Big Think

Kurt Andersen: The pleasures I get out of writing non-fiction, or writing essays, which is really what I do these days in journalism – is mostly a figuring out what I think. I wrote a piece about trying to figure out what I think about the current nightmare debacle of Iraq in terms of what U.S. policy should be, and what the debate should be. And that’s such a profoundly complicated thing to figure out, for me anyway. That it was only through writing and thinking it through that I was able to begin to figure out what I really did think we should or shouldn’t do. Or how long, or when we should leave and all of those things.

I sometimes begin a piece like that with a basic sentence, but I usually find that it is only through the writing that I get any clarity in my own mind.

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. 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 so that’s hugely fun.

And since I’m relatively a new writer and 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, if not mastering, at least having good moments of figuring out how to do 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 when I feel as though I’ve gotten a line right, or a character, or a paragraph, or a chapter; I was going to say it’s all struggle in what I do. But there’s very little struggle in what I do on the radio. It is a kind of unfairly pleasurable experience because the people I work with do most of the heavy lifting, and I just get to talk to brilliant people.

But any kind of writing – non-fiction or fiction – is a struggle. It’s a very moment-to-moment struggle of figuring 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 becomes an enormous structure to try to get as right as possible. It’s a pleasurable struggle when you’re done; but it is a struggle while it’s going on.

Recorded On: July 5, 2007