An Interview in The Writer’s Chronicle makes the Classic Mistake

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs publishes The Writer’s Chronicle magazine. In the current issue—March/April 2014, pages 14-28—Richard Bausch, an award-winning writer and professor, is interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson, author of The Art of the Author Interview: And Interviewing Creative People.

The interview includes the following question and answer:

Johnson: How do your characters arrive, in a piece of dialogue, a look, a gesture?

Bausch: It feels like they walk into the sentences I’m fumbling with and make their own space, and refuse to be subject to my will about them. So I let them do what they seem to want to do. Whenever they are the real thing, they surprise me. I don’t know what they’re going to do, and then they do it and I’m surprised without being incredulous. I know this sounds mystical and all that, but I really don’t mean it that way. I’m talking about how it feels.

This question and answer did not follow any discussion of character, and the question after it changes the subject. So what we appear to have is a routine question which assumes (based on the interviewer’s experience) that characters will “arrive” (as opposed to being created), and an answer by the writer that fulfills all the interviewer’s expectations.

Apparently the interviewer is not surprised to hear the writer say that his characters are not consciously created: They just walk in when he’s fumbling around and make their own space; they are not subject to his will, but do what they want to do, and surprise him; and it all appears to the writer to be a sort of mystical experience, in that it seems to be out of his control and to defy rational explanation.

The classic mistake in this interview is its failure to pursue what’s going on with the writer and his characters.