Stories Try to Persuade Someone

American novelist and short-story writer Richard Ford (books by this author), is best known for his novels featuring the character of Frank Bascombe, a former sportswriter turned real estate agent. Ford won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for the Frank Bascombe novel Independence Day.

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). After college, a stint in law school convinced him to be a writer, because, he once said, “Like writing briefs, stories try to persuade someone.” He sold two novels that got good reviews but didn’t sell very well before he decided to hang it up and become a sportswriter. After a couple of years of that, he started writing a novel about a sportswriter named Frank Bascombe, whose life is a mess. That book, The Sportswriter (1986), made his name and introduced Frank Bascombe to the world.

Richard Ford has spent over 30 years writing about Frank Bascombe, taking him from marriage to divorce, through the death of a child, and into the arms of various women. Ford has meticulous files on Bascombe and other characters, keeping notes on ripped up pieces of hotel stationary and small pieces of paper, and eventually types them up and puts them in ring-bound notebooks. When he’s ready to write, he says, “I just pick at them, very patiently, and I mean it takes months, and I know what I’m writing, because part of the collation of these notes indicates that I think I’m writing something. And then I start making files. I like to put them in the freezer, so if the house burns down, the freezer won’t.”

People often ask Ford about Bascombe as though he’s real person. He says: “Fictional characters aren’t people — except sometimes to readers who want them to be. And they’re especially not people to those of us who make them up. Instead, characters are imminently mutable, cobbled-together bits of language reflecting the this’s and that’s of a writer’s life — memory, fantasy, fears, desires, suppressed experience, shards of speech, half-noticed newspaper squibs, over-hearings, mishearings — all of it subjected to the writer’s often whimsical will, then put on to the page for others.”

On writing, Richard Ford says: “I like the part of being a writer in which you don’t feel the sides of anything. You don’t see the beginning, and you don’t see the end, you’re just in it.”