INTERVIEW WITH GEORGES SIMENON
"Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite."
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “too literary”? What do you cut out certain kinds of words?
SIMENON
Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find
such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
INTERVIEWER
Is that the nature of most of your revision?
SIMENON
Almost all of it.
Hat tip to Frank Loose for this excellent interview with Simenon from 1955 in the Paris Review.
22 comments:
Ernest Hemingway ascribed his success as a novelist to his early life as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. It was there he learned economy of language. My vice is overwriting, and my editors have relentlessly chopped out the modifiers and duplication that I somehow miss.
Great advice indeed.
Oh, for an editor to excise my excess. Writing briefs or news stories are great preparation.
As all the parodies of Hemingway show, even "less" can be overdone, but I tend to favour lean writing. I suppose trying to write my way out of a 4/4 job in Texas (without giving up my fiction writing) had a lot to do with making me write leaner *and* faster.
Thanks for sharing that story. I need to be more like Simenon in so many ways.
Being able to turn out a book in a month's time the first of them!
If you are honest with yourself about what you have written, which is essential, you can succeed as a writer by being a ruthless editor of your own work.
Simenon is correct. Adjectives and adverbs are lethal. Prepositional phrases are poison. Familiar metaphors are monsters. Kill them! (That is my constant advice to my students.)
Of course, that is easier said than done. As for myself, when I write, I am a terrible sinner in first and second drafts because I cannot resist the temptation to mix metaphors, overdo modifiers, and torture syntax with all sorts of clauses and phrases.
We could all learn a bit from Hemingway and Simenon.; but then, if we learned it all, our names would be as famous as theirs.
Some of that ruthless rewriting is evident in George Simenon's PEDIGREE, his fictional autobiography.
That was Borges's advice (paraphrase: Avoid "fine" writing) and Damon Knight's ("eschew surplusage," jokingly) as well...
Robert Silverberg was writing a book a week there for a while...but only infrequently was he sustaining that level of productivity and doing better than professionally acceptable work.
Barry Malzberg reports having written one of his novels in 36 hours. Now, that's fever pitch.
Indeed, to paraphrase George Orwell, never use a polysyllabic word when a diminutive one will do instead.
Kill your darlings. I often resist that too, and I'm glad that other writers do. Maybe if I read "only" for story I wouldn't want the beautiful words, but I don't. I love the beauty of language, the poetry. I sop it up like a sponge. I have to have it, so I'm glad when other writers don't kill their darlings. My reading world would be a poorer place.
It's sad. I used to love Simenon, but the more I got into writing, the less I enjoyed his work. Too dry. Now I know why.
Some of us love the words more than the story. Or the character. Or the atmosphere. I like books that do both. I would get darn sick of Hemingway all day long and similarly of Thomas Wolfe or Dreiser. Variety is nice.
Simenon wrote about 400 novels, Dana. I like some of the novels in some of his phases better than others. PEDIGREE is a my current favorite. I've enjoyed all the reprints from the New York Review of Books Press.
I've written a novel in 10 weeks. I want to get closer to Simenon speed, but I want to retain some of my absurdities, too. I'm searching for a kind of Angela Carter-meets-Kingsley Amis sort of happy medium...
Superb advice. I have to keep telling myself this over and over again.
It seems like some really top-notch writers can get away with breaking this rule, but the rest of us mortals have to follow it.
Two things: 1) My writing became more economical when I learned to write press releases for the newspapers. 2) Use the readability indexes in Word to find out what grade level you're writing at. Anything over 10.0 can benefit from judicious pruning.
Mortal indeed.
Have to look into that Ron, new to me.
Someone tell me more about this "readability index" in Word. I am not familiar with it. How do I access it and use it?
Me, too.
It ain't all that, as you might've discovered by now. It mostly counts how many polysyllabic/lengthy words one uses.
Someone asked about READABILITY indexes: Word has a readability function as part of the grammar and spell check. To turn it on (this varies so you may have to experiment), go to WORD > PREFERENCES > Click on SPELLING AND GRAMMAR > Check SHOW READABILITY STATISTICS > Click OK.
At any time in a Word file, you can run the Grammar and Spell check (usually the first item under TOOLS), and when it's done with that check, it will end with the readability statistics.
It checks for both word length and sentence length, and though it's not foolproof, if you get a high score (over 10, I feel, for fiction writing), it should be a flag that the writing could benefit from pruning. Really punchy genre writing could go lower.
Hope this helps.
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