Gore Vidal Interview

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me about your work habits? You must be enormously disciplined to turn out so much in such a relatively short time. Do you find writing easy? Do you enjoy it?

GORE VIDAL: Oh, yes, of course I enjoy it. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t. Whenever I get up in the morning, I write for about three hours. I write novels in longhand on yellow legal pads, exactly like the First Criminal Nixon. For some reason I write plays and essays on the typewriter. The first draft usually comes rather fast. One oddity: I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it’s too discouraging. Also, when you have the whole thing in front of you for the first time, you’ve forgotten most of it and see it fresh. Rewriting, however, is a slow, grinding business. For me the main pleasure of having money is being able to afford as many completely retyped drafts as I like. When I was young and poor, I had to do my own typing, so I seldom did more than two drafts. Now I go through four, five, six. The more the better, since my style is very much one of afterthought. My line to Dwight Macdonald, “You have nothing to say, only to add,” really referred to me. Not until somebody did a parody of me did I realize how dependent I am on the parenthetic aside—the comment upon the comment, the ironic gloss upon the straight line, or the straight rendering of a comedic point. It is a style which must seem rather pointless to my contemporaries because they see no need for this kind of elaborateness. But, again, it’s the only thing I find interesting to do.

Hungover or not, I write every day for three hours after I get up until I’ve finished whatever I’m doing. Although sometimes I take a break in the middle of the book, sometimes a break of several years. I began Julian—I don’t remember—but I think some seven years passed between the beginning of the book and when I picked it up again. The same thing occurred with Washington, D.C. On the other hand, Myra I wrote practically at one sitting—in a few weeks. It wrote itself, as they say. But then it was much rewritten.

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