The Paris Review

“We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from written stories. Each mode has its ways and methods and rules. They can reinforce each other; this is the advantage my generation has—we can bring to the written story something of that energy of the story told by word of mouth. This is really one of the contributions our literature has made to contemporary literature.” —Chinua Achebe, the Art of Fiction No. 139

We’d like to congratulate Louise Erdrich on her National Book Award for The Round House. The following quote, from her Art of Fiction interview, explores the author’s approach to writing:

I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly. Not many of my stories work out that way. Most of my work is simple persistence … But if the trance happens, even though it’s been wonderful, I’m suspicious. It’s like an ecstatic love affair or fling that makes you think, It can’t be this good, it can’t be! And it never is. I always need to go back and ­reconfigure parts of the voice. So the control is working with the piece after it’s written, finding the end. The title’s always there, the beginning’s always there, sometimes I have to wait for the middle, and then I always write way past the end and wind up cutting off two pages.

The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

—Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198

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I didn’t grow up reading The Paris Review. My earliest encounter with the magazine—I’m somewhat ashamed to admit—came in graduate school, when I stumbled upon an interview with Milan Kundera. (I was writing a paper on translation, and the quote I pulled didn’t even make it into a footnote.) Had you asked me, a year or so later, when I found myself applying for an internship, what the magazine meant to me, I wouldn’t have given you an honest answer. It didn’t mean much of anything to me. I wanted a foot in the door in New York, and The Paris Review’s seemed as good a door as any.

The latest issue, 191, had closed just before I started, so my first few weeks were quiet. I read submissions, delivered packages, distributed the mail. Then came my first real assignment: We were running an interview with Ray Bradbury, and it needed fact-checking. I volunteered.

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“I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”

—Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203