Joan Didion Interview (page: 3 / 5) National Book Award	Print Interview

When you were working at Vogue in the '60s, did you already see yourself as an independent essayist?

Joan Didion: I was writing pieces that I just sent out. I really didn't have any control over them.

I did see myself as a novelist, even though I was having trouble finishing this first novel. After it was published, it was only read by about ten people, but they happened to be ten people who gave it to ten other people and eventually -- you know, not only was it not a commercial success, it wasn't by any means, I don't think, a success on its own terms. I didn't know how to do it, and it ended up, because I didn't know how to do it -- I wanted to have a shattered narrative, but I didn't have a clue how to do that, and so it was confusing. So the publisher pressed me to straighten out the chronology, so it became just a simple novel with a flashback, which wasn't my intention at all. But anyway, enough people read it so that I was offered a contract for a second novel.
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What was the first novel called?

Joan Didion: Well, that was another thing. It was called Run River, but that was the publisher's title. I said, "What does it mean?" He said, "It means life goes on," and I said, "That's not what the book is about."

And what was the second book?

Joan Didion: The second was Play It As It Lays.

You've said that one of your intentions in that work was to write a novel that moved so fast that it would be over before you noticed it, so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page.

Joan Didion: I just wanted to write a fast novel. You always have a vision of what kind of object a piece of fiction is going to be, or anything that you're making. In that case, it was going to exist in a white space. It was going to exist between the paragraphs. Some of the chapters are only three or four lines long in that book, and I found a way to speed it up. I had started it -- just because I didn't know how else to start it -- I started it with two or three characters (who) have short first-person statements, and then it goes into a "close third" for what appears to be the rest of the book, but as the book comes to an end and starts gaining momentum, you can pick up a lot of momentum by going back to this device from the beginning. This sounds so technical. You go back to that first person and shorter and shorter bursts, and it really gives you a lot of speed. So I was sort of thrilled with that.
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It was a fairly revolutionary structure, wasn't it, to employ both third- and first-person narrators that way?

Joan Didion: There is nothing you can't do, it turns out.

Faulkner, in As I Lay Dying, used all these different first-person narrators, but you mixed that up even further by having first and third-person narrators. When you say you wanted the book to move fast, do you mean you want the reader to kind of gobble it up?

Joan Didion: I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it. I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

To this day, your books are fairly short, for the most part. Did a publisher ever give you any trouble about that?

Joan Didion: No. Publishers now, it turns out, like short books. They didn't used to like short books, but they are now convinced that that's what people want.

I would imagine that it's harder to write a short book because every word has to be so exact. Isn't it easier to write long?

Joan Didion: It might be for some people, but it wouldn't be for me because I would lose interest as it kind of meandered on.

It sounds like, for you, writing is, in large part, editing.

Joan Didion: It happens in the course of writing.

I can't go on if it's not pretty much the way that it should be. Towards the beginning of a book, I will go back to page one every day and rewrite. I'll start out the day with some marked-up pages that I have marked up the night before, and by the time you get to page, maybe, 270, you are not going back to page 1 necessarily anymore, but you're going back to page 158 and starting over from there.
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When one reads your prose, it feels like you just sat down and wrote it that way the first time, because it's so spare, and because the language is so powerful, but from what you are describing, there are actually a number of drafts.

Joan Didion: Endless drafts.

Has the computer helped you a lot?

Joan Didion: I didn't like it when I first began using it. Where it's helped me a lot is in non-fiction which is a kind of different process. You've got research, you've got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape. When you're writing fiction, you don't have notes necessarily. You don't carve it, it's not like a piece of sculpture, it's more like water color.

When you're writing fiction, do you know how it's going to turn out?

Joan Didion: Sometimes I do. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I know how it's going to end. For example, in The Last Thing He Wanted, which was my last novel, I knew that the end required a double set-up, but I didn't know what the set-up would be until I got there.

So what did you end up doing there?

Joan Didion: This book had so complicated a plot that I had to write it in about three months in order to keep the plot in my mind. It's too complicated to explain, but basically she gets set up, and he gets set up. The way she is set up is she is supposed to have killed him. She apparently kills him. Now, actually, she doesn't kill him. Someone else kills him. A sniper kills him, but she is targeted as the alleged assassin because some Sandinista literature will be discovered in her hotel room. It was a double set-up.

Do you carve out certain hours of the day that are devoted to writing, or is it sort of as the mood strikes you?

Joan Didion: I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

Seven days a week?

Joan Didion: Yeah. Obviously, today I'm not doing something, and tomorrow I'm not doing something because I'm flying. So it will take me about three days this week to get to working again.

So you feel like if you stay away from it for very long, you won't feel confident enough to go back. Even today?

Joan Didion: Even more so now, because I know I'll lose the impetus to do it.

We interviewed John Updike, and he said when he sees his books in the bookstore, he always feels like he got away with something. It's astonishing that someone of his stature would still have that insecurity.

Joan Didion: It's not an occupation that attracts really secure people. I've never really examined it, but I suppose it's a kind of secret activity which you can undertake on your own. In fact, you need to undertake it on your own. It doesn't increase your socialization.

You have said that you write to find out how you feel.

Joan Didion: And what you think.

When commentators look at your work, they sometimes group you with the so-called "New Journalists" --Tom Wolfe and so on. In your non-fiction, you've always been present as a character, as a protagonist in a way.

Joan Didion: I had a strong feeling that it was necessary, that there was no reason to trust the reporter unless you knew where the reporter was. And if you didn't know where the reporter was standing, then I really objected to the notion of objectivity, soi disant objectivity, because it didn't seem to me very real. The reporter is always standing someplace.
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Joan Didion: I don't mean that he is biased, you just want to know where he's standing, so that you can triangulate different reports from different people against each other.

It's paradoxical. You've described yourself as being soft-spoken, yet in your writing, you are very outspoken.

Joan Didion: That's another sneaky part of it. It's a place where I can be someone other than my exact face to the world.

So there's a difference between how you are in the world and your writing?

Joan Didion: I think there is less of a difference now, but there certainly was a difference.

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