Proulx

INTERVIEWER: Do you think of yourself as having a style that evolves from book to book?

PROULX: I don’t think about it. If I have a style, that’s fine. But I couldn’t say what it is. I don’t consciously cultivate a style. It’s just an outgrowth of who I am. If I could write sentences like Aidan Higgins, I would be a happy person. My God, he’s a stylist master. Absolutely exquisite sentences. But what he doesn’t have is structure, and he doesn’t want it. To me architecture in a story is very important.

I’ve always felt very sorry for writers who don’t read anything because they’re afraid of hurting their style. I know quite a few of them. Many writers are extremely poor readers. They haven’t read much and they teach, so what they do read are the stories that their students have written and their own work begins to seem finer and better and more exalted and precious to them in comparison with the clumsy first efforts of kids. Slowly they go through a melting-down process. I think that’s one of the reasons I never wanted to teach.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different worlds on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. I read omnivorously—technical manuals, history, all sorts of things. It’s a relief to get away from your own stuff.

INTERVIEWER: Do you write when you’re traveling?

PROULX: Sure I do. If you’ve got a knotty situation or a character that isn’t playing the game right, sometimes walking or driving for a couple of days will straighten it out, or some possible scenarios will float through your mind and one or two of them will mesh into something that works. I carry it in my head and then write it down later, or scribble at most a couple of key words.

A lot of the work I do is taking the bare sentence that says what you sort of want to say—which is where a lot of writers stop—and making it into an arching kind of thing that has both strength and beauty. And that is where the sweat comes in. That can take a long time and many revisions. A single sentence, particularly a long, involved one, can carry a story forward. I put a lot of time into them. Carefully constructed sentences cast a tint of indefinable substance over a story.

INTERVIEWER: The hard works pays off.

PROULX: There is difficulty involved in going from the basic sentence that’s headed in the right direction to making a fine sentence. But it’s a joyous task. It’s hard, but it’s joyous. Being raised rural, I think work is its own satisfaction. It’s not seen as onerous, or a dreadful fate. It’s like building a mill or a bridge or sewing a fine garment or chopping wood—there’s a pleasure in constructing something that really works.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5901/the-art-of-fiction-no-199-annie-proulx