LeafSalon reader Susan Pearce caught Richard Ford at the IIML in Wellington, and was kind enough to send us a report:

Masterclass with Richard Ford. That note in my diary buoyed me up for weeks before the event. Then, last Wednesday, I joined Damien Wilkins and a bunch of current MA students and grads from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters to ask questions of Ford.

The chairs in the Stout Centre room had been arranged facing the front. Minutes before Ford was due, word came via Damien that he wanted them in a circle.

Chairs duly moved.

Ford enters. Tall, smiling. “Where’s my table? I need a fucking table! This table here.”

Ford carries one end, sits behind it. “That’s better.”

When he was at college, he said, no student took a class without challenging the teacher: “What use is this class to us? What right do you have to be standing there? Why aren’t I standing there, teaching this?”

“The premise of this class,’ he said, “is that we’re colleagues.”

That’s as may be, I thought later – we’re all practising the same craft, albeit most of us without Ford’s experience. And perhaps one or two who were in the room that day are able quote at will from Henry James, Emerson, Edmund Wilson, et al. As far as I’m concerned, however, the event was aptly named a ‘masterclass’.

He spoke about process. Philosophy of writing. Problems and solutions. For two hours. It can’t get much better than that. Here are some notes.

*

“Getting things published is not very important. You shouldn’t try to get published until you’re writing as well as you can. [Otherwise] you live with that crap forever. Other people will read it and think, ‘Uuurgh’.”

“You have all these terrible thresholds of pain you have to cross as a young writer. Most of them have to do with your lack of excellence. [So you have to] invent strategies that will take you back to your work in some less than excruciating ways.”

RF’s strategy is to read his work aloud to his wife, Kristina. They’ve been together since before he started writing, aged 23, and she’s heard every short story and novel he’s ever written. It took six weeks, reading all day, to read The Lay of the Land to her. “It’s a garish use of her time. I try to repay it by using it to write better.”

When reading aloud he “listens for infelicities, listens for what is wrong”. For where it sags or is boring. Kristina interrupts about once every sentence.

You must read others’ work with intensity in order to properly understand your own work.

*
“When I look at a story, I ask myself, ‘Is there anything interesting about the premise, here?’”

When beginning a novel, Ford takes about a year to work out the premise: how the narrative will move from go to nearly whoa, and the fundamental dramatic moments. He does this before he begins to compose. “I never sit down and just start writing. Oh shit I might write a story that worked, but I might not.”

He works out all but the last movement of the story. “Spatially I have a notion of where it will end. Not emotionally.” He composes about four fifths of the story. Then, if all the elements are in place, he can “go back and see what’s still in play, what still needs to have language dedicated to it”.

“Don’t hang your hat on that, though.” It works for him, may not for us.

“Writing novels or stories can be usefully thought of as the husbanding of the reader’s attention. You have to move the reader from place to place, mindful of the experience you’re creating.” Yes yes yes.
He aims to move from one moment to the next “with authority”. He quoted from Emerson’s Self-Reliance (I can’t find the actual quote, so this is something along the lines of): “Power in a novel / story stops in moments of repose. Power is represented by transitions.”

*

In discussing John Cheever’s story, ‘Reunion’, he quoted Henry James’s preface to What Maisie Knew:

“No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connexion of bliss and bale, of the things that hurt with the things that help, so dangling before us that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other somebody’s pain and wrong.”

Of the Cheever story: “You feel the torque in your chest.” (Between the boy’s love for his father and the father’s betrayal of his son, between the hope and the disappointment, etc.)

*

He too likes to set up contradictions in his work. “Shed the sense of responsibility towards what your characters should do, and make them to what you want them to do.”

If the results of this seem far removed from the real world (as in his own ‘Reunion’, in which the protagonist approaches the man he has cuckolded for a casual chat), “Put into the mouth of your narrative authority, your dramatic authority, the very problem that you yourself are puzzling over.”

*

Quoted Northrop Frye: “Poetry is a disinterested use of words”. Extended this to literature in general: “You must have nothing riding on the outcome.”

Talked about why he writes (which, according to him, is solely because he wants to and no-one’s told him to stop yet). Talked, with reference to Eudora Welty’s essay ‘Place In Fiction’ about what should be at the core of our writing. Doesn’t like to hear writers say that they “need” to write, that they write to be understood, etc. “I don’t care about your ‘needs’. I care about the choices that you make because of the things that you want.”

He grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, which was Welty’s hometown and is the setting for almost all of her work. He became her great friend, and after her death, the executor of her estate. Discussing the essay, he rejected Welty’s assertion that fiction “depends for its life on place” – “No no no no no.”

There’s no freedom in that idea. “You should not be confined unless you want to be.”

“You should read these essays with scepticism.”

He liked nothing about growing up in the South except for his parents. “They loved me and I loved them.” The South came with too much stuff for him to be able to write about it. Had talked earlier about his desire for control (the ex-marine): “I want to be the author of everything I do.” Now said, “I want to be author-itative about [what I write].”

He also rejected the idea that the urge to write must be pathological. The approach that Edmund Wilson espoused in The Wound and the Bow (drawing on various writers, such as Dickens and Hemingway, whom Wilson argued used the central ‘wound’ of their life as their material) is wrong. He “hangs his hat”, instead, on Katherine Anne Porter’s “commotion in my mind”.

Yippee. Thank you, Richard Ford.

*

LeafSalon ed - And thank you, Susan. Wonderful stuff.

Susan Pearce convenes the Short Fiction workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her first novel, Acts of Love, will be published by Victoria University Press this November.