IN CHARACTER: “It isn’t always the case that writing novels will make the writer discover something that he hadn’t ever known before.” |
We tend to think of novelists as somewhat sedentary. You live in New Orleans and Maine, but here’s all this stuff from New Jersey, and as the newspaper guys say, it’s a story you had to go out and get.
It’s true. You certainly don’t have to write those stories down there, but for me — and maybe somebody else would do it differently — I had to continually replenish my memory with experience down there, and I did it for the most mercenary of reasons, because I wanted to find more of what I thought were comic details, the names of places, Bump’s Eat It Raw and things like that, I’m so completely tickled by all that stuff, I think it’s hilarious. But I have to go find it. I know that I drive myself crazy trying to get the specific names of places and things, and I probably drive writers I edit crazy with it too: “Exactly what KIND of sunglasses were they?”
And the reason they don’t do it, aside from inattention, is that I think they don’t understand that those words on a page not only mean something or make something plausible, but they also give pleasure. When you see the word Ray-Ban, that’s hyphenated, somehow my little heart quivers a little bit when I see that. Not only because the real world is verified, but because the word itself is so funny. Writers don’t know that language itself, in and of itself, is pleasure-giving.
Do you read reviews?
No. Particularly when I’m out here on the road I find that the upsie-downsie parts of that are pretty twisting. I think the good ones are never pleasing enough and the bad ones hurt me more than they should. I guess they would say in common parlance: I don’t have good boundaries.
RICHARD FORD | Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St, Brookline | November 16 | $2 | 617.566.6660
Topics:
Books
, Culture and Lifestyle, Media, Health and Fitness, More 
, Culture and Lifestyle, Media, Health and Fitness, Holidays, Medicine, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Books, Pulitzer Prize Committee, Cancer, Richard Ford, Less 
