I posted this link in the Planning it Out thread, and then remembered what a fantastic resource it is.

The Paris Review, if you haven't come across it (or even if you have) is one of the great literary magazines. It was started in Paris, in the ex-pat literary spirit of the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop, but is now based in New York. Since the 1950s it has interviewed most of the greats (with a slight but bearable bias towards men and Americans), at length, and in the same question-and-answer format. Since some of the writers were old then, there are insights going back a century or more. The interviews are collected in a series of books by Harvill, but they're all available online here:

http://www.theparisreview.com/literature.php

Quite rightly, it's headed The DNA of Literature. A couple of these are worth any number of how-to-write-a-bestseller-in-a-weekend books.

Emma

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I've just checked, and they still haven't got the most recent ones online, but you can order that number as a back issue.

Talking of Shakes and Co - have you seen Before Sunrise, and Before Sunset? Two of the great romantic movies (the 2nd one begins in the bookshop). If you haven't, you're in for a treat - they are fantastic - Richard Linklater is a genuis.

One thing's for sure, looking at the interview pages - most famous writers have utterly crap handwriting - interesting to see the manuscript pages, though. The Fitwilliam Museum in Cambridge have some of Virginia Woolf's notebooks on display, including A Room of One's Own. Amazing to see such immortal words in her own hand. She had crap writing too.

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I mean handwriting. Mind you...

The British Library's collection of manuscripts and - almost more interesting - corrected typescripts, must be unique. They had a biggish exhibition when the new building opened, and I think they now have a rotating display: as I remember, Joyce's MS of Ulysses has phrases written at all sorts of angles all over a huge page, and then underlined in a coded set of colours, according to who's narrative they're part of. There are thousands of others which I can't now remember, except that I moved from case to case, muttering 'My God, they've got [i[that, too!'

Emma

Emma
Thank you so much for posting that. I always pounce on author interviews in the press and find it so fascinating to hear how they think and work.
I will be dipping into this a lot, I can tell.
thanks again!

You're welcome. I do wonder when they'll get round to getting the last couple of decades online. But at least they're the easier authors to find material on elsewhere!

Emma

Oh, great! Just when I thought I wouldn't be spending too much time on the computer...

Thanks, Emma, it's a marvellous link!