How I Write

Custom Search

Literature , a photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/dandelions_and_daisies/ on Flickr.

[(interview date August 2007) In the interview below, Perrotta discusses his writing process and offers some advice to aspiring writers.]

[Pfaff]: If you came of age in the '70s and '80s, you'll almost certainly recognize the characters in Tom Perrotta's fiction--self-obsessed suburban strivers (and a few slackers) who might be worthy of our scorn yet somehow gain our sympathy. As a satirist, Perrotta manages to skewer his subjects with one hand and render them acutely human with the other, whether he's writing about the members of a New Jersey wedding band seeking transcendence in rock 'n' roll (The Wishbones) or cataloging the travails of a working-class kid on scholarship at an Ivy League university (Joe College). His fourth novel, Little Children, was adapted for the big screen in 2006, and as part of the writing team Perrotta was nominated for an Academy Award. He lives in Belmont, Mass., with his wife and two children.

Credits: The novels The Wishbones, Election, Joe College and Little Children and the short-story collection Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies.

[Perrotta]: Why: I trace it back to a lifelong love of stories. I remember, as a kid, being rapt, listening to the adults I knew tell stories. That's how I make meaning out of life--through stories.

Routine: I write in a home office, and I'm lucky enough to write every day. My working hours are mainly my kids' school hours. ... Generally speaking, I write from about 10 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. If I need to go further I will, but that happens very rarely, under the pressure of a deadline.

If I'm lucky, I use the period after I finish writing to get my exercise. I find writing generates a lot of nervous energy and it's great to ... burn it off.

Process: Not only do I not do an outline, I can't understand how anybody possibly could. Because at least if you're writing character based fiction, you have to know a lot about your characters before you can begin. So I write to discover my characters and in doing so, feel my way through the story.

Basically, I begin with a situation or a setting and a question: Who will win the election? Are the lovers going to run away together? ... The germ of Election, for instance, was a piece I read about a high school principal who became outraged when he learned that a pregnant girl had been elected prom queen, after which he burned all the votes, hoping to invalidate the election.

I think it would be death to know the answer before you set out to write. There's a point, maybe halfway or two-thirds through the book, where I kind of know where I'm going, but at that point I may have gone a year without answering the most basic questions of the story in my own mind.

Revising: I try to write the book as if I'm reading it, and so I can't go on to Chapter 2 until I feel that Chapter 1 is finished and quite workable. It's a very slow process, where I'm constantly going back to the beginning of Chapter 1 and rewriting every sentence. I polish it up as I go and, hopefully, by the time I write the last period of the first draft--which has taken me two to three years to write--it is, in a way the final draft.

Writing satire: I write work that appears to be satirical but actually isn't--meaning that often, early on, I introduce my characters as if they were stock figures and as if the reader should feel superior to them, which are the hallmarks of satire. Then, if things are working right, something will happen that humanizes those characters and lets them expand beyond the way that they've been typecast.

Advice: I'd advise people to consider getting a job where writing is the job, in journalism or advertising, instead of an MFA program. When I was in graduate school, I took a job as an advertising copywriter, which was very good for me, because I was going days feeling uninspired [with my fiction] and I wasn't getting any work done. But then I'd go into the ad agency and I'd work because I had to, and it taught me not to let myself off the hook. Once I started to treat my own writing as a job and not as a romantic undertaking, I actually got the work done.

Source Citation Perrotta, Tom, and Leslie Garisto Pfaff. "How I Write." Writer 120.8 (Aug. 2007): 66. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 266. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Feb. 2012.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1100089202&v=2.1&u=22054_acld&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w
..

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100089202

.
[(interview date August 2007) In the interview below, Perrotta discusses his writing process and offers some advice to aspiring writers.]

[Pfaff]: If you came of age in the '70s and '80s, you'll almost certainly recognize the characters in Tom Perrotta's fiction--self-obsessed suburban strivers (and a few slackers) who might be worthy of our scorn yet somehow gain our sympathy. As a satirist, Perrotta manages to skewer his subjects with one hand and render them acutely human with the other, whether he's writing about the members of a New Jersey wedding band seeking transcendence in rock 'n' roll (The Wishbones) or cataloging the travails of a working-class kid on scholarship at an Ivy League university (Joe College). His fourth novel, Little Children, was adapted for the big screen in 2006, and as part of the writing team Perrotta was nominated for an Academy Award. He lives in Belmont, Mass., with his wife and two children.

Credits: The novels The Wishbones, Election, Joe College and Little Children and the short-story collection Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies.

[Perrotta]: Why: I trace it back to a lifelong love of stories. I remember, as a kid, being rapt, listening to the adults I knew tell stories. That's how I make meaning out of life--through stories.

Routine: I write in a home office, and I'm lucky enough to write every day. My working hours are mainly my kids' school hours. ... Generally speaking, I write from about 10 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. If I need to go further I will, but that happens very rarely, under the pressure of a deadline.

If I'm lucky, I use the period after I finish writing to get my exercise. I find writing generates a lot of nervous energy and it's great to ... burn it off.

Process: Not only do I not do an outline, I can't understand how anybody possibly could. Because at least if you're writing character based fiction, you have to know a lot about your characters before you can begin. So I write to discover my characters and in doing so, feel my way through the story.

Basically, I begin with a situation or a setting and a question: Who will win the election? Are the lovers going to run away together? ... The germ of Election, for instance, was a piece I read about a high school principal who became outraged when he learned that a pregnant girl had been elected prom queen, after which he burned all the votes, hoping to invalidate the election.

I think it would be death to know the answer before you set out to write. There's a point, maybe halfway or two-thirds through the book, where I kind of know where I'm going, but at that point I may have gone a year without answering the most basic questions of the story in my own mind.

Revising: I try to write the book as if I'm reading it, and so I can't go on to Chapter 2 until I feel that Chapter 1 is finished and quite workable. It's a very slow process, where I'm constantly going back to the beginning of Chapter 1 and rewriting every sentence. I polish it up as I go and, hopefully, by the time I write the last period of the first draft--which has taken me two to three years to write--it is, in a way the final draft.

Writing satire: I write work that appears to be satirical but actually isn't--meaning that often, early on, I introduce my characters as if they were stock figures and as if the reader should feel superior to them, which are the hallmarks of satire. Then, if things are working right, something will happen that humanizes those characters and lets them expand beyond the way that they've been typecast.

Advice: I'd advise people to consider getting a job where writing is the job, in journalism or advertising, instead of an MFA program. When I was in graduate school, I took a job as an advertising copywriter, which was very good for me, because I was going days feeling uninspired [with my fiction] and I wasn't getting any work done. But then I'd go into the ad agency and I'd work because I had to, and it taught me not to let myself off the hook. Once I started to treat my own writing as a job and not as a romantic undertaking, I actually got the work done.

Source Citation Perrotta, Tom, and Leslie Garisto Pfaff. "How I Write." Writer 120.8 (Aug. 2007): 66. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 266. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Feb. 2012.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1100089202&v=2.1&u=22054_acld&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w
..

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100089202