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Creating the Mood by Bill Hussey

March 1st, 2009

Due to a case of excruciating back pain, caused in part by my terrible posture at the keyboard, I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours lounging on the sofa, propped up by dozens of cushions. Instead of lamenting the ravages that time is now inflicting on my thirty-one-year-old body I decided to catch up on a little reading. Having devoured the first two volumes of The Paris Review Interviews, this case of extreme neck and lumber crick allowed me the time to get on with volume 3.

I think that The Paris Review Interviews ought to be a set text for any aspiring writers out there. These are in-depth pieces in which some of the greatest writers of the 20th Century talk about their professional life (although some, like Georges Simenon, would balk at the labour of writing being called a ‘profession’). As Margaret Atwood says in her introduction to volume 3, it is comforting for any scribbler to know that even the greats have ‘doubted and blocked and messed up… have been poor and neglected… have kept going and overcome obstacles and persevered.’

A number of the interviews in this volume come from the 1950s and, in one respect, have an air of quaint comedy about them due to the fact that the interviewers seem convinced that, in the future, all novels will be dictated into new-fangled dictaphones. Aside from this, the insights and advice of writers like Ralph Ellison, Simenon, Harold Pinter and Evelyn Waugh are as pertinent to the writing process today as when the interview was set down.

One piece of advice comes from the wonderful Joyce Carol Oates, who alongside Capote and Raymond Carver is in my top 3 of the best American short story writers. It concerns something I believe Joseph and I have touched on before in our occasional conversations ‘on writing’. I’ll let Oates state the case in her own words:

‘Interviewer: Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write? Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind? Is your mood reflected in what you write? How do you describe that perfect state in which you can write from early morning into the afternoon?

Oates: One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood’. In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function – a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind – then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I’ve found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing seemed worth enduring for another five minutes… and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so…’

Creating your own mood, not waiting around for those blasted muses, and writing when it’s the last thing on Earth you want to do. More than any 3 book publishing contract, it seems to me that this marks the true difference between the part-time amateur and the professional writer.

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