“Frank and me” by Richard Ford, on Frank Bascombe novels: Prize-winning novelist on relationship with characters, and “how real humans are comprised”

Interviewers often ask novelists about their relationship with characters, since it is amusing to hear novelists say they converse with characters, who seem to have minds of their own, and may or may not need to be curbed and controlled. Although some novelists evade such questions, it is rare for a novelist to become irate.

Interviewer: What kind of relationship do you have with your characters?

Richard Ford: Master to slave. Sometimes I hear them at night singing over in their cabins. And sometimes, I’ll wake up at night and write down what I hear…I’m kidding, of course. But they don’t talk to me. They don’t tell me what to do. I make them do whatever I want them to…I’m very disdainful of these aesthetes who talk about, “My characters wouldn’t do that,” or “I just start writing it and then my characters write the book.” Horseshit, is what I say. It’s a ruse to get out of taking responsibility for your mistakes. Authorship means I authorize everything (1, p. 168).

“Writing Frank Bascombe for 30 years was never what I intended…The first Bascombe novel, The Sportswriter (1986), was written…with no onward lines leading to another book. The second, Independence Day (1995), came…when I set out to write a completely unrelated novel…To my surprise, however, all my preliminary notes for this book ‘sounded’ like the narrator from the earlier book. Frank. These notes had his sense of humor, his preoccupations, his flaws…” (2).

Ford goes on to refer to the character “Bascombe as my familiar…He may be my secret friend; but only in ways that children have secret friends…And beyond all this, the sense of what fictional characters are, and how they’re made, turns out to be very instructive about how real humans are comprised. In my view, we’re all but bits and pieces forged together by some furious will, seeking plausibility” (2).

1. Huey Guagliardo (Editor). Conversations with Richard Ford. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

2. Richard Ford. “Frank and me: Richard Ford on his Bascombe novels.” Financial Times, October 24, 2014.