Patricia Highsmith on Writing: Another Novelist With Multiple Personality in Her Characters, But No Recognition of It in Her Own Literary Analysis

“One must know what these characters look like, how they dress and talk, and one should know even about their childhoods, though their childhoods do not always need to be written into the book. All this is a matter of living with one’s characters and in their setting for some period of time before writing the first word. The setting and the people must be seen as clearly as a photograph…” (1, p. 33).

“…a flexible plot line lets the characters move and make decisions like living people, gives them a chance to debate with themselves, make choices, take them back, make others, as people do in real life” (1, p. 40-41).

“Once when I had everything settled about a new apartment in Manhattan…I was informed that I could not have it because it was a professional apartment. Writers are not professionals, because ‘their clients do not come to them.’ I thought of writing to the Department of Housing or whoever made this law, ‘You have no idea how many characters ring my doorbell and come to me every day…” (1, p. 46).

“…it often happens…that a book changes itself three-quarters of the way through. This can be the result of a character’s not behaving the way you foresaw, a situation that can be good or bad. I do not subscribe to the belief that having a vigorous character who acts for himself is always good. After all, you are the boss, and you don’t want your characters running around all over the place…A recalcitrant character may veer the plot in a better direction than you had thought of at the outset. Or he or she may have to be curbed…” (1, p. 53-54).

“…my main idea…was of two young men with a certain resemblance—not much—one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity…There is nothing spectacular about the plot of Ripley, I think, but it became a popular book because of its frenetic prose, and the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself…Ripley won an award from the Mystery Writers of America, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France, and was made into the movie Purple Noon. The Mystery Writers of America award hangs in my bathroom, where I hang awards, as they look less pompous there…I lettered ‘Mr. Ripley and’ before my own name, since I think Ripley himself should have received the award. No book was easier for me to write, and I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing” (1, p. 69).

“It often happens that a writer has a theme or a pattern in his books…Mine is the relationship between two men, usually quite different in make-up, sometimes obviously the good and the evil, sometimes merely ill-matched friends. I might have realized this theme myself at least by the middle of Strangers on a Train, but it was a friend, a newspaperman, who pointed it out to me…The two-men theme turned up…in six books out of ten…certainly in my ‘best’ books in public opinion. Natural themes cannot be sought or strained for; they appear. Unless one is in danger of repeating oneself, they should be used to the fullest, because a writer will write better making use of what is, for some strange reason, innate” (1, p. 144-146).

1. Patricia Highsmith. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Boston, The Writer, Inc., 1966/1972.