irunfrombears:

I love skimming interviews and rarely do I read the entire thing. I am still making my way through the Spring issue of The Paris Review (currently halfway through Joshua Cohen’s short story), but I wanted to write up Ann Beattie’s interview so I could remember it. It’s one of the only ones I’ve read in its entirety.

On Fiction: 

It took me years and years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you’re raising questions, and a lot of people think you’re playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don’t know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers.

I’ve struggled with this for awhile in my own writing. I always expected that I would eventually answer my own questions while writing and I often forget that the story, the characters, often won’t allow that. A story has a life of its own, even outside of the author.

On Writing:

When I first started writing I was on a roll, I was learning stuff, I was always internalizing things and wanting to do the next move before I forgot what it was. Something was always the stepping stone to something else. Now there are still many surprises for me in what I write—if anything, it’s even more mysterious—but I no longer feel that having absolute focus and staying power will get me where I want to go.

I don’t begin with a preconceived notion of where a piece of writing is going to end. If you go around filling a grocery cart, you figure, I’m cooking for tonight. You are not often fooled in the grocery store as to what your approach should be. But I’m fooled by stories sometimes, thinking that I’m picking up something for the night, and it turns out that I’m shopping for a week or a month. I’m always happy when that happens. It’s not consistent fun like being on a roller coaster, but I can hardly think of anything that pleases me more than writing a sentence that surprises me.

On Hemingway:

Oh, just the bare necessities from Hemingway: his way of making the subtext creep into the reader’s consciousness, or maybe unconscious, as if it’s a bad dream, which makes it all the more insidious. He’d seem to back off from scenes, but he chose the scenes so well, they were enormously evocative. At the same time they were greatly understated. He writes that way in “Cat in the Rain.” He lets the place, and the commonly found aspects of the place, and the physical objects seem to create a world, all by themselves. The significance of the statue outside the window, the wrong cat brought to the American girl by the proprietor, the objects she imagines and covets are all things of her particular world that overwhelm her. It’s palpable. And I admire those endings of his that boomerang right back at you, with all the glitter, as well as all the dust, flying into your eyes—the final dialogue of The Sun Also Rises. I don’t love everything he wrote, but I love many of the stories, and also the structure of In Our Time. Certain things that I like about endings—endings that hint at the whole story, that let you know there is an arc, but that offer some related image or emotion, instead of decoding the initial image, or pattern, or symbol, endings that alter the tone and the mood just a bit. I realize that some people criticize me for being arbitrary with my endings. I think my stories are very determined. I can tell you the reverberation I have in mind for each element in the story. I can’t make you read it that way, but it’s been contrived, and then revised. What is there is intentional.

On Minimalism:

None of us have ever known what that means. Carver was incensed by it! If you look at what the term originally referred to, in painting and sculpture of the seventies, there is no analogy to what was going on in certain new writers of the time. Are my sentences like Raymond Carver’s? They simply are not, sentence by sentence, and I can’t see that any work is built except word by word, sentence by sentence. I love Raymond Carver’s work. I love it more than my own work, but I’m not interchangeable with Raymond Carver, and he’s not interchangeable with Frederick Barthelme.

That said, in the seventies a lot of us stopped tracking characters in a conventional way. In Carver’s story “Fat,” you don’t see what the floor of the restaurant looks like. You could see it, but you don’t. You don’t know what the street traffic is like outside. It’s set up more like a play, in which the scenery can’t change unless it’s during intermission. And in a very brief story, there often is no intermission.

The interplay between character and external world is something that realist writers always dealt with conscientiously, and it started to drop out with minimalism. Hemingway dropped it out, too, but even in his stories there tends to be a volley going on between the environment and the character. Carver won’t say what the volley is. None of us will.

I guess you might say that minimalism resides in certain omissions, in trusting, à la Beckett, that if you give the sparest sort of context—two people in a trash can, a road at night—it will be like a dreamscape for people’s projections. If you look at “Are These Actual Miles,” in spite of the fact that the wife is off somewhere, and we increasingly understand what she’s doing, Carver nevertheless keeps the reader in the house. Then there’s the neighbor out the window, watering the lawn. What could be more extraneous? I can make a lot of the neighbor symbolically; I can make many assertions about him. The point is, Carver lets us see so little outside. What’s on camera is the main character, separated from the action elsewhere, getting increasingly anxious. Tension builds for the character and for the reader because the reader can’t do anything about his limited environment. In Madame Bovary, hypothetically, Emma could run off across the fields! (Which I guess is what she did, and look at all the trouble it caused.)