Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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To celebrate the release of her new novella, The Party , we caught up with Tessa Hadley to discuss the act of writing as a slow process – and the joy in that moment where everything starts to come together. Writing is slow and reading is fast. It may take you a day to write a couple of paragraphs, sweating over them, trying to capture the precise aura of someone’s physical presence, their appearance and an instant impression of their character too, straining your imagination, free associating perhaps around an image in your mind’s eye, scribbling in a notebook or on a scrap of paper before you commit to the keyboard. Or you might be messing around with your dialogue, making them say too much, so that it sounds wordy or too literary, then cutting back to the broken blurted fragments that feel more like living speech. And then tinkering with the punctuation, breaking up the sentences and then joining them together again, trying to get the most natural-seeming flow of words. Transitions are the hardest: how to get people out of the room, or to prepare for someone’s entrance, or move from describing what someone looks like to describing falling in love with them, or starting a quarrel with them. Or just jumping ahead from Saturday to Monday. Then, if your couple of paragraphs make it through to the final draft and the published book, even your most appreciative and careful reader will whisk through them, after all that work you’ve put in, in just a couple of minutes. Partly your reader is hurrying on to follow the story, but it’s not just that. Even the slowest reading of prose fiction is meant to be faster than writing, much much faster. The words are meant to flow past your reader’s awareness as if they are spooling out easily and inevitably, as if they never could have been written any other way. They are meant to carry your reader forward. Perhaps at best, if you’re lucky, once every few pages, someone will pause for a few moments to dwell […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
