Les conseils de Lucius Shepard

[jerome]

Lucius Shepard donne quelques conseils aux apprentis écrivains :

"What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Lucius Shepard : Careerwise, I don’t think I should be giving advice to anyone. Writerly advice, well, just the usual. Write a lot. Write all the time. Be obsessive with it. Steal stuff from writers you admire. Never carry a camera—rely on your memory and your senses to record and interpret the world. I remember when I first went to Egypt I took a trip out to this oasis named Siwa and I came back with about five hundred pictures of sand and little memory of doing other than taking pictures. After that I threw the camera away. Miniature tape recorders are good in order to get to know how dialogue really sounds. After a while you won’t need one. It’s like in school when I used to write cheat sheets—by the time I finished writing them I had the answers down pat and didn’t need them. But recorders are useful for focusing your ear. Theodore Roethke once said, Facts are jewels. They are jewels for a writer. The specifics are what connect with a reader, what give him that special sense of place. Develop your ear and your eye, and you’ll be halfway there. Write what you know, but know as much of the world as you can. Go get yourself a scar and a tattoo. Do some living. Take some risks. It amazes me how many writers I meet who haven’t done much besides go to school and write and hold down a few jobs. Maybe that works for them; I’m certain it does for some; but I remember what my freshman advisor said to me the first time we met. He asked, What do you want to be? I said, maybe a rock and roll musician, or a writer. He said, What are you doing here?

You can always go to college, but you can’t always be 19 or 20. So my best advice would be to live a few stories before you try and write one. Feel some shit. Get intense. Forget who you want to be and be who you are for a while. You may be surprised by what develops. Living that way will give you a bunch of material and teach you a hell of a lot about narrative. Having to talk your way out of trouble in, say, Medan, Indonesia when it’s pouring rain and this little swarthy guy in sunglasses and khakis with a big gun is about to take you for a drive... that can be extremely instructive about the art of bullshit, which is indispensable for a writer. You might not survive it, but look at it as a learning experience."

toute l'interview