Carol Shields Interview (page: 6 / 6) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction	Print Interview

So many of us loved being read to as children. Do you remember that?

Carol Shields: Yes. Sure, even when you could read. Yes, my older two children, as soon as they could read themselves, they wanted to read themselves, but the younger ones didn't. With the very youngest, I remember we would read books, she would read a page, and I would read a page, and that was very nice to do, and it took her right up into her teens. So it was very comfortable. I remember reading my daughter, Meg, Anne of Green Gables. You know, if you have read this, you know there are parts of it that are very saccharine. I kept cutting out little lengthy descriptions just as I read. It was sort of an instant editing, although that book has been very meaningful for -- I guess for all of my daughters and for my mother.

Not a big favorite with fathers and sons.

Carol Shields: No. No. I wouldn't think it would be. Not many men can identify with Gilbert Blythe (in Anne of Green Gables) or even Jo March (in Little Women), which I always think is curious. A lot of -- almost all -- women know who Jo March is, but hardly any men.

That's quite a beautiful book. In The Stone Diaries you say, "It is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence." Could you talk a little bit about that?

Carol Shields: I'm always caught by this question of, did I think Daisy Goodwill was a heroine or not. What was heroic in her life? I've said in another place in this novel that what she did was she got through 10,000 ordinary days. I think there is a kind of heroism in keeping ourselves sane with this life that we have been handed, the life we inherited, putting up with it, getting through it on a day-to-day -- never mind the major crises that come along -- the small boredoms, the small frustrations. And I suppose this is what I mean here by keeping faith with that, that it's all a worthwhile enterprise in the end, though it seldom seems so when we're close up to it.

A famous psychologist wrote that the crazy person in the family is the one who tells the truth. Life is very difficult; it's a wonder that we hold it together.

Carol Shields: Yes, it is a wonder. It's a wonder how few suicides there actually are, I often think, or cases of severe depression, when there is so much in our life that doesn't find response anywhere. Yes.

How would you explain to someone who has never written what makes it so exciting to you, why it compels you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Shields: I always have trouble with this because I always try to get students to rewrite their work, and they never want to. It's in the rewriting where I find the exhilarating part of the whole enterprise. The writing itself, the first draft, the sort of hacking at the stone wall, seems to me to be such a difficult piece of work that it's hard to see where pleasure comes into this process. But once something is on the page and you start moving it around, changing words, moving sentences -- I love sentences, by the way. This is why I'm a writer. I love to make sentences. I even love punctuation. I once sent a whole class to sleep by talking about the semicolon for three-quarters of an hour. I love all of this stuff that we are given, this little handful of equipment and raw materials. So it is a joyous expression when you see something come together at last, and then the next day you look at it and you realize you haven't done it at all, and then you do it again, and that's even better when you -- so you get closer and closer to what you really want to say, to what you really mean. You never get right at it, and I think you have to accept that as a writer, that, you know, what we call "the golden book in our head" is not going to make it to the page completely. But we can keep getting closer and closer, and I find this exhilarating. And I'm not a very patient person, but with this one aspect of my life, I have enormous patience.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

The patience that you will get closer?

Carol Shields: That I'll get closer, if I only keep working on it.

Well, it's good news to your readers that you're going to keep working on it. Thank you very much.

Carol Shields: Thank you.

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