to respond to it at the time, which is the kind of thing, you know, it happens in life all the time.
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You just hear it. And there's subtext.
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And there's subtext.
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Oh, yeah, what people are not saying.
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I mean, listen to what people are not, you know, just listen for not people, what people are not saying.
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Yeah, it's not given to you too directly.
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I just watched Lost in Translation, which is a whole movie basically exploring what happens when two people talk, but they're not communicating at all.
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It happens all the time.
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I mean, lately, and also, I don't know, lately, I've been walking around and sort of mishearing people, you know, because people are passing very fast.
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And it often seems to me
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that the thing I'm hearing is more interesting than the thing they could possibly have said hmm
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so that's I mean yesterday I heard this whole I was walking behind a guy
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and I and I it seemed to me
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that he was having a whole conversation about ayahuasca and
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and then I passed him I realized it wasn't about ayahuasca
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at all it was about something else I thought I kind of wish it had been
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because it would have been you know slightly more interesting yeah I just moved back to New York City
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and one of my favorite parts about living in a dense place is all the crazy stuff that you overhear.
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I know.
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I know.
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You know, I just heard a couple fighting and she goes, it's just your dang...
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What'd she say?
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It's just your f*ing personality and literally everything about you.
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And she's just yelling at this guy and who knows what's going on, but your mind just creates this whole world of whatever's going on there.
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Yeah, fights are great.
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Fights are good.
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Yeah, people are letting it all hang out.
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We're talking about process.
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Tell me about where the ideas for books come from through
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the prism of this this photograph oh yeah that's well that's a brusse photograph uh
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and it's a lesbian couple at lomenocle
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which is a nightclub in paris where where it had a gay clientele
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and uh trans and cross -dressing clientele and um
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and she the woman in the photograph the the sort of
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butch the butch woman it just there was a little wall text
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and it said her name that she'd been a professional race car driver, I guess.
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So I went and Googled it.
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You can Google in two seconds.
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And it turned out that not only had she been a race car driver, but she was an athlete,
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race car driver, and because for some aspect of the Napoleonic Code made cross -dressing illegal,
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she wasn't allowed to compete professionally in France.
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So somehow Hitler got wind of this and invited her to be his special guest at the 1939 Olympics.
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And she sat in the box next to Hitler.
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And then by the time she got back to France, she was spying for the Gestapo.
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Oh, wow.
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Yeah, wow.
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So that was kind of where that story went.
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And then I'd been reading a lot and looking at Brassei's photographs a lot.
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So I sort of wanted to put all those stories together.
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So explain that feeling for me you see the photo
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and it's like a world emerges that you feel like you can step into and take from your imagination onto the page?
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Yeah.
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And even simpler, it's like, what a great story.
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You know, why haven't a million people written about this before?
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And then one thing kind of led to another, led to another.
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Tell me about painters.
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How have painters influenced your writing?
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I think you were in an interview talking about Karl Obe Knowskaard
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and you said he's a painter and painters get a very bad reputation for not being smart.
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Untrue.
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Some of the best readers I know are actually visual artists.
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My husband's a painter and is one of the best readers I know
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and is my first reader and has impeccable taste in books.
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And as I said, many of my friends, just because of That's His World, have been painters and they're great.
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I mean, they're not only good painters, but they can write.
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I mean, like David Sally writes fabulous art criticism.
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The stuff he writes of the New York Review books is incredible.
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Back to the Canarsgaard quote.
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So what are people missing about why are painters such good writers?
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I think that they pay attention to the world in a certain way.
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The same way that writers do.
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I mean, they're always looking.
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Well, just for example, you know, as I said, I'm married to a painter
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and one of my dearest friends is a photographer and they see more than I do.
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I mean, they literally see more than I do, even though we have probably the same vision.
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But they'll, you know, we'll go down the street and one or the other will say, did you see the blah, blah, blah?
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And I'll go.
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know, and they will have seen it.
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So they're very, I mean, you know, if, if one of the things that's helpful in writing is, is the ability to pay attention to what's out there,
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they're really good at it.
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Yeah.
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I went to the Monet in Venice exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum,
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and I was, the way that the exhibit is structured is you start off looking at how other people have depicted Venice.
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And you just see all these painters and a lot of it is on the details of architecture, the people and the gondolas.
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And you just see those over and over.
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And then the end of the exhibit is how Monet depicts Venice.
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And it's completely different.
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The quality of the light is different.
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He isn't nearly as detailed, but he captures something about the spirit of Venice that for hundreds of years, nobody had captured.
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And the thing that I realized is it's seeing differently
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that you can do that in writing to look at the same thing, look at the same thing and bring a different energy,
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a different texture, different hue to something that people have looked at a thousand times.
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Yeah, sure.
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Well, you know, once photography came along, painters didn't have to do that anymore.
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I mean, Canaletto went to Venice and people who had never been to Venice wanted to see Venice, how it looked.
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Because it's so realistic.
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Yeah, so it's so realistic.
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And then once you could look at a postcard of Venice, there wasn't that same compulsion to show it the way that it actually looked.
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Tell me about Peggy Guggenheim.
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She was this kind of unhappy, very rich heiress who didn't know what to do with her money,
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who had horrible, painfully horrible taste in men.
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I mean, you know, horrible marriage.
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And then she was horrible.
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Two marriages.
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And she had great advisors advisors and she had a great eye.
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She was very smart.
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One of the things that was shocking to me when I was writing the book was how many last surviving, most of them are dead now,
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men of her generation would kind of actually invite me to lunch to tell me how stupid she was.
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I would go like, I don't think she was that stupid.
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They would say, oh yeah, no, she had good advisors but she was really stupid.
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I think that her persona was ditzy.
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She must have seemed ditzy.
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She wrote two hilarious memoirs that were pure ditz but she was great.
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Also, she left Europe with all this art packed up in her crates with her household laundry stuff to avoid paying taxes.
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But all the stuff, you know, Brancusi's Bird in Flight and a lot of Picassos and Giacometti's would have been taken by the Nazis.
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I mean, and that was really their definition of degenerate art.
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And she saved it.
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I mean, the fact that it exists at all.
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And she had a great eye.
402
I mean, she was the first person who really got Jackson Pollock.
403
As you're working on a novel, building up characters, how do those characters come to shape?
404
Is it something that's more intuitive, less intuitive?
405
Well, you know, it's funny because over, you know, okay, here's this novel about Dickens and Anderson, which they're not me.
406
But the weird thing is that only within the last few weeks when I've been talking about the book,
407
I've suddenly realized all these autobiographical elements, stories from my own life that have gone into the book.
408
There's a part in the novel where Anderson has become the only child, Baby.
409
As I said, Baby is the only child that will speak to Anderson, and Anderson reads some bedtime stories.
410
And Dickens is very possessive about Baby and very annoyed, really, that Anderson has gotten close to the one child
411
that Dickens still feels close to but Baby is a stutterer and Dickens begins to notice that when he's correcting Anderson's English,
412
because Anderson didn't speak a lot of it, his speech defect goes away, right?
413
And I went, oh, that's, and then literally yesterday afternoon, I remember that we, at one of these summer conferences, I think, Bredloof.
414
My kids were there and one of my sons,
415
Leon, was sort of babysitting for a younger kid and the kid had a stutter and a speech defect.
416
And the kid was so impressed by Leon that he hadn't been able to say his L's before.
417
And suddenly it was like, Leon, Leon, Leon.
418
And everyone was going like, oh my God, he's cured this kid.
419
And I just gave that to Anderson without remembering that it's something that had happened in my life.
420
So there's a lot in there like that.
421
I mean, there's a scene where Anderson… just cuts all the red geraniums that Dickens is so fond of in his garden.
422
And we, many years ago, a friend was moving back to the city and she had these tons of gorgeous chrysanthemums.
423
It was the fall.
424
And she said, just take some.
425
And we went and just cut them all and put them in our house.
426
And then it turned out she had a gardener who was heartbroken and furious.
427
So, and again, I hadn't remembered that I'd done that, but it turned out that I had.
428
Do you think that's just a matter of chance? or do you think it's some deep bodily memory that's reemerging?
429
I would go for the deep reemerging bodily memory.
430
Wow.
431
That's pretty cool.
432
Some mystical about that.
433
Well, there's some mystical about the whole thing.
434
I mean, there's really, you know, I mean, there's a whole part of writing.
435
Have you read Mural Sparks, Loitering with Intent?
436
I have not.
437
It's really great.
438
But it's the only thing I know about the phenomenon that most of my close friends who are writers have had,
439
which is you invent a character and two weeks later you meet that person.
440
Or you imagine an event and a month later it happens.
441
I mean, it's just, you know, at the fear of sounding a little...
442
But it just happens.
443
I mean, you're just somehow in tune with something you don't know that you're in tune with, I think.
444
do you feel like there is a mystical quality of writing a novel yeah yes I mean it's like
445
because as I kind of mentioned it feels like taking dictation in a certain way I mean
446
because it just is true that if it's working after a certain point the characters start talking to you You know,
447
you're hearing voices and you can still be sane.
448
So, yeah, no, it definitely is a mystical quote.
449
And also, where is it coming from?
450
I mean, unless you're writing a memoir, let's say, and you're trying to actually dredge up the facts of the past, which is, it's very clear where it's coming from.
451
Other than that, it's just like floating around out there in the ether and you're trying to pick it out.
452
Where do you think it's coming from?
453
I don't know.
454
You know, people used to say the muses.
455
I mean, who knows?
456
I don't know.
457
You know, I mean, memory, observation, some desire for order, to impose some kind of order on experience, you know.
458
Yeah, you hear all these sorts of crazy stories.
459
I have a friend, she's a writer, and she woke up one night, middle of the night, freaking out about her aunt.
460
Freaking out.
461
And her aunt had had a heart attack two hours before and she hadn't thought about her aunt in months.
462
Oh yeah, no, it happens.
463
Of course it happens.
464
Well, I, you know, I've heard a long time, uh, Deborah Eisenberg is a very close friend of mine and, and there were so many things like that that happened,
465
you know, that we would write something and, and then it would happen or we would meet and blah, blah.
466
And, and there, there just got to be this phrase we would use, which was like, it could be a coincidence, you know, but we didn't believe it was a coincidence,
467
but we didn't know what else it was.
468
I was struck by how much Anne Frank edited her, her diaries.
469
That seems to be something you were talking about over and over again.
470
She wanted them to be published.
471
She was not, I mean, this sort of myth of, you know, this little girl lying on her stomach with her, you know, scribbling the thing.
472
That was like not the case.
473
How old was she when she was running?
474
15?
475
Yeah, 12 to 15.
476
Because she'd heard early on, you know, they listened to the radio.
477
They would listen to the radio and the annex.
478
And some announcer came on and said, you know, after the war there's going to be hunger for people writing about what their experience was during the war.
479
And she said, my diary so she went back
480
and edited the diary several times so she wasn't just some like naive
481
tween writing this little book I mean she was really she was a writer
482
and then her father of course edited again you know took out the sex
483
and then put it back in etc but um but I was just you You know, I was just sort of,
484
I felt that I was speaking up for 12, 13, 14 -year -old girls everywhere who were so underestimated,
485
you know, what their talents are, how smart they are.
486
Well, when you were talking about Anne Frank's diaries, you talked about her process of revision.
487
And there's this cool, I don't know if paradox is the right word, but that the naturalness of voice is something that emerges through revision
488
and it isn't just something that comes in the first draft.
489
Well, you know, she was writing for, I mean, whether or not she knew it, she was certainly writing for clarity, too.
490
And also, you know, to address the diary to the non -existent Kitty.
491
Gave it a kind of intimate conversational tone, which it couldn't happen.
492
You know, which is why at the beginning I was saying like, you know, the exercise of a story where someone's telling a story to somebody.
493
That was that Kitty was her person that she was telling the story to.
494
So it gave her, you know, again, the question of who's listening wasn't a question.
495
As you're writing a novel, what are the things that you feel like you orbit around?
496
Do you feel like you orbit around character?
497
Do you feel like you orbit around, hey, this is a theme that I really want to focus on?
498
A driving question.
499
What do you hang around?
500
I'm just trying to tell a story.
501
It's narrative more than anything else.
502
And then kind of, I mean,
503
more often than not, characters just kind of pop up because they're needed in certain ways.
504
And then that becomes a whole arc that I have to follow.
505
Characters being needed?
506
What do you mean?
507
Well, you know, I mean, simple questions.
508
Does this person have a family?
509
Who's in it?
510
Who lives down the block from the person?
511
Or, you know, what's the neighborhood?
512
Or, you know, the various things you need to create some version of a human being on the page.
513
What are the person's connections?
514
Or what are the person's memories?
515
Or so where? than the things, the parts of the novel, the details just kind of collect around that.
516
But some have more, what do I want to say, more schematic structures.
517
I mean, the YA novel, I wrote a YA novel, right?
518
And it was about a high school that was turned into a kind of prison camp, basically.
519
And all I had to do was go online and Google preventing school violence.
520
And it gave you like a, you know, one thing, two, three, three, three.
521
Told you what to do.
522
You know, metal detectors, body searches, you know, blah, blah, blah.
523
And that became the sort of scheme that here are a bunch of kids
524
that were experiencing one of those things after another.
525
Tell me about words.
526
Well, I mean, that's your raw material.
527
That's the rawest of raw material.
528
I mean, I think one thing I say in the book is,
529
what's the difference between a Van Gogh sunflower and a picture of a sunflower you can get in a yard sale?
530
Right.
531
You know, and it's the way that he used the brushstroke, which is sort of the equivalent of language, really.
532
It is a language. So, yeah. And also,
533
like, one of the most fun things about writing is finding one word that you thought you needed 10 words to use.
534
I mean, it's insanely satisfying.
535
So, yeah, I mean, there's a kind of joy in just finding the right word, which is, you know, it's a buzz.
536
You just get, it's a real up.
537
So, and I think that's part of the reason you do it.
538
One of the things that struck me as I was reading
539
that chapter is you were just emphasizing this started as a blank page.
540
And now there are a bunch of words on the page.
541
So all those words were a decision that somebody made to say, I'm going to put this one here.
542
I'm going to put that one here.
543
And once you really embody that, you realize, oh, my goodness, I'm not just looking at a piece of paper.
544
I'm looking at a thousand choices that were made.
545
And I'm trying to understand why the writer made those choices.
546
That's exactly, I mean, that is the absolute basis of talking about this or teaching it.
547
It's like, you know, it didn't pre -exist.
548
There was an actual human being that sat down and didn't make those choices and decided, you know, as I said, semicolon or colon or period, like it made a difference.
549
And then try and figure out why.
550
Sentences.
551
I think I start as I remember, and again, so much of it goes back to clarity, too.
552
I mean, somewhere in that chapter is Virginia Woolf's opening of her essay on being ill.
553
There's 141 words in case anyone's counting, but the thing is, the clarity of it is so perfect.
554
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, How astonishing when the lights of health go down,
555
the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view,
556
what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals,
557
what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness,
558
how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads, and wake
559
thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels in the harbors
560
when we have a tooth out and come to the service in the dentist's armchair and confuse his rinse the mouth,
561
rinse the mouth, with the greeting of the deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us
562
when we think of this as we are so frequently forced to think of it.
563
It becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love
564
and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
565
it's so clear and it's so beautiful and it's 141 words long
566
and it's one sentence
567
and it's one sentence yeah i mean one one year years ago um i was teaching in colombia
568
and i taught this story
569
that i love called the marquis of o by henry fun class
570
and the students were going like oh we can't read these the sentence is
571
so long and and i'm and they're going it's like german and i said but you're reading it in English.
572
You know, you absolutely can read these sentences.
573
So this is a graph of sentences over time.
574
Gotten shorter.
575
Oh, yeah.
576
I mean, we've basically gone from 23 word average sentences in 1931 to about 15 word average sentences in 2026.
577
I'm surprised the difference isn't bigger, actually.
578
I am, too.
579
I am, too.
580
I don't know.
581
Well, they start with Daphne du Maurier
582
if they'd gone back like another hundred years would have been even longer yeah well i was thinking of
583
that part of immovable feast by hemingway where it just says write one true sentence write one true sentence
584
and he's sort of looking over the paris rooftops i was just thinking i don't know what
585
if every single day i was like the goal for the
586
day one goal for the day is just write one true sentence
587
or one funny sentence i mean there's time there are times when I've written some sentences and it's really amused me.
588
And then I'm going, okay, I'm done for the day.
589
I don't have to do anything else today.
590
Mission accomplished.
591
Mission accomplished.
592
Paragraphs.
593
Well, I believe in them.
594
What can I tell you?
595
I mean, although, you know, I think maybe I say it in the book, I can't remember, Garcia Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch is one paragraph without paragraph breaks.
596
And a friend of ours, a Polish artist, was saying, oh, I hate this book.
597
And I went, why?
598
And he said, because I like to drink beer when I'm reading it, and there's no place in this book that I could put down the beer and pick it up again.
599
So I went, I get it.
600
I don't know.
601
It's like, well, Bible says it's like a break of lightning, like it's suddenly a way that a new thought can begin.
602
Although again, when I hear my kids being said topics, I have no idea.
603
But it's instinctive.
604
I mean, I think so much of writing is just you get kind of instinct, which comes from reading too.
605
I mean, you know, why does, it's just pure instinct.
606
It really is.
607
After a while, why should I be getting a new paragraph here instead of someplace else?
608
I mean, you have a sense that a slightly, a slightly new thought is beginning, maybe.
609
Yeah.
610
There's something annoying about that advice, but also incredibly liberating about that advice.
611
Cause I think it's true.
612
Like good writing is instinctive.
613
And at first you hear that's, tell me what to do tell me what to do well it seems like the answer is to read
614
and your body just knows the answer is to read
615
and write i mean there's no you know it's not as
616
if people haven't written you know insanely brilliant first novels
617
and then never written again they somehow were born knowing how to do something
618
and then they did
619
but i think for most of us you know i'm knocking on wood you get better
620
or and that's not that it gets easier but that you get a clearer sense of
621
what you need or what you need to do or something like that.
622
Tell me about narration.
623
It's a question.
624
Who's telling the story?
625
And what, and, you know, I mean, what, I mean, every time you, when you pick a narrator,
626
you're establishing a distance between the reader and the story.
627
I mean, a third person, so -called omniscient.
628
I mean, there's no really such thing.
629
So -called omniscient, you're far away from the action you know close third person
630
you're in the person's head
631
but you're not really it's not first person second person's like
632
a whole other weird can of worms I never understood
633
that one well sometimes you know it only works when I think
634
when you know who the letter's being written to you know I mean novels
635
and letters certainly work that way and there's a great Mavis Callan story Mademoiselle DaCosta that's in second person.
636
And then first person, obviously, is the closest you're going to get.
637
But then the question of, like, do you call the character Smith, Mr. Smith, Joe, Joe Smith, you know, what I, you know, what you call it.
638
And so, again, a lot of narration is about, you know, obviously how the story is being told.
639
But, as I said before, the distance between the reader and the writer.
640
I mean, you know, the new book has.. well, really four different kinds, five different kinds of narrations in it.
641
I mean, there's the collective narration of Dickens' children, and I never even tried that.
642
I mean, you know, that is, there were nine children ranging in age from five to 20.
643
So, and I really just couldn't pick which one was going to tell that part of the story.
644
So I just thought, let's try the collective voice.
645
And you know what it had been done before?
646
I mean, Jeff Fugenides did it in The Virgin Suicides and Josh Ferris and then we come to the end.
647
So it was possible.
648
And then I knew I had to tell Dickens' side of the story
649
and it was very intimidating to write from Dickens' point of view.
650
I mean it seemed insane to me.
651
And at first I tried to not even mention the word Dickens and that wasn't just not going to work.
652
So I call him Dickens and it's third person.
653
And Anderson is so interior and so isolated that I couldn't, I had to write it from the first person.
654
I mean, no one else would have known, even an omniscient narrator, what was going on in this guy's head.
655
And then to have letters is a whole other kind of, you know, a different kind of narration.
656
Do you find it easier to write from the perspective of a woman versus a man?
657
No, no. There are two men in this novel, the main characters.
658
There's several children of which I think only two or three were girls.
659
Catherine, unfortunately, has only a few little pieces of the novel.
660
So no, Blue Angel was written from a man's point of view.
661
Yeah.
662
But I had a brother.
663
I have a long marriage.
664
I have two sons.
665
I've grown up around a lot of guys, so I don't feel like it's some, you know, that I'm writing about space aliens or something.
666
I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence College and having a horrible time and commuting from the Hudson Valley by bus.
667
Oof.
668
Yeah, oof, to New Rochelle.
669
And it was the first and last time I've ever had an adversarial relationship with my students.
670
I mean, they were like, you know, because the system then, it may have changed them,
671
but I had to have a 40 -minute conference with each student whether or not they'd done any work during the week.
672
So, you know, it's like still getting along with your roommate.
673
I mean, you know, I was like a therapist.
674
And my father was ill, and the Challenger blew up.
675
I mean, it was like a really bad year.
676
But I was reading Chekhov on the bus commuting.
677
You know, I mean, there were like 13 volumes of the Constant Garnet translation that Echo Press had just...
678
And every time I would get on the bus and start reading Chekhov, I was like transported.
679
And also the interesting thing, which I guess I say in that essay, is that every time...
680
I mean, you were saying that these books have these rules about writing, you know, that they're so stupid.
681
Every time I would find myself saying some stupid rule about writing, I'd get on the bus and start reading a Chekhov novel
682
and he would have broken precisely the rule I had just told them was a rule.
683
So, you know, don't, like, have two characters with the same name because it's confusing for the reader.
684
So there's the Chekhov story, the two villages, guess what?
685
Or, you know, one of his greatest stories, Gusev, I was saying, like,
686
you can't have a close third -person narrator who dies because obviously what's going to happen?
687
And that's Gusev.
688
I mean, at the end, the narrative follows.
689
He dies at sea.
690
He's a sailor.
691
And the narrative follows his, they throw his coffin over, his body overboard.
692
And it follows it down the water.
693
And these, like, sharks come.
694
And these little school of fish come.
695
And then it just moves up to the sky.
696
You know, glorious, radiant colors for which there are no name.
697
Well, Chekhov did it really well.
698
So, yeah, you can have a character die at the end of the story.
699
So, again, it was, like, uncanny every time I had said something.
700
And good for me, too, because that was the last, the absolute last class that I said, you can't do this, you can't do this.
701
Except that I say, you know, don't write stuff that I can't understand because I'm not the, you know, like pretend I'm the stupidest person in the room and I need to be able to understand it.
702
Like what happens when certain bits of information come into a certain brain
703
and the certain brain reacts in a certain way and thoughts, memories, ideas, hopes, dreams, all those things are part of why you would write.
704
What's interesting.
705
Yeah, I was working with a therapist and he said,
706
I want you to write as much of your internal chatter onto a piece of paper as you can.
707
How'd that go?
708
It's astonishing to look at all the recurring things that go through your mind that are so strange.
709
Things that you, little fragments of language that you picked up when you're six or seven years old that show up.
710
Weird ways that you encourage yourself or berate yourself.
711
And you look at it and all of a sudden feel this distance from things
712
that were so close inside your mind that you couldn't even see them.
713
Yeah, no. Very bizarre.
714
I can imagine.
715
Yeah, every so often I'm conscious of it.
716
I'm going like, oh my God.
717
And a friend told me, she asked me, another writer, she said something like, if you drop something in the kitchen,
718
do you like yell at yourself for 10 minutes?
719
And I went, no. She said, I just noticed that I did that.
720
She said, I had never noticed before.
721
I must have done it my entire life.
722
Dialogue.
723
Dialogue.
724
Again, eavesdropping, it's the best thing.
725
How do people talk?
726
You know, the stories people tell each other.
727
You know, now that I live in the country, I mean, the thing I miss, one of the things I miss most is just subway travel because you could hear, you know, you could hear people talking more.
728
And you get to watch people scroll Instagram, which is fun, too.
729
Well, now, yeah, I know.
730
And now they're usually playing, you know, Candy Crush and stuff.
731
2048's the best phone game.
732
Is that right?
733
Yeah.
734
Well, I do play a lot of computer solitaire at home.
735
but uh but
736
that used to be great you know you just walk away with people pieces of dialogue
737
that people have written for you
738
but my sense of dialogue is that the dialogue
739
that works in a novel is actually different from the way that people engage in that
740
it gets compressed into a story i mean subtext really is important
741
but it also has to move that you know it's complicated because you don't want it to have narration masquerading as dialogue, as I said.
742
But on the other hand, something about the dialogue has to move the story forward or reveal character, which is, you know, not that hard.
743
I mean, people speak out of who they are.
744
Well, also, what I think would be strange is there's so much empty language that actually is so revealing,
745
and how do you get that onto the page?
746
well it was a huge challenge writing five weeks because
747
Hans Christian Andersen doesn't speak English and he's under the impression
748
that once he gets to Charles Dickens house he's going to magically learn English
749
and of course that doesn't happen so and at some point he took like six weeks of English lessons and
750
also when they met they were both drunk
751
so they both were under the impression they could speak
752
but he gets there and he can't communicate so a lot of it is about the total inability to communicate,
753
even though there's dialogue all the way through.
754
And finally, he learns, I mean, it's much easier to learn a language from kids.
755
I mean, you know, something nannies and au pairs figure out.
756
So he does learn a certain amount of English from the kids and Mrs. Dickens,
757
but he's so terrified of Dickens that he's mute in his presence until the very end.
758
And so there's a lot of, I don't know, miscommunication or stalled communication.
759
Details.
760
You know, well, and gesture.
761
I mean, those two go together.
762
You know, it's like if a person is not, if there's no reason for the person to smoke a cigarette in a novel, a story, why are they doing it?
763
You know, or, you know, she filled his coffee cup again.
764
So, unless it means something, unless it reveals something, you know, what's, I mean, there's just a lot of kind of, I guess, I guess people use gesture and,
765
and bits of dialogue as like placeholders.
766
But, but one way to tell a placeholder is if you get rid of it and you don't notice it's gone, then it turns out you didn't need it.
767
So, you know, I mean, and also, I mean, I keep, I keep saying like the value of the space break. So underestimated.
768
You know, you think you have to spend two pages getting a certain number of characters out of the house onto the street.
769
But instead, space break, they're on the street.
770
You know, you just figure out what you don't need.
771
Do you like the advice that they give to Hollywood writers?
772
You want to enter the scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible?
773
No. It's one of those things.
774
It's one of those you know, how to or how not to.
775
Some, yeah.
776
Some you want to be there right in the middle.
777
Some you can't.
778
You have to figure out how the person got there.
779
I mean, you just, you know, it depends.
780
I mean, I think, you know, but also if you're writing from the screen, I think you're presupposing a different attention span.
781
You know, you're not, although.
782
you know i mean god whatever well maybe it's
783
because it's sort of in a way period
784
but like downton abbey opens with like driving up this endless
785
driveway to this beautiful house like it's not exactly starting in the middle of the scene
786
but you know i was into it just to go back
787
to dialogue for a second i was thinking like dialogue
788
that i like uh i one of the books
789
that I've been rereading and wrote an introduction to was Shirley Jackson's Hangs a Man.
790
Have you read it?
791
Well, it's this young girl who's about to go to college and her father is just this, he's a writer, he's just this fatuous blowhard,
792
I mean just so full of himself and it's hilarious because he's just so phony and full.
793
And every time I read it I think, God, it must have been so much fun.
794
I hate to say it, but one of the pleasures of writing dialogue
795
is that certain things that you've had to listen to for one reason or another, you just put them on the page and then you're exercised of what it is that you've had to put up with.
796
I'm sure if one of those people you heard fighting was a writer, within moments that would show up on somebody's...
797
Last question.
798
So you teach writing.
799
And what is it
800
that you try to have your students understand by the end of the semester that they come in not knowing?
801
Well, I teach I teach literature classes.
802
So writing is sort of a I mean, they have to they have to send me a 300 word page, 300 word paper paper every week so there's a writing component.
803
But I think if I had to boil it down, really boil it down, I mean the one thing
804
that I find myself saying over and over is the magical fact that a human being wrote this,
805
a human being wrote this, that it was just words on a page.
806
But then there are these characters that we're all talking about as if they're somebody we know.
807
We know Madame Bovary, We know Heathcliff.
808
We know Ahab.
809
We know these people.
810
And so much so that they're like holograms.
811
I mean, we can just turn them around in the middle of the desk and talk about the various aspects of them.
812
But they were made up.
813
Some actual person just made them up and put them together with words, not even pictures, really.
814
And they exist.
815
Francine Prose, thank you very much.
816
Thank you.
817
It was good to meet you.
818
Good to meet you.
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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección
Esta lección de conversación de nivel B2 se basa en el vídeo “This Is What a Harvard Writing Masterclass Feels Like”. Este vídeo tiene 817 frases y 10038 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 57:36. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 174 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. El 84 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés; conviene repasar el resto antes de empezar.
Vocabulario clave de este vídeo
Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| painter sustantivo | /ˈpeɪntɚ/ | pintor, pintora |
| clarity sustantivo | /ˈklæɹ.ɪ.ti/ | claridad |
| jargon sustantivo | /ˈdʒɑː.ɡən/ | tecnicismo, jerga |
| narration sustantivo | /ˌnæɹˈeɪ.ʃən/ | narración |
| revision sustantivo | /ɹəˈvɪʒ.ən/ | revisión, edición |
| paragraph sustantivo | /ˈpæɹəɡɹæf/ | párrafo, parágrafo |
| diary sustantivo | /ˈdaɪ.ə.ɹi/ | diario, diario personal |
| exhibit verbo | /ɪɡˈzɪbɪt/ | exhibir |
| mystical adjetivo | /ˈmɪstɪkəl/ | místico |
| insanely adverbio | /ɪnˈseɪnli/ | insensatamente |
| omniscient adjetivo | /ɑmˈnɪʃənt/ | omniscio, omnisciente |
| plainly adverbio | /ˈpleɪnli/ | a palo seco |
| subtext sustantivo | subtexto | |
| narrator sustantivo | /ˈnæˌɹeɪ.təɹ/ | narrador |
| advisor sustantivo | /ædˈvaɪ.zə(ɹ)/ | consejero, asesor |
Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| figure out verbo | averiguar, captar | |
| go through verbo | atravesar | |
| turn out verbo | resultar | |
| go away verbo | irse, marcharse | |
| come along verbo | avanzar, marchar | |
| get back to verbo | responder / contestar (en un rato), volver / tornar a contactar | |
| go ahead verbo | /ˌɡoʊ əˈhɛd/ | venga, adelante |
| grow up verbo | crecer |
Frases que vale la pena repetir
Frases cortas y completas del vídeo que puedes reutilizar en la conversación diaria:
- Can you tell me more about party scenes?
- We said, what does this actually mean?
- When you think of school, what comes to mind?
- Do you think that's just a matter of chance?
- Where do you think it's coming from?
Gramática en este vídeo
Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:
| Estructura | En el vídeo |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verbo — un hábito o estado pasado que ya no es cierto | used to write · used to be · used to give |
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — una acción que empezó antes y continúa | I've been calling · I've been walking · I've been talking |
| Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora | has written · You've done · have stood |
| Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace | is called · is read · were just pumped |
Pronunciación a tener en cuenta
El hablante usa 224 contracciones y formas reducidas, como don't, I'm, you're. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.
- Los sonidos de “th”: therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, eighth /eɪtθ/
- Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: narration /ˌnæɹˈeɪ.ʃən/, revision /ɹəˈvɪʒ.ən/, omniscient /ɑmˈnɪʃənt/, astonish /əˈstɑnɪʃ/, accomplish /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ/
- Palabras largas — cuida el acento: indeterminate /ɪndɪˈtɜː(ɹ)mɪnət/, semicolon /ˈsɛmikoʊlən/, intuitive /ɪnˈtjuːɪtɪv/, underestimate /ʌndɚˈɛs.tɪ.meɪt/, coincidence /kəʊˈɪnsɪdəns/
Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:
- s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: spire /ˈspaɪ.ɚ/, sponsor /ˈspɒn.səː/
- /v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: revision /ɹəˈvɪʒ.ən/, advisor /ædˈvaɪ.zə(ɹ)/, eavesdrop /ˈivzˌdɹɑp/, instinctive /ɪnˈstɪŋktɪv/, intuitive /ɪnˈtjuːɪtɪv/
- /z/ — sonora, no /s/: exhibit /ɪɡˈzɪbɪt/, advisor /ædˈvaɪ.zə(ɹ)/, amuse /əˈmjuːz/, eavesdrop /ˈivzˌdɹɑp/
Cómo practicar con este vídeo
- Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
- Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
- Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como painter, clarity, jargon.
¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.