{"id":105573,"date":"2016-12-06T18:30:18","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T23:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105573"},"modified":"2016-12-07T11:19:09","modified_gmt":"2016-12-07T16:19:09","slug":"now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/06\/now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney\/","title":{"rendered":"Now Online: Our Interviews with Dag Solstad, Jay McInerney"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mcinerney-750\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The interviews from our Summer issue are now online in their entirety, freely available for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. In the Art of Fiction No. 231<\/a>, Jay McInerney discusses the circumstances that led to his first published short story\u2014which appeared in The Paris Review<\/em>:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

George called me up. He said, I liked your story, I think you\u2019re talented, let me know if you have anything else. So I went to my drawer that night and reread everything I had written up to that point \u2026 I came across this piece of paper with one paragraph, in a nearly illegible scrawl, which read, \u201cYou are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But you are here \u2026 \u201d et cetera. Three or four sentences long \u2026 this was the only thing that struck me as being remotely original or interesting, and so that night I started continuing the story. I think I finished it the next day.\u00a0George published the story, almost as I wrote it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That story, \u201cIt\u2019s Six A.M.<\/small> Do You Know Where You Are?<\/a>\u201d, ran in our Winter 1982<\/a> issue. Subscribers can read it in full online; it\u2019s part of our new digital archive. It went on to serve as the foundation for McInerney\u2019s novel Bright Lights, Big City<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"solstad-750\"<\/p>\n

And in the Art of Fiction No. 230, the Norwegian writer Dag Solstad defends his affinity for the third person:<\/p>\n

\n

To me, being able to see someone from the outside has been of the utmost importance. If you have an \u201cI,\u201d you\u2019ve limited yourself to that perspective, but if you write in the third person, you are much freer to mobilize other perspectives and positions. Of course, writing in the first person intuitively seems much easier. I think almost everyone who sets out to write a novel starts with the idea of telling it in the first person. Given how easy it is, it\u2019s almost surprising I have only written two novels in the first person.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you write about an \u201cI\u201d and what happens to it, it\u2019s easy to feel that you don\u2019t even have to compose, that you\u2019re free to write about almost anything. You just write from A to Z. Most bad novels are written in the first person.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019re on a Norwegian kick (and who isn\u2019t?) be sure to read the proceedings from the first annual Norwegian-American Literary Festival<\/a>, covered in our Winter 2012 issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The interviews from our Summer issue are now online in their entirety, freely available for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2559],"tags":[1601,17943,14,1132,22571,26107,1599,6122,26108,7782,10113],"class_list":["post-105573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bulletin","tag-bright-lights-big-city","tag-dag-solstad","tag-george-plimpton","tag-interviews","tag-issue-217","tag-its-six-a-m-do-you-know-where-you-are","tag-jay-mcinerney","tag-norway","tag-norwegian-literature","tag-the-art-of-fiction","tag-writers-at-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNow Online: Our Interviews with Dag Solstad, Jay McInerney<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The interviews from our Summer issue are now online in their entirety, freely available for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/06\/now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Now Online: Our Interviews with Dag Solstad, Jay McInerney by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 6, 2016 \u2013 The interviews from our Summer issue are now online in their entirety, freely available for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/06\/now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-12-06T23:30:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-12-07T16:19:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/mcinerney-750.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"750\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"547\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/06\/now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/06\/now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/4a14f739935c82f100675b84e220252e\"},\"headline\":\"Now Online: Our Interviews with Dag Solstad, Jay McInerney\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-12-06T23:30:18+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-12-07T16:19:09+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/06\/now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney\/\"},\"wordCount\":428,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/06\/now-online-interviews-dag-solstad-jay-mcinerney\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/mcinerney-750.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Bright Lights Big City\",\"Dag Solstad\",\"George Plimpton\",\"interviews\",\"Issue 217\",\"It's Six A.M. 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