If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.
When you are writing a character, what the character says is obviously crucial. But what the character doesn't say is absolutely as important as his words.
I don't think I want to write a third book. But the more people talk to me about it, the more I think maybe I do.
I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.
In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.
What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.
I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.
