Richard Price: Keeping you honest
In preparation for his novel Clockers, Price followed and hung out with cops and drug dealers month after month. He accumulated a stack of notebooks "two feet high of overheard things, sights, descriptions, sounds." He sold his book; his editor patiently listened as the anecdotes kept multiplying. Then John Sterling, his editor, took him to lunch and asked: What's the first sentence?
Richard Price: I was simply afraid. Actual writing is no fun for me. Going out and hanging out and getting impressions out there on the streets, that's fun. I was running with everybody. I was like one of those guys who jumps off the stage into the audience and gets passed around. I got myself passed around for three years. So you've got all these good lines in a notebook, but then what? I think it was Norman Mailer who said that the fact that something really happened is the defense of the bad novelist. At some point I got so hooked on research that after a while it seemed out of the question to make things up. Ultimately, everything in Clockers was pure fiction, but in the beginning I had to learn enough about the texture of truth out there in order to have the confidence to make up lies, responsible lies.
From The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.
Richard Price (Damon Winter/The New York Times)
