Donna Tartt interview (1992)

[Music] Madonna tart instant success wasn't quite so quick her first novel The Secret history took nine years to write but it set off a bidding war among Publishers which is virtually unprecedented for a new author an instant bestseller the secret history is winning praise for combining a Savvy literary literate Style with an edge of the seed plot and we are pleased to have her here with us welcome thank you um how' you do it um worked every day worked every day for eight years you've always wanted to write and and for for a long long

long time for a long time ever since I um ever since I was a little girl I um always loved to read books and I thought what a wonderful thing if I could just read books all day but writing is even more wonderful because it's a deeper level of involvement you know when you're reading a book you're very caught up in it but um yes writing a book is is is One Step Beyond it's one it's it's it's it's um it's a depth lower it's Wonder was the first love fiction or poetry Pros or poetry

um well when I was a little girl my first love I mean stories storytelling I mean you're a southerner you know this Southerners love to tell stories love to listen to stories I mean um and then when I was in high school uh when I was a bit older it was poetry all my favorite writers were poets but did you dream of being a poet oh yeah and still do in vain show me a show me a successful novelist and I'll show you a want toe poet well it's true I mean in order to be

a good poet you have to have an ear for language so fine that to a novelist it's really almost diseased I mean to um um and I just can't help it I mean I have just a real narrative sense things present themselves to me as stories I see if if I try to write a poem If I try to concentrate upon images too too too heavily a narrative will just always impose itself you had written short stories before this hadn't you MH yeah mhm and had them published or not I'd had some of them published

actually the first things I ever had published were poems uh actually was quite Young when I was 13 or 14 I had my first my first poems published um but um I've written I've written some short fiction and probably will continue to do so but um it's not my my favorite form I love I love novels because um do you know in a short story you're only getting a glimpse of of of something you're only getting a tiny little a tiny little fragment of the world you started out at at om Miss right yeah why'

you transfer to Benning actually on the advice of my friend Willie moris um when I was a freshman at om Miss um I was um I was in a graduate level writing class I was taught by Barry Hannah I had gotten in and um yeah he said it convince the others that you were Genius Bar can convince anybody that's why we're letting this 18y old in Barry and Willie are both great talkers they could you know they could so you got in this writing course and and and then Willie and Bar said well um they

they said um that it pro and they were quite right I mean that I should I should um go someplace else and see what other people were doing I mean um you know schools in the Northeast then were very sort of Cutting Edge and the thing was minimalism which I had never heard of I mean everybody was Raymond Carver and Bey you know writers I had never heard of at all and you know um I was um you know the books I grew up reading were were were Dickens were Mark Twain I mean I was

just I I had I I was I'd never seen a copy of the New Yorker I don't think until I was 19 years how about fauler and udor Welty and people like that I love udor Welty love udor Welty and I like fauler but um um Faulkner's I I have to I mean in a certain sense one has to read for pleasure and and fauler is a genius and and one loves to to to go through his books and see how they're constructed and they're amazing concoctions but just in terms of reading for pleasure if

I were sick and bad in a hospital I would I would I would not not ask my mother to bring me a cop but then what would you ask your mother that you've read recently to if you were sick and just wanted to read for pleasure oh what have I read recently that's so good um um it's I mean it's terrible to ask me these questions because I just read the same books over and over again um you do yeah I you know if you you look back at construction you look back at at character

development you look back at all those things I I love a book more um the because the first time you're reading a book you have I mean you're discovering along with the writer do you know you're you're I mean it's sort of an inductive process and you don't know quite where he's taking you and it's it's very wonderful um you can understand the process better as a young writer the way a young writer looks at a book it's the way a young architect looked at a building and you can you can see better how how

things are constructed and how they're put together second time speaking of construction uh tell me about the beginning of this when did the idea for this begin um I mean when was the moment that that sort of you said what if you had to find the very first if this was a journey of a th000 miles and you had to have the first step what was it the very first step in a way was deciding to reveal the murderer on the first page no I'm taking you even back further in terms of the idea to

write this thing I mean was it to reveal the murder on the first page you you wanted to write a a a murder mystery in which you want to reveal the name of the victim on the first page yes and um one of the reasons why I wanted to do that it was um partly because I'd been studying Greek and you know there's there's tremendous suspense in in The Iliad and you know everything that's going to happen they tell you everything that's going to happen in the first six lines and I mean this was just

a very interesting question to me how do you how do you create suspense from knowing what we already know and then it was funny I love Alfred Hitchcock and I read something that Alfred Hitchcock said he said suspense doesn't come from having a bomb thrown from nowhere um you know at one at the hero suspense comes from having you know two people sitting talking at a table there's a bomb ticking underneath the table and you don't know when it's going to go off and the audience sees it but the characters don't and that's what suspense

is and um I don't no I mean in in a funny way that was that was what made me want to write this sort of Novel do you know um which which is a suspense novel but um at the same time I think that um I mean I'm very interested in craft and very interested in Aesthetics and um it seems to me that a book can be suspenseful can be very well constructed and very tricky in terms of plot lots of Ledger domain and mirrors and smoke being thrown up and surprises but also also be

a well- constructed thing also be aesthetically pleasing and pleasing in terms of style from sentence to sentence why a murder mystery um murder is just one of the most um it's actually funny almost all my favorite novels have have a murder in them you know I mean and very unlikely novels like Huckleberry Finn you know um you know there um or you know alliver twist you know you don't you don't you don't think about that but um it's it's just one of those maybe when I'm 40 maybe when I've lived a little longer in the

world I'll be able to write a book about love as of now I don't know enough about that yet but um but you know those are those are the two great things Love and Death and where did you start after you decided that how you wanted to start the thing did you how much of it worked at Stu out as you began to write versus how much of it did you see all the way to the conclusion and then the challenge was the skill of writing well I thought at the first I saw it all

the way to the conclusion which was actually not at all true I I started from an outline but it was basically just to sort of comfort myself going on a CrossCountry journey and having a map you know and of course along the way you have to take all kinds of unexpected detours one comes to some very crucial point that one's been leading to for 100 pages and then the characters would just have developed to such a point that you would realize that that that logically they wouldn't do that I mean the characters grew along with

the book too the characters sort of became alive and so what you might have imagined for them would turn out to be in inconsistent with what they would do they would take on a character You' realize what you thought they might do would not be something that would be appropriate for them to do because it would be out of character it's exactly it's exactly the same process as getting to know people as getting to know friends at first you think you've got them figured out you know and then and then but people always surprise you

you know people people always do how much influence from your peers I mean this book is dedicated um for Brett Eon Ellis who generosity will never cease to warm my heart and for Paul Edward and and others um how much did they influence you well Bennington was a very wonderful school to go to because um the I think a lot of writing programs there there's a great deal of cutthroat Behavior there's a lot of competitiveness but at Bennington um we were all really quite supportive of each other and we were all doing very different work

but we read each other's work we commented on each other's work yes Works in progress and it was a very it was a very good sounding board and there wasn't I mean you hear horror stories about you know people sabotaging other people's work stealing it you know and sounds like lost cool yeah it does but you know it did didn't happen at Bennington and we you know we really all stuck together and even though we were doing very different things and really tried to help each other and did help each other and I think it's

very funny that you know I think about my creative writing class when I was 19 think of the faces around that table half of those people are published authors now how much do to the talent you have now comes from um what you've learned and in in classes being taught by creative writing classes and and you learn from other writers like Willie moris and and others that might have had an influence on you how much of it is that versus just natural going much more a product of what you were as a child and this

in instinct to write and this sort of literary flare that you probably had well you're talking about two different things I mean in a writing class it's a writing class is like a drawing class in a certain way I mean you got to have some technique to surv they they can teach you how to how to construct um a decent sentence how to construct a readable plot um you know just in the same way in a drawing class they can teach you you draw your hand s they make you a good writer if you're they

can make you a good writer they can make you a good writer but you know in the final analysis I mean you know all writing I mean there's there's magic there's some and where does that come from um I don't know if we did know that would but is it what is it though that magic that that I mean what's do you have any idea why this has done so well and create such a sensation um I was I've been very surprised by the response to it which has been um wonderful I mean beyond my

wildest dreams this book is found actually quite a large audience um um and I yeah I've I've been very surprised I mean I've just got gotten back from a book tour and you know just all kinds of people all kind say to when they when they come up to you in a book signing what do they say um J you write a great story um wonderful things when I was in Miami um you know right after the hurricane people people coming up to me with these waterlogged books and saying you know this is what I

grabbed when when I ran out of the house when I realized I was going to be away from my house for a while yeah and um you know I mean things like that I mean you know it makes eight years 8 years of work worthwhile to know that um you know that even one person and what happens when you went back to Bennington um to to to visit the campus after you had become a successful I was actually only there for a short time I was only there for about 20 minutes I was basically only

there for the photograph so it was um oh you went up for a shoot to just because they wanted to have a background of you had MH mhm so you had no real inter exchange with the with the students there now a little bit a little bit bennington's changed very much since I was there uh in the early 80s it's it's a different school there's a different Administration it's it's it's it's it's not quite the same place it was when um you know most of the teachers I had there have have um are not there

anymore it's it's a very different place now than it was in the early 80s a great quote from you which said the philosopher car poer talks about living in three Worlds world one is New York City uh where we both see when we walk out the door world two is subjective World New York as I see it through my eyes and then there's world three and that's where Plato's Republic is that's where Dr Johnson's London is that's where Oz is have always been most comfortable in world three it's true yes you're so you're most comfortable

in what how would you characterize that today in world three yeah where is World 3 today well the world 3 today was Switzerland I was reading Nabokov transparent things um and I was in Switzerland with h person and Armand yeah so that's that that's where I was today in the 1930s John Grisham who's been here uh who is a has a genius for writing bestsellers uh he's got two or three on the bestseller this now in paperback and hardback says what a debut a beautifully written story well told funny sad scary and impossible leave alone

until finish not since a prince of tiddes have I enjoyed a book as much as this you'll take that won't you thank you thank you so much pleasure to have you thank you for joining us tonight tomorrow night Arthur Mitchell of the Dan theat of Harlem recounts his company's controversial tour to South Africa all of that and more see you tomorrow night at 11: