The Challenges of Writing

Question: What did you aim to achieve with your new book that you'd never achieved before? Paul Auster: As you say, each book is a new book. I've never written it before and I feel that I have to teach myself how to do it as I'm doing it. This book evolves in a very organic way. I wasn't sure about where I wanted it to go, what I thought was going to happen. I had the beginning in my head, but then as I began writing, more ideas came to me about how to continue the book. I think it's the first time structurally that I've never had more than one narrator in the book. There are actually three in this one. But what I hope to accomplish? I don't know. It's for you to tell me, I really don't know. You get grabbed by the story, the characters, the language that you want to embody somehow on the page, and then the rest is done in a kind of trance, and so it's hard for me to say what I want to happen. Just something important for the reader, something memorable, I suppose. In the same way it was memorable to me to write it. Question: Which of your books has been the most challenging? Paul Auster: The most challenging project I've ever done, I think, is every single thing I've ever tried to do. It's never easy. Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty. I think probably I struggled most, had the most difficulty completing things or writing something to my son, especially when I was young, I was starting out. And then there would be many false starts, many abject failures that depressed me to no end. And as the years went on, I became a little more comfortable with the prospect of failure as part of the routine of writing, the whole business of it. What changed for me over the years, I think is this. Early on, when I was writing a novel and I got stuck, and every writer gets stuck at certain points, I would go into a kind of panic thinking the project is over, I don't know what to do with it, and go through some very tormented times. Now, in my old age, when I come to these moments, I say to myself, "If this book needs to be written, if it's something valuable, if it has the power that I think it might, then I'm going to figure it out and all I have to do is be patient." So sometimes it's a matter of taking a couple of days off, sometimes a month off, which happened with this new book, “Invisible,” I took about six weeks off, just to meditate on what I wanted to do with it. And then lo and behold, you're rolling again. And I don't know this happens, but I think it's so much a matter of the unconscious telling you what to put on the page. And if you're listening and relaxed enough to be able to listen, it will happen.