What rules or principles would you add to, or subtract from, Vonnegut’s list?

Oh dear. I don’t have any rules or principles. On reading Vonnegut’s list, I am glad about that. What a dreadful and stupid list! I suppose I am interested in rhythm and what is between words. I suppose I would suggest that maybe if you write one sentence and then put a full stop you could think soon of writing another sentence that would sort of follow on from the one before. Maybe that might be enough. Especially if you are concentrating hard on establishing a kind of seamlessness, or an ease, in the diction.

You’ve taught in the MFA at the prestigious New School in New York, Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin and you’ve also led workshops in fiction at the Arvon Foundation. Might you give me an example of the kinds of things you say to your students? Things you say in order to help them avoid common errors, things you say in the hope you might help become better at this difficult craft?

I don’t make any generalisations, so I read each piece and try and make comments on how it might be better, often going through it line by line. I often complain about too many flashbacks. Also, I try and suggest that the only interest fiction has is when someone behaves out of character, so if someone is intelligent, then best have them stupid for a while and vice versa. I am also against a whole grain in American writing which is male, macho, so I don’t encourage any guys to write about penises. In Texas I had to ban any mention of the penis. I am also against any form of obvious show-off experiment in writing. In the New School and Stanford and Austin, however, I mainly taught literature courses, and only more recently some creative writing. I hope more happened in the literature classes, or they were more demanding and useful for the students, especially when we were reading Jane Austin, or George Eliot, or Conrad, or Henry James. I think your job in creative writing is partly to entertain the students, make them laugh, or tell them gossip, so that they think that the class is not boring and then that business of not being boring might make its way into the stories they are writing. I try to make no declarations, but read line by line. And then I end up making many declarations. Another is that people I care about have more than one quality and it is a pity that so many characters in fiction do not have more than one quality. They just have one, and they behave in character all the time. The kind character is kind, the cruel one cruel. I think I tried to stamp that out.

At the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in 2004 you gave a talk about The Master (which was shortlisted that year for the Man Booker prize) and you mentioned the importance, in fiction, of what almost happens between characters, the dramatic importance of what a character thinks he might do, but doesn’t do, the things a character might want to say and do, but for whatever reason fails to say or do. Could you perhaps elaborate on this?

Sex is a good example. Something that is almost sexual has more power than sex. And something that came close to sex but didn’t get there has more drama. Love is maybe like that, and loyalty and goodness. I am not talking about life here but about the making of fiction, the working up of drama in fiction towards truth, or, even better, something that is almost truth.

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