Jeffrey Ford revient sur sa carrière...
Posté : mer. août 26, 2009 9:20 am
Jeffrey Ford est en interview sur le site du prix Nebula.
Il revient au détour d'une question sur sa carrière.
Extrait :
Your first novel, Vanitas, was published in 1988. Almost ten years went by before your next books, The Well-Built City trilogy, were released. What changes, if any, occurred in your approach to writing during that time?
Jeffrey Ford : Forget my approach to writing, what happened is I had two sons. I spent a lot of time with them, reading to them, playing crazy games, and walking for hours with them in this double stroller we had, checking out the world. This was where it was at. I didn’t have time to write novels then, but I continued to write. I focused my attention on writing short stories. I wrote a bunch of them at night, after everybody was finally asleep. I was tired, but it was a blast. Occasionally, I’d sell one. I was sending more realistic stories to literary journals and obviously fantastic stories to genre magazines. During this time, two things happened as far as writing. I finally got the notion to combine the two types of stories I was writing. Not exactly genius—all revelations for me came slowly as far as writing went. Once I did that, though, I started publishing a lot more stories. I have to say that the genre magazines were much more accepting of my hybrids than the lit. magazines, and it seemed to me at the time, much more willing to take a chance with something either structurally or thematically different. The other thing I finally realized was the beauty of revision. Revision went from being a theoretical concept to an integral part of the creation of the stories. That personal discovery was thrilling to me. Every story is a combined creation of both the (and I wish I had better terms to describe this) conscious and the subconscious. They’re both important to crafting a good piece, but it’s essential that they both have the story’s best interest at heart and are willing to relinquish ground to one another when it is called for. A big part of learning to write fiction is getting to a point where you can feel their allegiance or lack thereof to the story. Still, mistakes are often made. What can I say?
Il revient au détour d'une question sur sa carrière.
Extrait :
Your first novel, Vanitas, was published in 1988. Almost ten years went by before your next books, The Well-Built City trilogy, were released. What changes, if any, occurred in your approach to writing during that time?
Jeffrey Ford : Forget my approach to writing, what happened is I had two sons. I spent a lot of time with them, reading to them, playing crazy games, and walking for hours with them in this double stroller we had, checking out the world. This was where it was at. I didn’t have time to write novels then, but I continued to write. I focused my attention on writing short stories. I wrote a bunch of them at night, after everybody was finally asleep. I was tired, but it was a blast. Occasionally, I’d sell one. I was sending more realistic stories to literary journals and obviously fantastic stories to genre magazines. During this time, two things happened as far as writing. I finally got the notion to combine the two types of stories I was writing. Not exactly genius—all revelations for me came slowly as far as writing went. Once I did that, though, I started publishing a lot more stories. I have to say that the genre magazines were much more accepting of my hybrids than the lit. magazines, and it seemed to me at the time, much more willing to take a chance with something either structurally or thematically different. The other thing I finally realized was the beauty of revision. Revision went from being a theoretical concept to an integral part of the creation of the stories. That personal discovery was thrilling to me. Every story is a combined creation of both the (and I wish I had better terms to describe this) conscious and the subconscious. They’re both important to crafting a good piece, but it’s essential that they both have the story’s best interest at heart and are willing to relinquish ground to one another when it is called for. A big part of learning to write fiction is getting to a point where you can feel their allegiance or lack thereof to the story. Still, mistakes are often made. What can I say?