Margaret Atwood (post 3) on writing: superstitions, ghosts, amnesia, interviews, hearing voices of characters, and that the writer qua writer has a split personality.

“There are a lot of things that I would rather not know about writing, because I think that if you get too curious about it and start dissecting the way you work and why you do it, you’d probably stop. Maybe not. Anyway that’s one of my superstitions” (1, p. 10).

“There are various kinds of ghosts…Or you can have the Henry James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one’s own self which has split off, and that to me is the most interesting kind and that is obviously the tradition I’m working in” (1, p. 18).

“…when I do go back and read things I’ve written a long time ago I’m often surprised…I can’t remember having written them” (1, p. 169).

“Interviews are an art form in themselves…The fact is that most writers can’t remember the answers to some of the questions…so they make up the answers…Also, writers quite frequently conceal things. They either don’t want them known, or they think of them as trade secrets…Let’s just state at the beginning that interviews…They’re fictions” (1, 191).

Interviewer: Professor Elspeth Cameron has written in an essay on your work that your characters are “transformations of imagined persona around an inner self.”

Atwood: What does that mean?

Interviewer: In Lady Oracle, Joan Foster creates various personas and somewhere in the midst of them all is “Joan Foster.” Many of your stories, both long and short, are built around shifting identities, the various personas the characters create. You often organize your books around a split point of view. First and third persons, contradictions within the characters, fractured identities. Is that how you see characters?

Atwood: Well, maybe…A lot of this is trying to keep oneself amused…” (1, p. 213).

“Well, for a creative person, some of the work is doing nothing…You need silence within yourself in order to listen…Unless you can listen, you won’t year anything” (2, p. 182).

Interviewer: What are [characters] like?

Atwood: …they talk all the time… (2, p. 222).

Interviewer: Do you see the scenes in your books as you are writing them, or do you hear them?

Atwood: I see them. I hear them, but I’m not hallucinating” (2, p. 248).

“I don’t ‘get an idea’ for a novel…I usually find that I have collected a number of compelling images or that a voice starts operating, somebody starts talking, and I want to know more about him, find out about him…” (1, p. 164).

“I grew up in world of doubles…a superhero was nobody unless he had an alter ego…Yeats and his theory of personae had nothing on us…As for the artists who are also writers, they are doubles twice times over, for the mere act of writing splits the self in two. In this chapter, it is therefore the doubleness of the writer qua writer I will discuss…What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’?…By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward…and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes over and uses it to commit the actual writing…All writers are double…you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read…(3, pp. 31-37).

1. Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor). Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 1990.

2. Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor). Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 2006.

3. Margaret Atwood. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2002.