Paris Review Interview of Joan Didion (post 1): Her writing self imposes on her reading self; characters speak to her; narrative seems mysterious, arbitrary

The Paris Review is an American literary journal famous for its interviews of writers on the art of fiction. In the following excerpts from the interview of Joan Didion, she portrays herself as being divided into parts that have minds of their own; in effect, as having multiple personality trait. 

She says that her writing personality imposes her literary vision on her reading personality. She learns about her characters when they tell her surprising things about themselves. She says that her narrative strategy often seems mysterious and arbitrary to her (because she has limited awareness of what her alternate personalities are contributing).

INTERVIEWER: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

DIDION: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way…

INTERVIEWER: Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION: Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself…

DIDION: …I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking. Then I start to love them. By the time I finish the book, I love them so much that I want to stay with them. I don’t want to leave them ever.

INTERVIEWER: Do your characters talk to you?

DODION: After a while. In a way…And suddenly Charlotte says, “He runs guns. I wish they had caviar.” Well, when I heard Charlotte say this, I had a very clear fix on who she was. I went back and rewrote some early stuff…

DIDION: …I usually don’t know what’s on my mind. On the whole, I don’t want to think too much about why I write what I write…

INTERVIEWER: A narrative strategy.

DIDION: Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative strategy is very mysterious. It’s a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don’t do it would ever believe…

1. Linda Kuehl (interviewer, 1978). Joan Didion, pp. 407-424, in Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Edited by George Plimpton. Introduction by Margaret Atwood. New York, The Modern Library, 1998.