Interview with Guy – Minutes 1-5
Q: To what extent do you introduce your personal morality into your writing?
A: I never do that consciously. That is, I never sit down to write with the express
purpose of displaying or advocating a moral position. But having said that, no writer
can write without having an inherent moral position, or ethical position. So that
when you write and you imagine yourself creating characters and creating
situations in which they act or don’t act, the situations you place them in almost
always have a moral value to them. The characters enact those moral values. They
either uphold them, or they reject them. For instance, in my creative writing class, I
always say if you want to prove something, write an essay. If you want to illustrate
or demonstrate how people react in different situations, that’s when you turn to
fiction.
Q: When you write, do you actually want to create some sort of reaction from your
audience? Do you intentionally try to seek out that kind of thing, or do you just write
whatever and let it be?
A: I write whatever, but I often suspect that what I’m writing may produce a
reaction. So, for instance, I mean just to take the simplest illustration, if you write a
scene of extreme violence, you’re pretty sure that that’s going to illicit some sort of
reaction in the reader. The question is whether that reaction will be simply
repugnance, in the sense that someone says, “this is horrific, horrible. I cannot read
this. I won’t read it.” Or whether they see that scene as having some sort of larger
significance not only to the story but to the way they may view the world. I know I’m
going to sound as if I’m equivocating and fudging here, but I don’t believe anything
is ever clear-cut in terms of when someone attempts to write fiction. The person
writing the fiction is not always clear of their own motivations or motives and why
they’re doing something. After the fact it’s much easier to delude yourself (laughter)
into saying, “Oh, this is what I intended.” But there are moments of course when
you’re writing that you can make guesses about what the reaction to what your
writing will be.
Q: What do you read for pleasure?
A: Cythia Ozick once said that she didn’t find entertainment very entertaining
(laughter). So my answer to that is that what I read for pleasure isn’t very much
different than what I read to learn from as a writer. By and large, I don’t do very
much of what people would call “light reading.” Doesn’t mean that I never do it.
When I’m on a plane, I will read a mystery. It might sound flippant if I said I read
Dostoyevsky for pleasure, but it’s also true. I get more pleasure from reading
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment than I do from reading a P.D. James novel, even
though I like P.D. James novels very much.
Q: What’s the difference for you between the light reading and the heavy reading?
You seem to be the kind of person who reads everything very meticulously.
A: I think I do read everything very meticulously. The difference between, and the
distinction that most people make between light and heavy reading, if you want to
call it that, is that they read light reading for entertainment. And there’s nothing the
matter with that, and it can give a great deal of pleasure. The problem for someone
like me, who has spent all of their life trying to write, is that many novels that are
entertaining in terms of the prose aren’t very well written. So when I read them, I’ve
got this niggling little thing in my brain that says, “bad sentence!” (laughter) or, “this
is a stock phrase,” or “this is a stock character,” or “this is a stock situation.” So when
I’m saying I often don’t find entertainment entertaining, that’s what I’m talking
about. Sometimes when there’s something that’s badly – really, really badly –
written, it can be actually quite funny. So then it can be extremely entertaining.
Q: When you’re writing do you keep your target audience in mind in order to solicit
a certain reaction?
A: Again, the notion of a target audience is, for me, a difficult idea, because that
sounds like a business plan where you say to yourself, “if I’m going to sell a plastic
container for food, who am I going to aim it to?” I think that Robertson Davies came
up with a good definition of what he thought a writer who cared about their craft,
what their audience was, and he used the word “clerisy,” which was a term of
Coleridge’s. And that meant, “reasonably educated non-specialist readers.” That is,
that you’re not writing for a specific audience as if, say, you were an academic.
Academics often are writing for other academics and they employ a language that is
specialized to their subjects. But the argument that Davies was making was that
writers should aim to make contact or communicate with an intelligent, relatively
well-educated audience that cared about what they read. So if I were to say that I
had any kind of target audience in mind, I would say that I’m writing for people like
me. And people who are interested in the things that I am interested in. That is, I
don’t try and guess what would interest people, and then write to that audience. I
assume – and it may be a false assumption (laughter) – that there are people out
there who are interested in some of the same things I am.
Q: Which brings us to a point you mentioned in class, that if it doesn’t entertain you
then you should probably not be writing it.
A: Yeah. If you have no interest in what you’re writing, and if you are writing for
some shadowy somebody else, then you’re better off not writing it.
Q: What would you say – because I remember a professor once said that there are
some books out there that are almost targeted towards book clubs – or, what do you
think about writers who have to sit down with their editor, and their editor has to
give them direction where to go with their story because they’re writing for, say,
young adults, because it’s work and it’s not exactly fun?
A: I would argue a little bit with your assumption there. I think that people who
write for children or who write for young adults are intensely interested in young
adults and in children and have that rare ability to be able to return to their own
youth or their own childhood and write incredibly appealing books. It’s not a talent
that everybody has. Or even an interest that everybody has. But I don’t think that
you can make the mistake of thinking that writers like that necessarily say, “I am
writing for this audience.” What they’re saying is – I think – maybe saying is the
wrong word – they want to actually return to the space – the emotional space – they
occupied as children. 12:35