I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.
I don’t pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating ‘Swann’s Way.’ There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences.
I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I’m not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.
I started with small-press publishers, who were willing to publish all sorts of forms. I didn’t move to the larger presses until they knew what they were getting in for.
Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn’t occur to people – or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.
In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle – ‘I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me’ – a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too...
Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I’m going on. You need at least two brains to write.
If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.
I find teaching – I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
When I’m trying a new form- trying to do something I’m not used to doing, which was true of the novel.
I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.
I would recommend, definitely, developing a ‘day job’ that you like – don’t expect to make money writing!
I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing – I’m always searching for multiple ways to say things.
I’m used to rereading e-mails, even, before sending them – a bit compulsive. So this is high speed roller coaster for me!
I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words – like ‘pois chiches’ for chick peas!
But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it.
I don’t feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.