This Is What a Harvard Writing Masterclass Feels Like (Francine Prose Interview)

Francine Pros has written more than 30 books and she's taught both at Harvard and Bard College and my god is she well read. Now if you ask her, "How do I become a better writer? You've done so much of it. What do I do?" And she'll say, "Well, you got to start by reading like a writer. Look at words and sentences, characters and details. Study them, dissect them, then find books that you love, ones that have stood the test of time, and ask yourself, why has this book endured? Why has it stayed popular for so long?" But how do you actually do that? Well, this interview is an answer to that question.

I want to start with in reading like a writer, you have this section where you talk about positive models and negative models of books. And obviously, there's a lot of writing manuals basically saying, "Hey, if you want to learn to write, read this." But you said that the problem with those is that they're negative models, meaning they're not bad books. They just tell you what not to do. So, let's start there. >> Well, that's what reading like a writer is about. It's a close reading, which is like you slow down and you just say why this word and why not another word or why a semicolon instead of a period or why, you know, just looking for how someone does something and then especially if you have a kind of problem or area yourself where you just don't know how to do a certain thing. I mean there there are certain things that are hard like party scenes that party scenes are really I mean there are a lot of

people and they're all talking at once and there's all this interaction and how do you follow it so that you look at I mean I guess James Joyce is the dead is the all-time great party scene and then there are great party scenes in Ana Corinina. So you just take a party scene and you go, okay, how did you know what's the camera eye in a way following people around this party scene and who's talking and when are they talking and how do you know when the guests arrive and how do you know? So you just use them as models. I mean the th those how to write books, you know, in general how to write things. I mean like my kids and grandkids are always coming home and saying like you know what's a topic sentence you know and I don't know I really do not know I have never figured out what a topic sentence or how to or you know how to organize things paragraph by paragraph I mean I think it's much more amorphous and you know

you're trying to tell a story and you're trying to make someone interested in the story and how do you tell that story in the most interesting language the most economical way the most I mean you know one of the things that I started out doing I my first novel was like this and I think of it because I just told a student to do it is um as one kind of little exercise is to try writing the kind of story uh that people used to write and don't and which is that somebody is telling someone else the story you know that people I mean it doesn't happen so much anymore because you're going out of your way not to talk to the person sitting next to you on the airplane but you know he used to be these long train rides and you know toll story with the courts of sonata so and it solves a lot of problems because I think a lot of times people were thinking like who's talking who's listening who's the audience but if you

have someone talking and someone listening and the person listening can interrupt the speaker to get clarification or to ask to move the story along or whatever it's like this quick trick and then I mean you don't have to do it all your life but it's I think it's something you learn from. Can you tell me more about party scenes? What makes for a good party scene? >> Well, since I mentioned Anna Corinina, you know, Anna is dancing with Ronsky, right? She's met Franson on the train and there's this instant attraction and and Kitty, who is in love with and I guess at that point still engaged to Veronsky, is uh is the one who would most notice the two of them are dancing.

So wisely Toltoy chooses to write big parts of the scene from her point of view because no one else at that party is really particularly interested in the that particular couple dancing, but she's the one who would focus in on it, right? I mean, the joy is the dead is more a sort of cacony of voices, but but pretty soon you learn who everybody is. I mean you you know again without going through the story line by line it would be pretty soon you learn who everybody is and you learn what the concerns are and also the story is called the dead you know so you know there's some you know there's something going on having to do with death and and and of course the hostesses are ancient so everyone at the everyone at the party is at some point thinking uh how many more of these parties are they going to give and And then there are all these sort of themes that are going through the party like Ireland, Irish history, Irish politics,

music, um, religion, you know, it's an Irish story. So, uh, and then they all come together in that insanely beautiful

ending. >> What don't students understand about how to read that you're trying to impart on them? >> I mean, my students have to apply to get into the class. So, I'm a couple steps ahead. >> You don't have students like how I was in college. >> No. And I mean, I don't know, but I don't think so. And next fall I'm teaching a class in ghost stories. >> Ghost stories. >> Ghost stories. Yeah. And usually I get, you know, like I have a limit of 15 kids in class and usually I get 20 applications and I have to decide. I've gotten like 60 applications this, you know, I don't know. I don't, you know, I have no idea what people think ghost stories are or what we're going to do, but uh but we're going to talk about sort of all the implications and all the different kinds of ghost stories and and stories in different cultures and so forth, you know, how that how that works. I mean, for example, there are a

lot of uh South American and Latin American ghost stories because I think um we spend a lot of time in Mexico. My daughter-in-law is Mexican and I think I think in in Latin cultures the people live much more closely with their debt than they than they do. >> We don't have a diia delos muertos in America. >> We do not although they have my that part of my family has an altar every every year. And in fact uh I guess a few years after my mother died my daughter-in-law and granddaughter put one of my books on the altar in case my mother came back. And I'm going like, what's that doing here? And my granddaughter said, "Oh, in case in case she comes back and needs something to read." And I went, I wept, of course.

So, >> do you believe in ghosts? >> Yeah. >> Really? >> Yeah. >> What do you think ghosts are? >> You know, just the law of average. There can't be that many people who believe in them and have seen them if they're not I mean, it just can't be in everyone's imagination. >> They're pointing at something. >> Yeah. Yeah. and and also I mean they're about people's relation with the dead and the afterlife and so forth. But I think I'm going to begin the class by asking the kids if they've ever seen a ghost or if they have a if they have a direct connection to a ghost of some

sort. >> Why is it that in so much of the writing advice that you give, you focus on clarity, clarity, clarity? >> Because not clarity, whatever that is, is so annoying. [laughter] I mean, you know, it's if you can't understand it, and that's this I mean, and you know, it's not that everything has to be simple. Although, I have to say I mean, here's where I lose all your listeners. I I if someone put a gun to my head and said, "You have to read Finnegan's Wake now." It, you know, I go, "Shoot me. Go ahead. Shoot me." So, so I have a certain limited uh a limited patience for the obscure. I mean, I just don't feel like working that hard anymore. But but you know that I mean I think it often happens that when people sit down to write they think they have to do a lot of like writing with a capital W. You know like fancy words they would never use or you know weirdly convoluted expressions they would never

I mean the the one thing again I tell my students is read it aloud. You know if you wouldn't say it and if you can't get it out of your mouth there's a good chance that it shouldn't be on the page. And don't don't unless you're writing something from, you know, a point of view of somebody who lived a million years ago, don't use words that you would never use in conversation because, you know, who wants to read that?

>> Yeah. One of I'm working on a documentary now and one of the things whenever we we're writing it, one of the things that we always say is just say the thing plainly. Just say the thing plainly. And >> where did we go? But we went to some art exhibit, me and the team, and this what it was. We went to the one Vanderbilt building and it was the the the tour of the top of the building, right? And they have this line in there about the spire of one Vanderbilt, how it's a nod to the spire of the Chrysler building next door, but the whole thing is a bunch of hoopla. And we were just looking at it.

We said, "What does this actually mean? It's a bunch of fancy words, but it doesn't mean anything." And I feel this way all the time when I read a plaque at the museum or the entry thing when you walk into an exhibit. I'm like, you're not telling me the thing directly. And so we just whenever we're writing, we say, what are you trying to say? Just say it clearly, state it plainly, and the rest just follows. >> Yeah. Well, jargon is like death. I mean, I used to give an assignment which I'd say like bring a bring a passage of jargon, historical jargon, art historical jargon, a bad one, you know, literary jargon, and then just translate it into English and see what you get.

And the jargon would just collapse like this big meringue because there didn't have anything, you know, it was just like four words that were just pumped up by by verbiage. >> This episode is sponsored by Alpha School. When you think of school, what comes to mind? For me, it was lectures, homework, being stuck at a desk. And the worst part is that it doesn't even work. 54% of Americans read below a sixth grade level. That's over half of Americans. [music] We need something new. And that's why I'm excited to have Alpha School as the flagship sponsor of How [music] I Write. At Alpha, you go to school. You get all your academics done in only 2 hours per day. So that then you could spend the rest of the time learning life skills like running a business, writing a musical, giving a TEDx talk. You know, the kind of things that make you a capable and well-rounded person. And it's working. They have the

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Tell me about reading to understand why that piece of work endures. >> Well, I you know, one year I taught Jane Air and uh and Great Expectations in the same year. And Janeire is the greatest representation of of female rage ever. And that that hasn't gone away. So So and my students got it immediately. Although I mean they were hilarious because they're these long sections between Janeire and Mr. Rochester that you can't figure out what they're talking about except they're really talking about sex, but they're not saying it. So, it turned out that two of my students could do these like dead accurate Alan Rickman imitations and they would read Mr. Rochester in the voice of Alan Rickman and it was so perfect that we just had like tears streaming down our faces. So, but it was so current to them. I mean, it was so alive to them. So, you know, those books are still engrossing. They're still powerful. They

still have seem to say something about our lives. They're still beautifully written. They're still surprising no matter how many times you read them. >> Tell me about your writing. You seem to be able to write for a long amount of time when you're in the flow. >> It depends what stage of the book I'm I'm in. I mean, first drafts are hard and first drafts like two or three hours, I'm done for the day. It's just too too exhausting. But revision, >> why are the first drafts so much harder?

>> Cuz you're just you're just cranking it out. And also, I think I think a friend of mine said something like um that you're constantly resisting cliches, like that you're just being barrageed with cliches and that you're just you're just fighting them off, right? I mean, I thought too bad too bad that doesn't burn calories. But but it's true. I mean, you know, it's like the stupidest way of saying the thing is the first thing that comes to mind and then you have to think that's the stupidest way of saying the thing and it's not the way I wanted to.

>> Mhm. And then after the first draft >> I you know what I still I mean this book is probably and now what is my 23rd novel or something? It's still probably gone through 40 40 drafts. I mean I number them now so I actually know but but yeah. >> Do you write by hand or on the computer? >> On the computer. I can't read my handwriting. >> How is revision different for novels versus non-fiction? >> It's the same. >> H >> it's the same because again it's clarity as you said. It's all about clarity.

It's like this sentence doesn't mean anything. And then the joy of of cutting, you know. I mean speaking of calories, it's like losing weight without having to not eat, you know. and the word counter, the greatest invention ever. You know, you go, "Oh my god, I've just lost 2,000 words and I I don't miss a single thing." You know, I mean, one of the one of the earliest things I wrote, this was like back in the 70s and it was back when uh Madame Wiselle was a really good magazine that published like very very high quality fiction and they bought uh a story that I wrote and it was like I don't know 20,000 words. was really long. And and they they said, "Well, we can only publish 3,000 words or 5,000 words." And I said, "Well," and then they said, "Well, we'll pay you $800," which was like a million dollars back in the 70s. And I said, "Oh, fine.

I want to go to Mexico." You know, so I took the money and I went to Mexico and I came back and they published it and I never noticed a single word that was missing. So, you know, what can I say? They had a great editor.

>> What part of the book do you find to be the hardest? introductions, endings, >> all of it's really endings are impossible. Endings are really, really hard. Endings are are be for all sorts of reasons. I mean, one thing is I really like indeterminate endings, you know. I mean, there's the ending of uh uh Czechov's lady with the pet dog, which is and they realize that the hardest part was still before them. I think that that should be passed a law that that's the end of every single book that that you know but uh but people don't a lot of people don't I mean I wrote a YA novel that had an in determined ending and and I was getting these packages of letters from like eighth grades like whole eighth grades would write to me and they'd say like I really liked your book until the end. Is there going to be a sequel? So >> because they want to know what happened?

>> Yeah. I mean it was perfectly clear what was going to happen but they they wanted to be told what happened. So, I just stopped opening the packages basically because I [laughter] knew I knew what they were going to say and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do anything about it. But you know something, the ending of Five Weeks in the Country, the new book, and and I have a wonderful editor, Noah Eker, and uh and he denies that this happened because I keep saying I've been calling you the guy that wrote the ending to my book, but um but there's a series of letters in there and the last and it ends I mean it ends it was about to end with this fairy tale that Hans Christristen Ander I mean that I wrote a fairy tale in the persona of Hans Christristen Anderson um you know, a fairy tale that combined all the horrible, embarrassing misery that he'd experienced at the home of Charles Dickens, except he transformed

it into something glorious. So, and so that was going to be the end. And Noah, my editor, said, uh, "It needs one more turn. There just needs to be one more turn." And he said, "What about a letter from Katherine Dickens?" I mean, Dickens's poor abused wife who he had nine surviving children with and he was about to dump for an 18-year-old. And and I thought, "Oh, okay." And and that's how the that's how the um the book ends. Now, I said, "Let me just try it." And I wrote this letter from Katherine Dickens's point of view. And and also there's a the youngest Dickens child uh who was 5 years old whose name was Edward who everyone called baby who's sort of a he who doesn't really speak very much in the in the novel but he's a kind of a major character because he's the only one of the children who's nice to Anderson and he's this only one who Dickens is still amused by because he's the baby and and the last line of

the novel Katherine Dickens and says essentially and by the way baby doesn't want to be called baby anymore he wants to be called Edward and uh and when I wrote it I was like because you know having raised kids and now my grandchildren and getting older there's something about that moment when baby doesn't want to be called baby anymore which is just devastating so to you know end that novel on this whole kind of emotional note that really hadn't been there before was uh so it's one of the few novels that I feel like I'm really really happy >> with how it ended >> with how it ended even though I didn't exactly write it but I mean I did write it but I was had a suggestion about how

to ride >> that is a kind of dialogue obviously what makes for good dialogue like when you read dialogue that sucks [snorts] and you just want to throw the book against the wall and then you read dialogue that just sings and you're like okay now I want to study this what is the difference between those two? >> Well, I think I think I talk about it some reading like a writer. I mean, the worst dialogue is just like exposition, you know, masquerading as dialogue. You know, someone's telling, you know, you know, is it true that you live in the West Village? Is it true that I'm going to have a hard time getting here? Is it true? You know, that is it's not a conversation. It's just information that's pretending to be exchanged between people. But and the best is just like someone says something unexpected or you know the same way in life someone says something unexpected or interesting or so someone I mean one of the things

that I learned about dialogue was that if you really I mean writing dialogue it makes you listen to people you know we were talking about eavesdropping before >> um it makes you listen to people and and there's certain things that I think writers think that they have to do when they're writing dialogue. I mean that is uh character A speaks and then character B speaks and then character A answers B and blah blah >> gave a ping pong.

>> Yeah. Exactly. And but in fact often character A will say something and character B will say something completely unrelated and you think that character B hasn't heard what character A says and then like five lines later it'll turn out that character B has heard exactly what character A has said but hasn't been able to respond to it at the time which is the kind of thing you know it happens in life all the time you just hear it >> and their subtext >> and their subtext. Oh yeah. What people are not saying. I mean listen to what people are not you know just listen for not people what people are not saying.

>> Yeah. It's not given to you to directly. I just watched Lost in Translation which is a whole movie basically exploring what happens when two people >> talk but they're not communicating at all. >> It happens all the time. I mean lately. And also, I don't know, lately I've been walking around and and sort of misharing people, you know, because people going or passing very fast and and and it often seems to me that the thing I'm hearing is more interesting than the thing they could possibly have said.

>> So that's I mean yesterday I heard this whole I was walking behind a guy and I and I it seemed to me that he was having a whole conversation about Iawaska and and then I passed him and I realized it wasn't about Iawaska at all. It was about something [laughter] else and I thought I kind of wish it had been because it would have been, you know, slightly more interesting. >> Yeah. I just moved back to New York City and one of my favorite parts about living in a dense place is all the crazy stuff that you overhear.

>> I know. I know. >> You know, I just heard a couple fighting and she goes, "It's just your dang what you say? It's just your personality and literally everything about you." And she's just yelling at this guy and who knows what's going on, but your mind just creates this whole world of whatever's going on there. >> Yeah, fights are great. Fights are good. And yeah, people are letting it all hang out.

>> We're talking about process. Tell me about where the ideas for books come from through the prism of this this photograph. >> Oh yeah, that's well that's a Brussai photograph. Uh, and it's a lesbian couple at Lemon, which is a nightclub in Paris where where it had a gay clientele and uh trans and crossdressing clientele and um and she the woman in the photograph with the the sort of butch the butchwoman I it just there was a little wall text and it name it said her name and that that she'd been a professional race car driver I guess. So I went and you know Googled, you can Google in two seconds and it turned out that not only had she been a race car driver, but she was uh she was an athlete race car driver and because the for some aspect of the Napoleonic code made crossdressing illegal, she wasn't allowed to to compete professionally in in France. So somehow Hitler got wind of this and

invited her to be his special guest at the 1939 Olympics and she sat in the box next to Hitler and then by the time she got back to France she was spying for the Gestapo. >> Oh wow. >> Yeah. Wow. So that was kind of where that story went. And then and then I've been reading a lot and looking at at Brussi's photographs a lot. So I sort of wanted to to put all those stories together. >> So explain that feeling for me. You see the photo and it's like a world emerges that you feel like you can step into and take from your imagination on onto the page.

>> Yeah. I And even simpler, it's like what a great story, you know? Why hasn't Why haven't a million people written about this before? And and then one thing kind of led to another led to another.

>> Tell me about painters. What how have painters influenced your writing? There's um I think you were in an interview talked about Carlo Canoskard and you said he's a painter and painters get a very bad reputation for not being smart. Untrue. Some of the best readers I know are actually visual artists. My husband's a painter and is one of the best readers I know and is my first reader and has has impeccable taste in books and as I said many of my friends just because of that's his world have been painters and they're great. I mean, they they're not they're not only good painters, but they can write. I mean, like David Sally writes fabulous art criticism. The stuff he writes to the New York Review Books is is incredible.

>> Back to the Cancard quote. So, what are people missing about why are painters such good writers? >> I think that that they pay attention to the world in a certain way, the same way that writers do. I mean, they're always looking. Well, just for example, you know, as I said, I'm married to a painter and one of my dearest friends is a photographer and and they see more than I do. I mean, they literally see more than I do, even though we have probably the same vision, but they'll, you know, we'll go down a street and one or the other will say, "Did you see the blah blah blah?" And I'll go, "No." And and they will have seen it. So they're very I mean you know if if one of the things that's helpful in writing is is the ability to pay attention to what's out there. They're really good at it.

>> Yeah. I went to uh the Monae and Venice exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and I was the way that the exhibit is structured is you start off looking at how other people have depicted Venice and you just see all these painters and a lot of it is on the details of architecture, the people and the gondilas and you just see those over and over and then the end of the exhibit is how Monae depicts Venice and it's completely different. the quality of the light is different. The he isn't nearly as detailed, but he captures something about the spirit of Venice that for hundreds of years nobody had captured. And the thing that I realized is it's seeing differently that you can do that in writing, too. Look at the same thing, look at the same thing, and bring a different energy, a different texture, different hue to something that people have looked at a thousand times.

>> Yeah. Sure. Well, you know, once photography came along, painters didn't have to do that anymore. I mean, Canaltto went to Venice and people who had never been to Venice wanted to see Venice how it looked because it's so realistic. >> Yes, it was so realistic. And then once you could look at a postcard of Venice, there wasn't that same compulsion to show it the way that it actually looked. >> Tell me about Peggy Guggenheim. She was this kind of unhappy very rich ays who didn't know what to do with her money who had horrible painfully horrible taste in men. I mean you know horrible marriage and then she was horrible with two marriages uh but and she had great adviserss and she had a great eye. I mean and she was very smart. I mean it was one of the things that was shocking to me when I was writing the book was was how many um last surviving I mean most of them are dead now men of her generation would

kind of you know actually invite me to lunch to tell me how stupid she was. Yeah. And I would go like I don't think she was that stupid and they would say oh yeah no she had good advisors but she was really stupid. I mean, I think that she she sort of her persona was ditsy. She seemed she must have seen dity. She seemed to have seen and and she wrote this hilarious two hilarious memoirs that were pure dits. But um but she was great. And also she saved, you know, I mean, she left Europe with all this art packed up in her crates with her household, you know, laundry stuff to avoid paying taxes. But but all this stuff, you know, Branuzi's bird and flight and a lot of Picassos and and Jacomedis would have been taken by the Nazis. I mean, and that was really their definition of degenerate art and she saved it. I mean, the fact that it exists at all, uh, and she had a great eye. I mean, she was the first person

who really got Jackson Pollock.

>> As you're working on a novel, building up characters, how do those characters come to shape? Is it something that's more intuitive, less intuitive? Well, you know, it's funny because over I, you know, okay, here's this novel about Dickens and Anderson, which they're not me, but it's the weird thing is is that only within the last few weeks when I've been talking about the book, I've suddenly realized all these autobiographical elements, stories from my own life that have gone into the book. There's a part in the novela where um Anderson has become uh the only child. Baby, as I said, baby is the only child that will speak to Anderson. And Anderson reads some bedtime stories. And Dickens is very possessive about Baby and uh annoyed really that Anderson has gotten close to the one child that Dickens still feels close to. But Baby is a stutterer. and and Dickens begins to notice that when he's correcting

Anderson's English, because Anderson didn't speak a lot of it, his speech defect goes away, right? And I went, "Oh, that's" and then literally yesterday afternoon, I remember that we one at one of these summer conferences, I think, Breadlo, my kids were there, and my one of my sons, Leon, was sort of babysitting for a younger kid, and the kid had uh a stutter and a speech defect. And the kid was so impressed by Leon that he hadn't been able to say his L's before. And suddenly it was like Leon, Leon, Leon. And everyone was going like, "Oh my god, he's cured this kid." And I just gave that to Anderson without remembering that it's something that had happened in my life. So there's a lot there's a lot in there like that. I mean, there's a scene where uh where Anderson just cuts all the red geraniums that Dickens is so fond of in his garden. And we many years ago a friend was moving back to the city and she had these tons

of gorgeous chrosanthemums. It was the fall and she said just take some and and we went and just cut them all and put them in our house and then it turned out she had a gardener who was heartbroken and furious. So and again I hadn't remembered that I that I'd done that but it turned out that I had. >> Do you think that's just a matter of chance or do you think it's some deep bodily memory that's reemerging? I would go for the deep reemerging bodily memory. Yeah.

>> Wow, that's pretty cool. >> Something mystical about that. >> Well, there's something mystical about the whole thing. I mean, there's really, you know, there I mean, there's a whole part of writing. Have you read um Mural Sparks Lording with intent? >> I have not. It's really great, but it's the only thing I know about the phenomenon that I most of my close friends who are writers have had, which is you invent a character and two weeks later you meet that person or you imagine an event and a month later it happens. I mean, it's just, you know, at the fear fear of sounding a little but it just happens. I mean, you're just somehow in tune with something you don't know that you're in tune with. I think >> do you feel like there is a mystical quality of writing a novel?

>> Yeah. Yes. I mean it's like because as I kind of mentioned it feels like taking dictation in a certain way. I mean because it just is true that if it's working after a certain point the characters start talking to you. >> You know there and you're like hearing voices. It's and you can still be sane. So, yeah. No, it's definitely is a mystical qu and also where is it coming from? I mean, unless you're writing a memoir, let's say, and you're trying to actually dredge up the facts of the past, which is it's very clear where it's coming from. Uh, other than that, it's just like floating around out there in the ether, and you're trying to pick it up.

>> Where do you think it's coming from? >> I don't know. You know, people used to say the muses. I mean, who knows? I don't know, you know. I mean, memory, observation, some desire for order to impose some kind of order on experience, you know. Yeah. You hear all these sorts of crazy stories. I have a friend, she's a writer, and she woke up one night, middle of the night, freaking out about her aunt. Freaking out. And her aunt had had a heart attack 2 hours before, and she hadn't thought about her aunt in months.

>> Oh, yeah. No, it happens. Of course, it happens. Well, I you know, for a a long time, uh Deborah Eisenberg is a very close friend of mine and and there were so many things like that that happened, you know, that we would write something and and then it would happen or we would meet blah blah and and there there just got to be this phrase we would use which was like it could be a coincidence, you know, but it we didn't believe it was a coincidence, but we didn't know what else it was.

I was struck by how much Anne Frank edited her her diaries. That seems to be something you were talking about over and over again. She wanted them to be published. She was not I mean this sort of myth of you know this little girl lying on her stomach with her, you know, scribbling the thing. That was like not the >> How old was she when she was writing? 15. >> Yeah. 12 to 15. Oh, she um because she had heard early on, you know, they listen to the radio. They would listen to the radio in the annex and and some announcer came on and said, you know, after the war, uh there there's going to be a hunger for people writing about what their experience was during the war. And she said, "My diary." So, she went back and edited the diary several times. So she wasn't just some like naive tween writing this little book. I mean she was really she was a writer and then [clears throat] her father of course

edited again you know and took off out the sex and then put it back in etc. But um but I was just you know I was just sort of um I felt that I was speaking up for 12 13 14 year old girls everywhere who were so underestimated you know what their talents are what how smart they are. Well, when you were talking about Anne Frank's diaries, you talked about her process of revision and there's this cool I don't know if paradox is the right word, but that the naturalness of voice is something that emerges through revision and >> it isn't just something that comes in the first draft.

>> Well, yeah, she was writing for I mean, whether or not she knew it, she was certainly writing for clarity, too. and also to you know to to address the diary to the non-existent kitty gave it kind of intimate conversational tone which it couldn't happen you know which is why at the beginning I was saying like you know the exercise of a story where someone's telling a story to somebody that was that Kitty was her person that she was telling the story to so it gave her you know again the question of who's listening wasn't a question

>> as you're writing a novel novel, what are the things that you feel like you orbit around? Do you feel like you orbit around character? Do you feel like you orbit around, hey, this is a theme that I really want to focus on? A driving question. What do you hang around? I'm just trying to tell a story. It's narrative more than anything else. And then and then kind of I mean the more often than not characters just kind of pop up because they're needed in certain ways, you know, and then and then that becomes a whole arc that I have to follow.

>> Characters being needed? What do you mean? >> Well, they, you know, I mean simple questions. Does this person have a family? Who's in it? Who lives down the block from the person? Or, you know, what's the neighborhood? or you know the various things you need to create some version of a human being on on the page. What are the person's connections or what are what are the person's memories or so forth and then then the you know the things the parts of the novel the details just kind of collect around that. uh but you know but some have more um what do I want to say more schematic uh structures. I mean, the the YA novel, I wrote a YA novel, right? And it was about a high school that was turned into a kind of uh prison camp basically, you know, and all I had to do was go online and Google preventing school violence and it gave you like a, you know, one thing, two thing, three told you what to

do, you know, metal detectors, spy searches, you know, blah blah blah. and and and that became the sort of scheme that that here are a bunch of kids that were experiencing one of those things

after another. >> Tell me about words. >> Well, I mean that's your that's your raw material. That's the rawest of raw material. I mean, I think I think one thing I say in the book is um what's the difference between a Van Go sunflower and a picture of a sunflower you can get in a yard sale, >> right? >> You know, and it's the way that he used the brush stroke, which is sort of the equivalent of language really. It is a language. So, so yeah. And and also like one of the most fun things about writing is finding one word that you thought you needed 10 words to use. I mean, it's insanely satisfying. So, yeah. I mean, there's a kind of joy in just finding the right word, which is, you know, it's a buzz.

You just get it's it's a real up. So, and I think that's part of the reason you do it. One of the things that struck me as I was reading that chapter is you were just emphasizing this started as a blank page and now there are a bunch of words on the page. So all those words were a decision that somebody made to say I'm going to put this one here. I'm going to put that one here. And once you really embody that, you realize, oh my goodness, I'm not just looking at a piece of paper. I'm looking at a thousand choices that were made and I'm trying to understand why the writer made those choices. That's exactly that's ex I mean that is the absolute basis of talking about this or teaching it. It's like you know it didn't pre-exist. There was an actual human being that sat down and didn't make those choices and decided you know as I said semicolon or colon or period like it made a difference. So and then

try and figure out why >> sentences. >> I think I start as I try as I remember and again you know so much of it goes back to clarity too. I mean somewhere in that chapter is uh is Virginia Wolf's opening of her essay on being ill. This is 141 words in case anyone's counting. But the thing is uh the clarity of it is so perfect considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed. What wastes and deserts of the soul, a slight attack of influenza brings to view. What precipaces and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals. What ancient and oburate oaks are set uprooted in us by the act of sickness. How we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and awake thinking to find ourselves in the

presence of the angels and the harbors when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's armchair and confuse his rinse the mouth rinse the mouth with a greeting of the deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us when we think of this as we are so frequently forced to think of it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

It's so clear and it's so beautiful and it's 141 words long >> and it's one sentence >> and it's one sentence. Yeah. I mean one one year years ago um I was teaching in Colombia and I taught this story that I love called the Marquis of by Henri Fun class and the students were going like oh we can't read these the sentences are so [laughter] long and and I'm and they're going it's like German and I said but you're reading it in English you know you absolutely can read these sentences so >> this is a graph of sentences over time >> gotten shorter >> oh yeah I mean we've basically gone from 23word average sentences in 1931 to about 15 word average sentences in 2026. I'm surprised the difference isn't bigger actually.

>> I am too. I am too. I don't know. Well, they start with Deafany and Demorat. If they'd gone back like another hundred years would have been even longer. >> Yeah. Well, I was thinking of that part of a movable feast by Hemingway where he just says, "Write one true sentence. Write one true sentence." And he's sort of looking over the Paris rooftops. I was just thinking, I don't know what if every single day I was like, the goal for the day, one goal for the day is just write one true sentence or one funny sentence. I mean, there's time there are times when I've, you know, I've written some sentence and it's really amused me even though I and then I'm go, "Okay, I'm done for the day." You know, I don't have to do anything else today.

>> Mission accomplished. >> Mission accomplished. >> Paragraphs. >> Well, I believe in them. What can I tell you? I mean, although, you know, I think maybe I say it in the book, I can't remember. The Garcia Marquez's Ottoma the Patriarch is one paragraph without paragraph breaks. And a friend of ours, a Polish artist, was saying, "Oh, I hate this book." And I went, "Why?" and he said because because I like to drink beer when I'm reading and there's no place in this book that I could put down the beer and pick it up again. So I went I get it. I don't know there you know it's like well you know babble says it's like a break of lightning like it's suddenly a way to uh a new thought can begin although again you know when I hear my kids being said topic sense I don't you know I have no idea but but it's instinctive. I mean I think so much of writing is just you get a kind of instinct which comes from reading too. I

mean you you know why does it's just pure instinctive it really is after a while why should I be get a new paragraph here instead of someplace else. I mean you have a sense that a slightly a slightly new thought is beginning maybe. Yeah, there's something annoying about that advice, but also incredibly liberating about that advice because I think it's true. Like good writing is instinctive. And at first you hear that, "Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do." Well, it seems like the answer is to read and your body just knows. The answer is to read and write.

I mean, there's no, you know, it's not as if people haven't written, you know, insanely brilliant first novels and then never written again. They somehow were born knowing how to do something and then they did. But I think for most of us, you know, I'm knocking on wood, you get better or it's not that it gets easier, but that you get a clearer sense of what you need or what you need to do

or something like that. >> Tell me about narration. >> It's a question. Who's telling the story and what and you know, I mean, what I mean, every time you when you pick a narrator, you're establishing a distance between the reader and the story. I mean, in third person, om so-called omnicient, I mean, there's no really such thing. So-called omnisient, you're far away from the action. You know, close third person, you're in the person's head, but you're not really, it's not first person.

Second person is like a whole other weird can of worms. >> I never understood that one. Well, sometimes, you know, it it it only works when I think when you know who the letter is being written to, you know, I mean, novels and letters certainly work that way. Um, and there's a great Mavis Galant story, Madame Dostto, that's in second person, but and then and then first person obviously is the closest you're going to get, but but then the question of like, do you call the character Smith, Mr. Smith, Joe, Joe Jose, you know what I you you know what you call and so so again a lot of narration is about you know obviously how the story is being told but but as I said before the distance between the reader and the writer I mean you know the new book has well really four different kinds five different kinds of narrations in it. I mean there's the collective narration of the ch of Dickens children and I've never even

tried that. I mean I you know that is there were there were nine children ranging in age of from 5 to 20. So and I really just couldn't pick which one was going to tell that part of the story. So I just thought let's try the collective voice and you know it had done before. I mean, Jeff Eugenities did it in the Virgin Suicides and and Josh Ferris and then we come to the end. So, you know, it was possible and then I wanted I knew I had to tell Dickens side of the story and I it was very intimidating to write from Dickens's point of view. I mean, it seemed insane to me and at first I tried to like not even mention the word Dickens and that wasn't just not going to work. So I call him Dickens and it's, you know, it's third person and and Anderson is so interior and so isolated that I couldn't I had to write it from the first person. I mean, no one else no one else would have known, even an omnisient narrator, what was going on in

this guy's head. And then and then to have letters is a whole other kind of, you know, a different kind of narration. >> Do you find it easier to write from the perspective of a woman versus a man? No, no. There three there two men are the in this novel the main characters there's several children of which I think only two or three were girls. Uh Katherine unfortunately has only a few uh little pieces of the novel. So no I don't it no it doesn't I've all you know Blue Angel was written from a man's point of view. Yeah. That's it.

>> But I had a brother. I have a long marriage. I have two sons. I've grown up a lot around a lot of guys, so I don't feel like it's some, you know, though I'm writing about space aliens or something, right? >> I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence College and having a horrible time and commuting from the Hudson Valley by bus. >> Our Yeah. O to New Relle and and it was the first and last time I've ever had an adversarial relationship with my students. I mean they were like you know because because the system then it may have changed them but I had to have a 40minute conference with each student whether or not they'd done any work during the week. So you know it's like still getting along with your roommate. I mean I was you know I was like therapist and and uh and my father was ill and the challenger blew up. I mean it was like a really bad year but but I I was reading check off on the bus commuting you know. I mean there were

like what 13 volumes of the of the constant garnet translation that echo presses and every time I would get on the bus and start reading check off I was like transported and also the interesting thing which I guess I say in that essay is that every time I mean you were saying that these books have these rules about writing you know that so stupid every time I would find myself saying some stupid rule about writing I get on the bus and start reading a check off novel and he would have broken precisely the rule I had just told them was a rule. So you know don't like have two characters with the same name because it's confusing for the reader. So there's this checkup story, the two villages. Guess what? Or you know, one of his one of his greatest stories is Gusev. I was saying like you can't have a first, you know, a close third person narrator who dies because obviously what's going to happen and and that's

Gusev. I mean at the end the narrative follows he dies at sea. He's a sailor and the narrative follows his they throw his coffin over his body over water and it follows it down the water and these like sharks come and these little school of fish come and then it just moves up to the sky, you know, glorious radiant colors for which there are no name. Well, Czechov did it really well. So, yeah, you can have a character die at the end of the story. So again, it was like uncanny every time I had said something and and and good for me too because that was the last the absolute last class that I said you can't do this, you can't do this except that I say you know don't write stuff that I can't understand because I'm not that you know like pretend I'm the stupidest person in the room and I need to be able to understand it. Like what happens when certain bits of information come into a certain brain and the certain brain

reacts in a certain way and thoughts, memories, ideas, hopes, dreams, all those things are part of why you would write. What's interesting? >> Yeah. I was working with a therapist and he said, "I want you to write as much of your internal chatter onto a piece of paper as you can." >> Really? How'd that go? It's astonishing to look at all the recurring things that go through your ma your mind that are so strange things that you little fragments of language that you picked up when you're six or seven years old that show up. Weird ways that you encourage yourself or berate yourself and you look at it and all of a sudden feel this distance from things that were so close inside your mind that you couldn't even see them.

>> Yeah. No. I can imagine. Yeah. Every so often I'm conscious of it. I'm going like, "Oh my god." And and a friend told me, she asked me, another writer, she said, "Um, she says to me like, if you drop something in the kitchen, do you like yell at yourself for 10 minutes?" And I went, "No." She said, "I just noticed that I did that." I said, "I had never noticed before. I must have done it my entire life." So,

>> dialogue, >> dialogue. Uh, again, eavesdropping. It's the best thing. How do people talk? you know, the stories people tell each other. Uh, you know, now that I live in the country, I mean, I the thing I miss, one of the things I miss most is just subway travel because you could hear, you know, you could hear people talking more >> and you get to watch people scroll Instagram, which is fun, too. >> Well, now Yeah, I know. And now, now they're usually playing, you know, Candy Crush and stuff.

>> 2048's the best fun. >> Is that right? >> Yeah. [laughter] Well, I do play a lot of computer solitire at home, but uh but that used to be great. You know, you just walk away with people pieces of dialogue that people have written for you. >> Mhm. But my sense of dialogue is that the dialogue that works in a novel is actually different from the way that people engage in that it gets compressed into a story. I mean subtext really is important but it also has to move the you know it's complicated because you don't want it to have narration masquerading as dialogue as I said but on the other hand something about the dialogue has to move the story forward >> or reveal character which is you know not that hard I mean people speak out of who they are >> well also what I think would be strange is there's so much empty language that actually is so revealing And how do you get that >> onto the page?

>> Well, it was a huge challenge writing uh five weeks because Hans Christristen Anderson doesn't speak English and he's under the impression that once he gets to Charles Dickens house he's going to magically learn English and of course that doesn't happen. So, and at some point he took like six weeks of English lessons and and also when they met they were both drunk. So, they both were under the impression they could speak. But he gets there and he can't communicate. So a lot of it is about the total inability to communicate even though they there's dialogue all the way through. And finally he learns I mean it's much easier to learn a language from kids. I mean you know something nannies and opairs figure out. So he does learn a certain amount of English from the kids and and Mrs. Dickens but he's so terrified of Dickens that he's mute in his presence. So there's a until the very end. So there's a lot of uh I don't

know miscommunication or stalled communication or or >> details, >> you know. Well, one and gesture. I mean, those two go together, you know. It's it's like if a person is not if there's no reason for the person to smoke a cigarette in a in a novel, a story, why are they doing it? you know, or you know, she filled his coffee cup again. So, unless it means something, unless it reveals something, you know, what's I mean, there's just a lot of kind of I guess I guess people use gesture and and bits of dialogue as like placeholders, but but one way to tell a placeholder is if you get rid of it and you don't notice it's gone, then turns out you didn't need it. So, you know, I mean, and also, I mean, I keep I keep saying like the value of the space break so underestimated. You know, you think you have to spend two pages getting a certain number of characters out of the house onto the street.

But instead, Space Break, they're on the street. You know, you just you just figure out what you don't need. >> Do you like the advice that they give to Hollywood writers? You want to enter the scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible? No, I It's one of those things. It's one of those, you know, how to or how not to. Some Yeah. Some you want to be there right in the middle. Some you can't. You have to figure out how the person got there. I mean, you just, you know, it depends. I mean, I think, you know, but also if you're writing from the screen, I think you're presupposing a different attention span.

>> You know, you're not although, you know, I mean, God, whatever. Well, maybe it's because it's sort of in a way period, but like Downtown Abbey opens with like driving up this endless driveway to this beautiful house. Like it's not exactly starting in the middle of the scene, but you know, I was into it. Just to go back to dialogue for a second, I was thinking like dialogue that I like. Uh I one of the books that I've been rereading and wrote an introduction to was uh Shirley Jackson's Hangs a Man. And do you have you read it? Her well it's this sort of young girl who's about to go to college and her father is just this he's a writer is just this fatuous blowhard. I mean just so full of himself and and it's hilarious because he's just so fy and full and and I every time I read it I think God must have been so much fun. you know, the I mean, the other I hate to say it, but one of the pleasures

of of of writing dialogue is that certain things that you've had to listen to for one reason or another, you just put them on the page and then, you know, you're exercised of of what it is that you've had to put up with. I mean, I'm sure if one of those people you heard fighting was a writer, it would within moments that would show up on somebody's, you

know. >> Last question. So you teach writing and what is it that you try to have your students understand by the end of the semester that they come in not knowing? >> Well, I teach I teach literature classes. So writing is sort of a com I mean they have to they have to send me a 300 word page 300 word page paper every week. So there's a writing component, but I think, you know, if I had to boil it down, really boil it down. I mean, the one thing that I find myself saying over and over is is the the magical fact that a human being wrote this, a human being wrote this, that it was just words on a page, but then there are these characters that we're all talking about as if they're somebody we know. you know, we know Madame Bovery, we know Heathcliffe, we know AB, we know these people. Uh, and there, you know, so much so that they're like holograms. I mean, we can just turn them around in the

middle of the desk and talk about the various aspects of them, but they were made up. Some actual person just made them up and put them together with words, not even pictures really, and and they exist. >> Yeah. Francine Pros, thank you very much. >> Thank you. It was good to meet you. >> Good to meet you.