Jonathan Franzen on Writing
It is such a huge question, I mean, I really literally could talk all day and barely scratch the surface and think it would interest as many as four or five other people how that works. I will say that it is always about tone and if the tone is not there, there is no writing. And so, to get anything done, I need a tone and I need some sense of outline. And the outline is usually much easier to get to the tone. I do not have the heart to try to make an outline until I believe that there is a piece of writing to be done and the piece of writing will exist as soon as I believe that there is a tone to write it in, so I made the mistake this fall of spending a lot of time trying to outline a piece I wrote about New York State. I thought I had come up with the tone, but I had not looked at those pages and when I went ahead and spent a lot of time not only making an outline but doing research based on that outline and then went back and the pages were horrid, just terrible! And I hated them and I hated the person who wrote them. I mean, I am in a relatively luxurious position at this point in my writing life where I do not have to do things that are not interesting and something—a piece of writing is not interesting or worth doing if there is not some personal risk; if it is not dangerous in some fashion whether you are exposing some part of yourself, you would rather not talk about or whether you are trying to be sincere about something that would be much more comfortable to be ironic about or vice versa, if you are being sarcastic or ironic about something that people take seriously to name just some of the obvious ways in which writing can have an element of risk, there can also be some kind of content risks, you do not want to be seen writing such and such a thing, or it would even be literally somewhat dangerous to do for a journalist! But particularly when there is some element of psychological risk, there is a discomfort. The first thing you have to know is can I find a way to write about this uncomfortable thing that will not make people uncomfortable when they read it and that distance is always navigated by way of the piece’s tone. Do you like how you sound as you write about it or do you sound like a pompous asshole and then you cannot immediately know that, but as soon as you start hearing, “Oh, this I could read aloud and it would not kill me.” And yet, people might simultaneously enjoy it, but also be made slightly uncomfortable about it, well that is where I want to be and that—when you start hearing that and you have some paragraphs that work like that, well you can say, “Okay, well I can write the whole thing in that voice.” And it will be okay. At which point, it is safe to create an outline and go on. So that is my processed answer.