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It’s Cold, So Cold: Writing (The Paris Review Interviews)

Toni Morrison

Repetition is something I usually disdain.  I'll make an exception here -- and I hope you will, too.  I've now read a dozen or more interviews so far, which isn't that many, and a phrase appears in several.  It's more than a thought or observation, and it's more than an attitude -- it's an approach to writing emotions that seems to cross stylistic, generational, gender, and racial lines.

To create passionate prose, exercise passionlessness.

Toni Morrison:

Interviewer: Do you ever write out of anger or any other emotion?

Morrison: No.  Anger is a very intense but tiny emotion, you know.  It doesn't last.  It doesn't produce anything.  It's not creative . . . at least not for me.  I mean these books take at least three years!

Interviewer: That is a long time to be angry.

Morrison: Yes.  I don't trust that stuff anyway.  I don't like those little quick emotions, like, I'm lonely, ohhh, God . . . I don't like those emotions as fuel.  I mean, I have them, but --

Interviewer: -- they're not a good muse?

Morrison: No, and if it's not your brain thinking cold, cold thoughts, which you can dress in any kind of mood, then it's nothing.  It has to be a cold, cold thought.  I mean cold, or cool at least.  Your brain.  That's all there is.

James Baldwin:

Interviewer: What sort of music are you hearing while in the immediate process of writing?  Do you experience anything physical or emotional?

Baldwin: No. I'm very cold -- cold probably isn't the word I want, controlled.  Writing for me must be a very controlled exercise, formed by passions and hope.  That is the only reason you get through it, otherwise you may as well do something else.  The act of writing itself is cold.

Truman Capote:

Interviewer: You recently published a book about the Porgy and Bess trip to Russia.  One of the most interesting things about the style was its unusual detachment, even by comparison to the reporting of journalists who have spent many years recording events in an impartial way.  One had the impression that this version must have been as close to the truth as it is possible to get through another person's eyes, which surprising when you consider that most of your work has been characterized by its very personal quality.

Capote: Actually, I don't consider the style of this book, The Muses are Heard, as markedly different from my fictional style.  Perhaps the content, the fact that it is about real events, makes it seem so.  After all, Muses is straight reporting, and in reporting one is occupied with literalness and surfaces, with implication without comment -- one can't achieve immediate depths the way one may in fiction.  However, one of the reasons I've wanted to do reportage was to prove that I could apply my style to the realities of journalism.  But I believe my fictional method is equally detached -- emotionality makes me lose writing control: I have to exhaust the emotion before I feel clinical enough to analyze and project it, and as far as I'm concerned that's one of the laws of achieving true technique.  If my fiction seems more personal it is because it depends on the artist's most personal and revealing area: his imagination.

Interviewer: How do you exhaust emotion?  Is it only a matter of thinking about the story over a certain length of time, or are there other considerations?

Capote: No, I don't think it is merely a matter of time.  Suppose you ate nothing but apples for a week.  Unquestionably you would exhaust your appetite for apples and most certainly know what they taste like.  By the time I write a story I may no longer have any hunger for it, but I feel that I thoroughly know its flavor.  The Porgy and Bess articles are not relevant to this issue.  That was reporting, and "emotions" were not much involved -- at least not the difficult and personal territories of feeling that I mean.  I seem to remember reading that Dickens, as he wrote, choked with laughter over his own humor and dripped tears all over the page when one of his characters died.  My own theory is that the writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader.  In other words, I believe the greatest intensity in art in all its shapes is achieved with a deliberate, hard, and cool head.