INTERVIEW BY LINDA KUEHL
THE PARIS REVIEW | The Art of Fiction No. 71.
FALL / WINTER 1978

INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.
DIDION: It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

INTERVIEWER: Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?
DIDION: Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I'm committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.

INTERVIEWER: When did you know you wanted to write?
DIDION: I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours—an actress—was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn't plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.

INTERVIEWER: Did any writer influence you more than others?
DIDION: I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they're perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.

INTERVIEWER: You have said that once you have your first sentence you've got your piece. That's what Hemingway said. All he needed was his first sentence and he had his short story.
DIDION: What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

INTERVIEWER: The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.
DIDION: Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That's how it should be, but it doesn't always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities. Unless you're Henry James.

The Joan Didion Interview: Part II

INTERVIEW BY SARA DAVIDSON
THE NEW YORK TIMES | APRIL 3, 1977

DAVIDSON: In “Why I Write” [a lecture delivered at the University of California at Berkeley and reprinted in part in The Book Review Dec. 5, 1976], there's a confidence expressed about the process of writing that know you don't always feel.
DIDION: I didn't express confidence so much as blind faith that if you go in and work every day it will get better. Three days will go by and you will be in that office and you will think every day is terrible. But on the fourth day, if you do go in, if you don't go into town or out in the garden, something usually will break through.

DAVIDSON: How do you feel when you wake up?
DIDION: Oh, I don't want to go in there at all. It's low dread, every morning. That dread goes away after you've been in there an hour. I keep saying “in there” as if it's some kind of chamber, a different atmosphere. It is, in a way. There's almost a psychic wall. The air changes. I mean you don't want to go through that door. But once you're in there, you're there, and it's hard to go out.

DAVIDSON: I'd always assumed that, after you'd been writing for a number of years, that fear would disappear.
DIDION: No. it doesn't. It's a fear you're not going to get it right. You're going to ruin it. You're going to fail. The touchy part on a book—when there's not the dread in the morning, when there's the dread all day long—is before it takes. Once it takes, there's just the morning dread and the occasional three days of terrible stuff; but before it takes, there's nothing to guarantee that it's going to take. There's a point in a novel where it shifts or the narrative won't carry. That point has to come before a third of the way through. It goes into overdrive. There are some novels you pick up and start reading and they're wonderful. Maybe you have to go to lunch or something and you get to page 70 and never pick them up again. You're not moved to keep turning pages. That's the narrative curve you've got to allow, around page 70 or 80, to give it enough thrust to send it out. Imagine, a rocket taking off. There's a point at which it drops its glitter or glamor and starts free.

DAVIDSON: How do you feel about a book while you're writing it?
DIDION: I try to hold my opinion in suspension. I hate the book when I'm working on it. But if I give way to that thought I would never finish the book, and then I would feel depressed and useless and have nothing to do all day.

DAVIDSON: Have you ever not finished a book?
DIDION: I've put things aside at 40 pages.

DAVIDSON: Could you talk about your writing method?
DIDION: When I started this book, I wrote the first paragraph and continued for about three pages. Then I got scared and started skipping around and writing odd things.

DAVIDSON: What did you get scared of?
DIDION: Scared I couldn't sustain it. So I started writing odd bits here and there, and then stopped being so scared when I had a pile of little things that appeared to be in the same tone as the beginning of the book. I just went back and started writing straight through until about page 40. By then the book was taking a slightly different direction. It was clear there was a narrator, for example. I had not intended there to be a narrator. I was going to be the female author's voice. I the author was going to tell you the reader the story. But the “I” became so strong that it became a character, so I went back and rewrote those 40 pages with that narrator. As the story developed, things kept changing; and you can push ahead for a little while knowing that those things are wrong back there, but you can't push too far or you lose precision. It doesn't matter to you as much, if you know it's wrong back there, so I started over again. I started over about 12 times. I wanted to start over when I went to Sacramento to

DAVIDSON: You always go to Sacramento to finish your books. Is that a ritual?
DIDION: It's very easy for me to work there. My concentration can be total because nobody calls me. I'm not required to lead a real life. I'm like a child, in my parents’ house.

DAVIDSON: Do you admire elegance?
DIDION: Yes, because it makes you feel better. It's a form. I'm very attached to certain forms, little compulsive rituals. I like to cook; I like to sew. They're peaceful things, and they're an expression of caring.

DAVIDSON: Is John [Gregory Dunne] your editor?
DIDION: Yes, we edit each other. A lot of people wonder how we can edit each other and live together, but it works out very well. We trust each other. Sometimes we don't agree. Obviously you never want to agree when somebody tells you something doesn't work. I don't mean that kind of not agreeing. That's just when you're tired and it's midnight. I mean, sometimes, even on reflection, we don't agree, and there is a tacit understanding that neither of us will push too far. Each of us is aware that it would be easy to impose our sensibility, particularly our own style, on each other. And so there is a tacit agreement not to push beyond saying, “It doesn't work. This is how to fix it.” If there is still a substantive disagreement it's never mentioned again.

DAVIDSON: How do you feel about getting older?
DIDION: I'm a very slow writer and I could count, if I wanted to—which I don't—the number of books I will have time to write. I work more. I work harder. There is a sense of urgency now.