John Updike Interview (page: 6 / 8) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction	Print Interview

You've said that it was fairly easy to write the Rabbit books. Do you write methodically? Do you have a schedule that you stick to?

John Updike: Since I've gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So, I work three or four hours in the morning, and it's not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases. You begin by answering a letter or two. There's a lot of junk in your life as a writer and most people have junk in their lives. But, I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There's a danger if you don't move it along steadily that you're going to forget what it's about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule. I've been maintaining this schedule off and on -- well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in '57. It's a long time to be doing one thing. I don't know how to retire. I don't know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type. It's still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe abandon the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I've operated.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime	[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

We've spoken to a number of writers who said they wrote a certain number of pages every day. There's a lot to be said for having a routine you can't run away from.

John Updike: Right. It saves you from giving up.

This present novel that will be out -- Villages -- I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it. So, it was really the habit -- the habit of writing that kept me at it in the end. It was like a bad marriage. I mean, whatever. This is the wife I'm married to here, and I'm going to finish this book. Finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it. So yes, it's good to have a certain doggedness to your technique. In college I was struck by the fact that Bernard Shaw, who became a playwright only after writing five novels, would sit in the British Museum, the reading room, and his quota was something like maybe five pages a day, but when he got to the last word on the last page, -- whether it was the middle of a sentence -- he would stop. So this notion that when you have a quota, whether it's two pages or -- three is how I think of it, three pages -- that it's a fairly modest quota, but nevertheless if you do it, really do it, the stuff will accumulate.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime	[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

You've recently published early stories. How does it feel to look back on work that you've done decades ago?

John Updike: Well, of course it brought back to me the life I was living at the time, and the various real people who lurk behind some of the characters, so it was a trip down memory lane for me. The only novelty really in the book was that I rearranged them thematically, so that a kind of a smuggled autobiography flows beneath the full run of the stories. I suppose a stronger writer or a more self-critical one might have made a selection, but I thought somehow the value of the book might be in doing them all. Doing all the ones that were good enough to get into print -- most of them in The New Yorker. A few The New Yorker turned down, but I thought this standard was enough for a writer to become terribly judgmental about his work. Some of the stories could stand a little improvement, which I was happy to bestow, so for me it was an exercise in rewriting to some extent. I'm glad I did it. It's sort of one of the books that's going to be too heavy to read with comfort, and I'm sorry about that. It's a heavy book but there is some kind of statement. Some kind of a new focus is being applied to these old stories just from the way they're arranged.

Do you feel that you have changed in your way of writing? You said in an interview that you thought the early Rabbit books might have been written too fast.

John Updike: I've rewritten the early books to some extent. Rabbit Run had some legal troubles. It was considered racy at the time, and so some sexually explicit bits were taken out and they were later restored, so I was happy. I put them back because the climate suddenly became, you know, "What's the fuss?" And, then again I looked at them -- I reread the whole bunch when they were put into an Everyman four-volume. So there has been some rewriting. There's a danger of an older man rewriting a younger man now. You might just throw out the baby with the bath water somehow. I didn't rewrite. I wasn't looking for trouble with the early short stories, but when you're young I think you're so surprised to find yourself writing at all that you jump on almost any word that will work. And, when you're older you sort of know there are lots of words, lots of words that you could use, and so your writing becomes a little less inspired and a little more plodding and careful. But, I did marvel at some of the phrases that the younger Updike tossed off. "I couldn't do this now," I said to myself, so I'm glad I did it when I could do it.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime

You were a little more devil-may-care?

John Updike: Yeah, devil-may-care, and being more fully persuaded that I had something unique to bring to these ordinary people and ordinary days to some extent. I was bringing a kind of verbal care, verbal elegance that they wouldn't otherwise get. So in a way, I felt I had a franchise to maintain, and maybe the writing is too self-cherishing in spots. You know the saying that you should write invisibly, that writing should be invisible. I think people know they're reading a book, and that this object in front of them is a page of words. What I really like in a book is the sense that the writing is itself entertaining, or interesting, or it makes you want to read a sentence twice.

John Updike Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8