The World of the Novel

Description: Kurt Andersen discusses the novel as an intellectual undertaking. He talks about the joy he finds creating his own world.

Transcript:

For fiction, the pleasure – the joy – is being god of my own little world. And creating this world and these characters. In this latest book, in the middle of the 19th Century, and while . . . as other fiction writers have said, they take on their own life and surprise one – the author – by doing things you didn’t expect. Still you are god. And . . . and . . . and so that’s hugely fun. And since I’m relatively a new writer and I’ve been dabbling . . . I’ve dabbled in fiction before the last 11 years, but I’ve only been publishing . . . And I still feel like, as I expect to feel for the rest of my life, that I’m still figuring it out; so that the joy of . . . of . . . of kind of, if not mastering, at least having good moments of figuring out how to do this . . . this thing that again, because of my childhood and my parents sort of worship of fiction – great novels – I feel as though, you know, it’s . . . if not the highest, best calling, at least one of them. And . . . and . . . and when I feel as though I can . . . I’ve gotten a line right, or a character, or a paragraph, or a chapter, I . . . that is ___________.

But any kind of writing – non-fiction or fiction – is a struggle. It’s a very, you know, moment-to-moment struggle of figuring out the right . . . where the right sentence, the right paragraph, the right page, the right structure for the larger thing. And when you’re writing a book – my two novels have been 600 odd pages – that’s . . . there’s . . . that becomes an enormous structure to . . . to try to . . . to try to get as right as possible. So that’s . . . It’s a . . . It’s a pleasurable struggle when you’re done; but it is a struggle while it’s going on. I actually find the work of writing fiction less of a struggle, less of a stressful procedure than I do writing a 1,700 word essay. That to me is . . . the . . . the essay, or journalism really is sort of . . . is almost pure struggle. And then I’m only happy when I’m done. Whereas fiction actually . . . writing fiction has moments of . . . of pleasure amid the struggle while it’s going on.

I like to think that the, you know, tens of thousands of people who are reading this . . . this novel that I’ve written about the middle of the 19th Century will actually have their . . . their brains permanently re-wired to think about the middle of the 19th Century in a different way as a result of having read this book. So that’s, you know . . . to the degree that that’s true . . . that’s a hugely gratifying, albeit small, impact. Recorded On: 7/5/07