Scritture giovani, a new generation of european writers

Four young writers talking about writing’s timetables and scoreboards.

WHEN DO YOU WRITE, IN YOUR DAILY LIFE? DO YOU CUT OUT A FIXED PERIOD OR DOES WRITING END UP MERGING WITH YOUR DAILY ACTIVITIES?

Davide Longo – I’m a teacher and during the school year I write very little, a couple of novels at the most, something for the radio, I help out if a friend comes with a screenplay that is interesting. I like being a teacher and that’s my job, after all. I keep longer projects for the summer. July and August are for writing.

Rajeev Balasubramanyam – When I have nothing else to do, I start between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., and continue until 12 a.m. and 6 a.m. Most of my novel-writing is done like this. Short-stories or nonfiction I can work on at any time.

Rachel Trezise – To be disciplined I try to treat writing as a normal job and work 9-5 daily, with Wednesday afternoon and all Friday off for other activities, but it doesn’t really work because there isn’t anything normal about writing. I’m an insomniac so I try and think up my ideas when I can’t sleep and get them down on paper whenever I have the time and stamina. So much of writing is staring into space and drinking loads of coffee and it’s hard to fit that into time constraints.

Marco Mancassola – No, I can’t dedicate a fixed time to writing; maybe because I lack the discipline… I can’t even define precisely what writing is or is not. To me, “writing” means dealing with a story or a novel (here comes the first complication: when do you start dealing with a story? When you write down the first line or when you wake up at night to jot down a sudden idea? Or is it when you spend days upon days reading reference texts?) Having said so, I can still pinpoint the time when my writing flows more freely, in line with my thoughts: it is at night, between 2 and 4 a.m., if I’m not already tired from the day before.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT A STORY HAS COME TO ITS END?

DL – When a new story starts running around in my mind and finds room to grow. Normally a lot of time passes between one story and the next.

RB – I suppose nothing is ever completed, it just depends on whether I like it or not. If there are things I don’t like, or if it feels sloppy, then I’ll go on working. If I’m working with an editor then their comments come into play. Sometimes deadlines preclude further work. If I had the time and desire, I’m sure I could write another draft of my first novel now.

RT – I never do. I try to write by length, so first I decide whether the idea fits into two pages or ten and the rest is planning, like it was at school with essays, you have to make a decision to stop when one element is complete and then move onto the next.

MM – Normally, when I start writing, I already know everything about the story. First, there’s an idea. It could remain scribbled on the back of a notebook or in some forgotten file for years, and sometimes that’s where it ends up staying. Other times, like a seed finally beginning to sprout, the idea springs to life. It keeps on coming back to my mind. It occupies my thoughts, chasing away all other ideas. It grows. It starts setting off a great number of sensations which fit into each other and start to outline the story. During this time, every conversation, every movie I watch, every atmosphere I experience seems to speak to me about that story which grows, slowly, like in a womb. I open a file which is a medley of notes and suggestions. I start filling it up. The amount of material piles up. When I have the feeling that there’s enough of it, that’s the time to start with the real writing.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE LIVES OF THE CHARACTERS IN THE STORY? DO THEY SIMPLY DISAPPEAR AT THE END OF THE STORY OR ARE THEY STILL THERE, MAYBE REAPPEARING AFTER SOME YEARS OR CHANGING INTO THE NEXT CHARACTER?

DL – My characters are almost always the same. Young, old, at war, in a factory: all the people I enjoy writing about are made of the same matter.

RB – Parts of characters seem to recur in other work, though rarely the entire character. This isn’t really possible because the location and context is different, and because the writer is different, in a different place mentally. Characters reappear when you perform the work, or when you read it to yourself, so they never really disappear (unless you stop believing in them).

RT – Most of them die. I wrote a short story recently for a UK magazine and for the first time ever my main character was a male. He was so funny. His voice really makes me laugh so maybe I’ll keep him around for a future novel. But that’s the first time that has happened. Usually they’re quite easily forgotten.

MM – Every character lives in its own story. When the story ends, the character has completed its cycle and there’s no reason for it to continue living; it remains frozen in a still image and I’m happy to leave it as such. If it happens that there is more to say about a theme that has already been explored, well, in that case it is not difficult to defrost the “still image” where I had left the character concerned and instill new life into it.

NOW, LET’S TALK ABOUT THE THEME OF THE ANTOLOGY SCRITTURE GIOVANI: “THINGS CHANGE”. IN SOME NOVELS, THE FLOW OF THE TIME CORRESPONDS TO A PHYSICAL OR MENTAL EVOLUTION OF THE CHARACTERS, TO A CHANGE OF THE STORY. IN OTHER NOVELS, EVOLUTION SEEMS TO BE BLOCKED BY AN INEXORABLE FATE. DO THINGS CHANGE?

DL – There are some things that is best never to change. Things which must pass from one generation to the next, resisting. My type of writing doesn’t invent that much, I think it is more useful for conveying. Other writers are very good at finding that which is new. In a way, they are different jobs.

RB – On one level, everything changes continually, but on another, there’s no such thing as time. I’ve seen this in novels, like The English Patient where past and present are all dealt with in the present tense.

RT – I think writing anything would be difficult unless things changed. Surely half of all writing is about documenting how people change and then how that changes their society. In my story, “Jigsaws”, the main character thinks that nothing is changing, but if that was true she would never have divorced her abusive husband and pursued her childhood friend.

MM – Actually, “Le cose cambiano” (Things change), the thematic title of the anthology, could very well be viewed as a statement, but also the other way around, as a question. In my novel, “Io e Devil” (Me and Devil), I tried to hint at the notion that the onset of an obsession, amorous for example, does not change the general view of one’s life but produces a kind of zoom, an “inward fall” into the mechanisms of the very everyday life. The forward zoom turns the image into dots, until it reveals unexpected black holes. And it is on a black hole, a gateway to darkness, that the story ends.