Interview Roundup

Pulitzer-winning Franz Wright reflects on his career in a chat with the St. Louis publication Playback, including lessons learned from his father, who also took home the Pulitzer for poetry:

The most important advice my father ever gave me was to abandon the idea of writing a finished poem and to simply keep faith, as he put it, with the notebooks and try, every day, to listen very carefully and write a single clear line—eventually, he contended, the poems would develop and in a sense, in a single fortunate moment, write themselves, and I have often found this to be the case.

Meanwhile, others in the blogosphere have already enthused over the Atlantic Unbound interview with Dennis Lehane.

I start with character. Plot is the last thing that occurs to me. It's funny because Richard Price and I were talking once about how we ended up in the crime genre. Since Clockers Richard has technically been writing what could be called crime novels. I asked him, "How did you end up there?" And he said, "I ran out of autobiography." He needed a skeleton, something to hang the story on. That's also what drew me to this genre. I don't plot well. If you give me a skeleton to work with, I think I'm a much better writer. And the skeleton is the crime or noir framework. Since I'm interested in violence anyway, what the hell.

I'll also confess to sharing his enthusiasm for David Mamet's advice against backstory, though I'm a bit wary of it as well--it sounds awfully hard to pull off for anybody who isn't Richard Stark.