The Godfather: Peter Corris on what makes a writer
What makes a writer write? I don’t mean a writer of music or poetry, plays or screenplays. I haven’t the faintest idea what moves them. I mean people who put words together to form sentences that end up as stories, short or long, or novels. My observations also apply, I think, to some journalists and to narrative historians.
My question is worth considering because so very few people actually do – that is, write fiction and narratives. In the past a lot of people who never published anything did write. They wrote letters, often very long and good ones. Their letters told stories, which were sometimes untrue as circumstances demanded – fictions.
Now almost no one writes letters. When did you last get a typed letter, still less a hand-written one? I have a few I’ve kept dating back 50 years or so. When I occasionally look at them, usually when searching for something else, they are curiosities already. From family members, teachers, lovers, colleagues, they are legible (or were when my eyesight was better), and long-lasting in their inked, well-formed presentation.
But letters are different; I’m talking here about narratives of one kind or another that are intended to be read by lots of other people. Why and how do they come into being?
For professional journalists the motivation might seem obvious – to make a living. But look how many of them are impelled to write books, to tell the whole story, and how many morph into novelists. This, I think, is one of the keys.
I am constantly surprised when exchanging emails with friends and family at how they are willing to let things rest without pursuing them. I might pose questions and never get an answer. I might offer an explanation and never get a response, positive or negative.
I admit I have occasionally done this deliberately, primed the verbal pump in order to gauge the reaction, and the results have been interesting. Non-writers are willing to let sleeping dogs lie.
The other key is self-dramatisation. Patrick White admitted that all his characters, male and female, were aspects of himself. This is perhaps a little extreme, but most fiction writers, I think, would admit that they project themselves into at least some of their characters. I suspect it’s partly an unconscious process. When considering what a character might do or say, how else to decide but to consider what line one would take oneself? And then follow it or do the opposite – something like that has certainly been the case with me.
I’ve never taught creative writing and wouldn’t want to. I used to say that the only advice I could give would be to imitate the manner of the writer you most admire using your own material. But I’ve re-thought that. Now I’d say to a student, ‘When you start a piece of writing are you determined to see it through? To see what happens?’ And further, ‘Do you imagine yourself right there in the midst of it all in some way?’
If a student’s answer was no to both challenges I’d have serious doubts; if yes, I’d think he or she could be a writer … maybe.
