Saturday, June 3, 2023

James Baldwin on writing

Reading a James Baldwin interview from The Paris Review in 1984, on the art of fiction.
It's all wonderful and devastating and inspiring. 

I'll be pondering these interchanges about writing for awhile:

Q: As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge?

A: You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. 

Q:What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer?

A: Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.

Q: Can you discern talent in someone?

A: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

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