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So I have like a kind of a shopping list of topics. And then I’m stuck and maybe I’m a little more tired and I have three left and maybe I’ll cut one or I’ll say this one’s going to go in the next chapter.
And when I mentioned and I figure out, which I’m going to mention first and then after I’ve talked about that first thing, it’s clear to me which I want to talk about second, third, fourth and fifth. For my book Humiliation I made a list of maybe like eight things that I really want to mention. Wayne Koestenbaum: With certain exceptions, but each book has its own ecology of germination so it would be wrong to say I don’t outline a certain one thing. I do make outlines, but there often outlines for the third or fourth or the fifth or the sixth draft, not for the first draft. Because it was a short book and it had to go in order. For each chapter I made elaborate outlines. I mean, I didn’t even begin to write it until I had really done all the research and the interviews and had read everything and seen everything and then started making maps. I don’t do a lot of outlining, except that there are books and projects where I do a vast amount of outlining, like for my Andy Warhol biography. Wayne Koestenbaum: Yes, it’s a fair thing to say. If we’re striving for universality rather than idiosyncratic, mere autobiography.īrad Listi: So is it accurate to say that you’re an intuitive writer and that you don’t do a lot of preconceiving or outlining? Then I think that if I’m excited, I will say things that are more valuable and maybe in a weird way, more universal and less personal. At the end of the essay, “No More Tasks,” I think at the very beginning and maybe the very end of the essay, I talk about a dream of a senile woman playing Schubert, and when that occurs, some say, well, you know, I’m writing an essay about writing or whatever and why would I talk about it? It’s sort of unpleasant, maybe nightmarish dream, but if I let it happen because I get more excited. And if I follow that dream, I’m reawakened to a more urgent sense of why I’m writing in the first place and what I have to say, like I know it. I will genuinely suddenly remember vividly a dream and the atmosphere of that dream will saturate the room.
Wayne Koestenbaum: In the process of writing. His new essay collection, Figure It Out, is available from Soft Skull Press.
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