The Novelist’s Creative Process: How can you learn anything from interviews, essays, and memoirs, if that isn’t the personality who writes the novels?

We know from Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction book on writing (see past post) and Henry James’s short story “The Private Life” (see past post) that the novelist’s nonfiction/social/host personality is not the personality who writes the novels. So how can you learn much about a novelist’s creative process from their interviews and nonfiction?

In past posts, I have criticized interviewers, because, for example, when novelists mention hearing the voices of their characters, interviewers never pursue it, never ask to be told more about these auditory hallucinations.

But maybe interviewers have asked such questions in the past, found the novelist had nothing more to say—didn’t know anything more or felt the interview was getting too personal—and so now they no longer ask. Or maybe interviewers think that anyone who hears voices is crazy, and they fear that if you ask about their voices, they might have a breakdown.

I can’t give advice that would work with all novelists. But in regard to novelists’ hearing voices when they are immersed in their writing process, I would suggest that the interviewer, politely and gently, stay with the issue, even if it is making the host personality a little uncomfortable. After five or ten minutes, the host personality may be replaced by a personality who is happy to talk about it. (To get a switch back to the regular personality, all you have to do is change the focus of discussion back to mundane issues.)

As to novelists’ nonfiction writings—essays, journals, memoirs, letters—these can be informative if a literary novelist is confession-minded, psychologically-minded, and/or prolific.

Why prolific? In a limited conversation with a person who has multiple personality, you are likely to be talking to only the host personality. But the longer you talk to a person who has multiple personality, the greater the chance that an alternate personality will come out. And a prolific writer is like a person who is having a very long conversation. Also, they may be prolific, in part, because they have more cowriters.