T. Coraghessan Boyle, On Creativity and Writing

00:08 [T. Coraghessan Boyle] I never have an outline, I never know where it's going, even if I'm writing a two-page story, a ten-page story, a 500-page story. I let it grow by accretion and let it take its own structure and form its own structure. It's great to write novels for that reason because they surprise you.

00:30 You've created something from nothing, you couldn't imagine what it would be beforehand, but you begin to discover it each day as it grows bigger. You begin to leap ahead and make connections and know what's going to happen. Very unusually, in this book, which is called Riven Rock, by the way, I know what the last few lines will be. Normally I don't know that until very close to the end, but the structure of this was unique and in trying to figure out how it would go

01:00 - and in fact, there were two separate times, one moving forward and one moving backwards, 'til they intersect, I realized what the ending would be. But this is the first time I've ever realized that. I never have an outline and I never know. In The Road to Wellville, which many people will know, I didn't realize that Dr. Kellogg would drown his son George, his errant son George in that big vat of macadamia butter, until about a week before I actually wrote that, and it made absolute sense when I got there.

01:30 When I was a younger writer, I would always hear the older writers and the professors talking about how characters would develop a life of their own, and I thought that was utter nonsense. And maybe I still do to an extent, but I understand what they're talking about, and that is that a given story will grow in your mind and so will the characters too. You've already identified them in certain ways, you've already put those characters through certain scenes, and that suggests how they will now

02:00 behave in the coming scenes. So in that way I can, I guess, understand what they were talking about years ago when I was a student and they said the characters develop a life of their own.

...

02:12 Well, some writers, and I'm sure you've discovered this, too, do write from an outline. One of my favorite writers, Kazuo Ishiguro, has said -- and I don't know him, I've read about this -- has said he spends years just thinking about his project, and by the time he sits down to write, he knows everything that's going to happen.

02:30 That, to me, is astonishing, that anyone would be able to do that. It seems so abstract to plot out or think out a story before it actually happens. To me, the joy of the story is in how it grows, what it looks like and smells like and feels like minute by minute, the world that's being created, to abstract that. For instance, take Water Music after it's been written now and published, and make an abstract of it. Well, Mungo goes here and he does that and such and such happens.

03:00 That to me to do it beforehand would be beyond my capabilities. And it wouldn't be fun! It would be dull and kind of scientific. It wouldn't allow you to invent. That's what this is all about, is to open up some part of yourself that can invent things. That's the fun of it, that's the joy of it.