Big Think

Calvin Trillin: Well I have a way of writing. I think everybody has a way of . . . I mean particularly people who work either completely as freelance writers, or in a place like The New Yorker where you’re essentially in the same situation in that you get paid by the piece rather than on salary. And nobody’s asking you for the piece, usually. So you have to figure out on your own how to do it and how to get it done. Or writing books is the same way. You have to figure out how to get it done. Most people invent some structure that allows them to do that, because God didn’t intend people to make livings as writers. I mean that was not in the grand plan. So you have to invent some sort of procedure that will allow you to do it, and it can be really dumb. I spent 15 years doing a piece every three weeks for The New Yorker from some part of the country, and – a 3,000 word piece. And I had the same schedule every time I came home. I mean I knew what I do the first day. I knew what I do the second day. And otherwise I wasn’t sure I was gonna get it done. So . . . And I used to have for longer pieces something called “The Committee for National Goals.” That was a phrase from the Eisenhower administration. And I imagined them as these old guys with beards sitting up high on a kind of a dais who . . . And I would give ‘em excuses. You know, “I don’t feel very well today.” And they’d say . . . they’d tell me how many pages had to be written no matter what. And you know, but people work in a completely different way. I think partly according to their background; partly . . . I mean I guess my first more or less “grown up” job was as a reporter in the south for Time during the Civil Rights Movement. And so you know I was used to writing with a typewriter on the back of the trunk of a car or something. I didn’t need to go into the woods in a shack to write. But some people do. It just depends on how they started, I think, a lot. And also when I was in about eighth grade, the Kansas City school system . . . Kansas City is always a little ahead of its time. Other cities in later years closed the schools when they ran out of money, but Kansas City did this years ago. And they closed the schools in April because they had run out of money and some tax bill wasn’t passed. And my father made us go to typing school and made me type for the rest of the summer. He thought typing was an important skill. And so I . . . I’ve always worked on a typewriter. I mean rather than, you know . . . You read about people who work in longhand, or I can write a letter in longhand. And so . . . And I type very quickly because I’ve been typing since I was a little boy. So I tend to put before computers . . . tended to put things through the typewriter a lot and just keep typing. And it took me a long time to sort of compose on the computer which I do now. I think most writers at some point realize they sound the way they’re supposed to sound – or at least they’re going to sound, maybe not supposed to. And that’s how they sound. I think once you’ve sort of settled into the way you’re gonna sound – what the writing teachers call your “voice” – there you are. I have no idea how to find it, but I think most people know when they’ve found it.

Recorded on: 9/5/07