(orchestral music) - There's an apprentice to be served to become a writer at least as much as to the apprentices to be served to become a doctor or anything else.

You have to study your craft, your art, your profession as much as a lawyer or a doctor.

Lawyers and doctors sometimes scoff at that notion but they're wrong.

(animated music) (typewriter keys clicking) - [Male Narrator] Shelby Foote is the author of several novels set in the South.

He spent 20 years researching and writing a three-volume history of the Civil War and has now returned to writing fiction.

- My great-grandfather was from Macon, Mississippi.

His name is Hezekiah William Foote.

And my grandfather was his youngest son.

He came to the Delta around 1875, somethin' like that.

And managed three plantations down in the Lake Washington region, Rolling Fork and the Lake Washington region.

My father was born at Mounds Plantation down near Rolling Fork where he's buried now, and where I'll someday be buried.

But my grandfather's favorite of the places was a place called Mount Holly on Lake Washington there about 20 miles or so south of Greenville, and that's where my father grew up.

I doubt if my grandfather read five books in his life or my grandmother, for that matter.

But they did have remarkable qualities.

My grandmother, for instance, their house at Mount Holly has 32 rooms.

And whatever her limitations were, she certainly managed to run a 32-room house, which I would hate to undertake.

They had rather formidable abilities when you look back on it.

Tradition is one of the things that a person deals with in his life, and it's one of the things that's bound to interest a writer in writin' about the people who live with it.

Most often, I suppose, certainly in my case, it's the failure to measure up to the tradition that makes the tragedy.

Sometimes that involves an examination of the tradition itself, which you find out is false or inflated.

Those are things well worth writin' about.

Without that tradition, you wouldn't have a skeleton to hang the meat on.

That's true of a lotta things.

I was singularly fortunate in being present at an enormous tragedy and injustice of the treatment of blacks or negroes, as they were called in those days, was a dreadful thing to have happenin' but an absolutely invaluable thing to be in the middle of when you're a writer.

When they talk about American ideals, and the nobility of justice and all that, I had to counteraction to that right present in front of my eyes throughout my growin' up years, and it was a great value to that.

That's one of the reasons I believe that a writer who is also a Southerner has a huge advantage.

He doesn't have to be taught about injustice; he sees it all around him.

You have memories outta your childhood, and the things are not all bad.

The blacks in Greenville, sometime in the middle 30s, had, I've forgotten what the festival is they call it, was called, it was somethin' like 100 Years of Progress or somethin'.

And the main speaker was George Washington Carver, who came over from Tuskeegee and spoke.

And it was a week-long thing, and it was wonderful.

I was a newspaper reporter on the paper at home, and it was a wonderful thing to be around.

Dr.

Carver gave 'em unshirted hell.

He said, "I go into houses where you can study botany "through the floorboards and astronomy through the roof, "and there's a Buick automobile in the driveway."

He said, "Don't do that; fix your house up.

"Don't get that Buick automobile."

He was a wonderful old man, one of the finest men I've ever known in my life.

It was a good place to grow up.

It was a splendid place to see all these different pushes and pulls in a society that was badly torn and yet had erected such defenses against the tearing that it seemed almost idyllic.

You had to look below the surface to see anything wrong with it.

There were enormous wrongs just immediately below the surface.

But it had both of these things, and it was a good place to grow up.

I was talkin' about Greenville havin' pretenses to bein' the Athens of Mississippi.

That was primarily due to Will Percy himself.

Certain influences went into makin' Will Percy what he was, but he was the first true literary figure in that part of the country.

I've often said, and I believe firmly that if Will Percy had been in Clarksdale or Greenwood, it would've been Clarksdale or Greenwood that turned out the writers instead of Greenville.

It was not done, and I've said this often, it was not done by havin' a coterie of literary people.

There was none of that; there was no exchangin' of manuscripts.

There was no intense discussion of this, that, and the other.

It was more by example, the example of bein' himself a cultured man that you saw and talked with.

It was his library, which he prized highly and would almost never lend a book out of.

His example as a man who would talk to you, say, for 30 minutes about the poetry of Keats, and the effect on you was to make you immediately wanta run home and read some Keats.

It was a childhood like any other.

I've always been glad that I didn't get interested in literary matters until I was about 15, 16, 17 years old so that I had all the normal experiences without books keepin' me from enjoyin' 'em.

When I did turn to books at about 17, I was like a colt in clover.

I was very happy with that, but I had all this in the background, and it continued.

The main thing I did between the age of, say, 16 and 20 was read and go to dances.

So I held on to the good part of it.

I had a good time at school, was editor of the school paper; and I enjoyed that part of it.

- I wanted to get you to talk a little bit about your first becoming interested in the Civil War, reading it, and researching it, and later writing about it.

- I always enjoyed the readin' of history, in part, because you knew what you were readin' was true; or at least you had reason to believe it was true.

Workin' against that was the quality of the history as it's taught in schools.

It's like Shakespeare.

The way it's taught in schools, it's a wonder anybody ever reads any more Shakespeare the rest of his life after bein' taught it in high school.

And so it was with history.

They made us memorize lists of dates and things like that, things that they could examine us on later on rather than lettin' us see what history really is.

I might almost remember the however many steps it was to the Treaty of Utrecht to this day, I still wouldn't know anything.

But I always enjoyed readin' history, particularly good history.

One of the first books I read that drew my attention strongly to the war was Colonel Henderson's biography of Stonewall Jackson and the personality, the character of Stonewall Jackson is a fascinatin' thing.

And then because of the interest in Jackson, you get interested in how he fought certain battles, and what he did.

And then he went on from that to plenty of others: Robert E. Lee, Tecumseh Sherman, by no means all Southerners.

Some of the Northerners are of equally-great interest or almost equally-great interest.

There are minor characters that you encounter as you get deeper into the war comparatively minor like Pat Cleburne from over in Arkansas.

Albert Sydney Johnson, Bedford Forest, many of 'em.

Some of the scoundrels are as interesting as the heroes, men like Edmund Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, generals like Phil Sheridan, whom he personally disliked, but find more and more fascinating' as you look into 'em.

Vacillators and men with warped natures like Joseph E. Johnston, fascinatin'.

They don't have to be good heroes; they can be bad heroes, and be just as interestin' if not more so.

There was not much interest in the Civil War in the late 20s and early, early 30s, not much.

And as for veterans, I think I saw about three of 'em in my lifetime, and they'd probably been drummer boys.

I was too late to see 'em.

Although once I did, down on the Gulf Coast, down in Biloxi, or near Biloxi, go to Beauvoir when it was still an old soldier's home; and I saw a number of 'em sittin' around on benches and things down there.

They were just old fellas with beards as far as I was concerned.

They tell funny stories about those old men.

There's a story about a woman goin' through the Confederate Home down there, and there was an old man about 80 years old, and he had one of his legs was off just above the knee.

And she stopped in front of him, and shook her head, and said, "Oh, my good man, you've lost your leg."

And he looked down and said, "Damned if I haven't."

(laughing) They were funny old men.

- Can you talk a little bit about Mississippi's contribution to the war in terms of soldiers, and in terms of destruction, and everything inside the state?

- The Mississippi contribution to the war was truly great.

My God, Mississippi contributed to the army of Virginia one of the hardest-hittin', hardest-fightin' brigades.

Barksdale Brigade, in Longstreet's Corps, is one of the finest body of fightin' men in the army of northern Virginia.

Mississippi, of course, was one of those states that had a terrific amount of fightin' within its borders.

North Carolina, for example, contributed more men to the Confederacy than any other state; but it was comparatively unripped-up compared to states like Virginia and even Mississippi.

Georgia, except for Sherman's quick march through it, didn't suffer too much in the war compared to places like Mississippi.

One of those statistics that shakes me up to know is that in the first year after the war, Mississippi's total income, in the state of Mississippi, 1/5 of it was spent on artificial limbs for the veterans.

There's just problems you don't even think about until you run across it in a statistic like that.

The women in Mississippi who were widowed or the engaged girls whose intended husbands were killed in that war changed a lotta things.

Before the war, I don't remember the figure, somethin' like 80%, far more than 80% of the teachers were men.

After the war, 80% or far more were women.

There just weren't any men.

The carnage of that war is just incredible when you come down to the figures on it.

If you wanta be a good writer, you've gotta have very early a notion of bein' true to what you have learned out of your personal experience, includin' your readin', but outta your personal experience.

You haveta be true to that.

You should never be willin' to write a scene that you know is false to these precepts in your own heart simply because it will work, or somebody will buy it.

Those are the traps that good writers don't fall into.

- Let's talk for a minute about influences, if you can tell me some of the American writers that influenced you as a young man.

- A huge influence on my life was William Faulkner.

I didn't know him, but he was over there in Oxford writin' books, which were among the first modern things I ever read.

And whatever first modern things you read are always very influential on you.

But in this case, it was a man writin' about my home state that made me see my home state in ways I would not have seen without his help or Faulkner's comprehensive law on many levels, includin' teenage level.

And I think that's proved by the huge sales he had in paperbacks long before he won the Nobel Prize.

To me, the most unusual thing about Faulkner, the thing I got from him more than any other one thing, is his ability to communicate sensation.

He can tell ya what the texture of this cloth feels like to your finger.

If you read a description of dawn in the woods in Mississippi; that is dawn in the woods in Mississippi.

Every sensation that he writes about becomes very real, mostly through use of highly-poetic metaphor, but also through the accuracy of his observation and the intelligence that he brings to it.

It's not often considered, probably because it's too simple to consider, how highly-intelligent a man Faulkner was.

That eye that he had was so gifted, was well-informed by the brain behind it.

Every writer I ever knew started out as a poet.

It was usually he changed to prose after he found out he couldn't handle poetry.

But I was already writin' as soon as I caught fire from these people who did it so well.

I guess the first time I settled down to thinkin' that things could be done with words above the level of journalism, and poetry, and those things was the stories I wrote with Carolina Magazine when I was in college at Chapel Hill.

I began to see it there.

And then when I left school, and I left it after two years, and I was waitin' at home for the National Guard to mobilize because Hitler'd gone into Poland, I wrote my first novel, Tournament, and that's when I really came into it, came to grips with the problem of handlin' a larger form.

By the time I finished college, I was in a class of '39, there had not been a major American writer who could even pretend to have been well-educated.

The only one I know of that had a master's degree was Thomas Wolfe, and I know he kept on another two years so as to live on his folks, which is a perfectly valid thing to do.

But Faulkner and Hemingway had never been to college.

Fitzgerald flunked out of Princeton and so on.

It is by no means required, and in some ways I think for the, say, the last two years of college, junior and senior year, you really might be better off out ridin' freight trains or workin' in a sawmill for the experience that you get from it durin' those invaluable years when your brain is like a sponge and absorbs every experience you have.

If your experience is a college campus experience, that's pretty meager stuff.

Anything that helps you learn how to write, any outside thing that gives you laws and rules, such as a teacher of creative writing, is short-circuitin' you, is keepin' you from havin' some very valuable experiences that can only be gained by makin' mistakes.

What he tells you may be literally true, but you don't know it on your own skin.

And the only way you're gonna know it for yourself is to discover it for yourself.

So anybody who gives you excellent advice about writin' is almost keepin' you from learnin' it.

You can say yes, right, but you can't put it into practice unless you find it out for yourself.

You can be vitally interested, and I can talk to ya for endlessly about theories about writing, about what's good, and what's bad, and what you should do, and what you should not do.

And I guess it's very well to have all those notions in your mind, but when you sit down at that desk, you better get 'em all outta your mind.

You fly by the seat of your pants when you're writin'.

You don't bring these theories with you.

That is what I meant awhile ago when I said there are some dangers attendant upon bein' highly-educated for a writer, not for a critic; he should be.

But a writer doesn't wanna develop his critical faculty to the point where it's ridin' herd on his work.

It's all right for it to be up there, but it better not be in command.

There aren't any shortcuts, or if there are, they're to your detriment.

A shortcut is a very poor way to arrive at a precept about writin'.

The longer it took you to learn it, the harder you had to sweat to learn it, the better it'll stay with you, and the more it belongs to you.

There's an apprentice to be served to become a writer at least as much as to the apprentice as to be served to become a doctor or anything else.

You have to study your craft, your art, your profession as much as a lawyer or a doctor.

Lawyers and doctors sometimes scoff at that notion, but they're wrong.

There's an awful lotta work involved in learnin' how to write.

You have to learn how to make your hand do what your mind is tellin' it to do, and the only way your hand can learn how to do that, and that is, write, is the same way a tennis player gets good with his racket or anything else.

It's a real process.

Not that makes a difference whether you use a pen, or a pencil, or a typewriter.

I suppose it doesn't; it does to me.

But I suppose it doesn't really, but you have to learn your craft.

You haveta learn it so well that you're not conscious of it while you're workin'.

And that takes a very lotta hard work.

It's sittin' at a desk, facin' a blank wall, workin' many, many hours day after day after day until you're able to use your hand the way your mind wants to put things down on paper.

If a story grows out of their natural propensities, then you have a true story; and I've always believed that and operated accordingly.

The worst possible way to conceive a book is a situation in which a man does this, that, and the other.

The best possible conception is how about a man who in a situation, not a situation in which a man, but a man who in a situation.

And it's a very different approach, and to me it separates good from bad writin'.

I'm the kinda writer who thinks that it's very dangerous to take very careful notes.

You have an experience, and you immediately write it all down so that you can use it.

That seems to me a dreadful thing; you freeze it that way.

What you should do, and the way I've always done, is let it move to the back of your mind and forget it.

And then when it re-emerges, as it will in future years, it comes out with all kind of encrustations, additions to it, and the distortions that take place in the back of your mind make it truer than it was when it got in there.

And I think that takin' notes for such uses is a serious mistake in any sense.

I might put down what I had for breakfast that mornin' 'cause later on I might be interested, but as for material to be used.

Now that's only my personal thing.

Henry James, for example, kept an extensive journal which he mined as a mother lode.

It was of great use to him.

But I think with D.H. Lawrence, to freeze somethin' is to keep it from growin' in this way that I think it'll grow it best if it's not specifically fettered, and I found that to be true time after time again.

The changes that somethin' undergoes in your sub- or unconscious are very valuable things.

And they don't occur if you pin it down too tightly before you let it move into your mind.

I'm a slow writer; 500 or 600 words is a good day for me.

And I have to work long hours to do that.

But if you can turn out 500, 600 words a day and can do it 360 days a year, you've got a lotta manuscript there.

A couple pages of typewritten stuff a day, it stacks up.

That's a novel a year if you can do it, if you can hold that.

And I did that the first four or five years of my writin' life; I wrote five novels.

I don't play poker; I don't play golf.

I don't takes rides in the countryside.

I write, and read, and listen to music.

And since the glorious invention came along, I watch a lotta television.

The glorious thing about television is when you're utterly exhausted by a day's hard work of writin', you can sit down in front of the thing, and your brain is totally inactive.

It's just somethin' there on the screen, and you watch it, and it doesn't require a thing of you.

There's nothin' there.

- Is the younger writer's duty to take what the things goin' on around him, and the way people talk today around him, and translate that into fiction?

- Sure, you're onto somethin' there that I haven't mentioned, and that's the need for a good ear.

I've been rereading John O'Hara lately, probably the best ear in American literature, and what he got from havin' a good, attentive ear is enormous.

The verisimilitude of O'Hara's work is enormously heightened by the accuracy of his hearing.

People speak in a way that you know is accurate because you test it on yourself.

O'Hara once pointed out that people do not say what is the idea of that.

What people say is what's the idea of that.

And that kind of thing put into your dialogue, especially, you know that it's true because of the accuracy of his hearing.

And, yes, it's very important for young people to learnin' writin' to sharpen their ears up and listen to what's goin' on.

I remember Rocky Graziano taught me a lot about dialogue.

He was kicked outta the army for refusin' to pick up cigarette butts.

He said that's not for me.

And I asked him later how he felt about it.

He said I wished now I'd picked 'em up, and that's the way people talk.

And you should listen to that.

It can also teach you how to make language strike home.

That's a splendid sentence: 'I wish now I'd picked 'em up.'

And you can use that writin'.

Many devices, many things you can learn from listenin' to people talk, black and white, illiterate and highly-literate, rich and poor.

They all have their virtues and they're waitin' for you to discover 'em.

And that's what a writer should do.

I was talkin' about not playin' poker.

That way I can listen, and I do.

As to advice, if someone were askin' me whether they should become a writer, I would always say emphatically no, have absolutely nothin' to do with it under any circumstances.

And if he would listen to that, he certainly should not have been a writer.

So there's so many pluses and minuses all over the place.

It just has to be an individual judgment.

It doesn't do any good to tell 'em that the satisfaction of bein' in print is a wanin' thing.

And by the time your fourth or fifth book comes along, you're not gettin' the kind of thrill you think you're gonna get outta your book comin' out.

You no longer think that the public will understand you.

They'll never understand you.

If they did understand you, it'd probably be a sign that you had slipped down to some kind of degree that shouldn't be paid any attention to.

But that's true of all walks of life.

It's not just writers.

Everybody knows that how he did what he does is far more important than how successful or unsuccessful he was at it.

Success shouldn't be scorned, but as for personal happiness, I'm absolutely certain that it comes out of the satisfaction that you have done your best in your circumstances.

And I think most people do do their best under the circumstances.

Yes, it's a hard life; it's also the happiest possible life sometimes dependin' on the very simple question as to whether work's goin' well or badly.

It's a life where, like any self-employed person, success or failure is strictly up to you.

And whether that's good or bad is your decision.

Most people say, yes, that's wonderful, but they wouldn't be so sure about it when all the blame comes clumpin' down on 'em.

But, to my mind, it's the best possible life.

I don't go with Henley about bein' the master of my fate and the captain of my soul, but that gets about as close to it as you can get.

I like it.

And the satisfactions are great.

I've been all my life not only opposed to writers bein' overeducated; I've been opposed to even financial help that's given 'em.

It's a great thing if you can't do any more than pay the light bill, to be able to do it.

And if somebody comes along with a large grant for you that short-circuits that, they're deprivin' you of somethin' there.

He should do it on his own.

He should be wary about acceptin' obligations that would require him to do work he doesn't like.

For instance, ideally, unless he could afford it, he probably ought not get married.

If he gets married, if he can't afford it, he probably ought not have any children.

That's one hell of a restriction to put on somebody.

But a writer knows not out of selfishness does he concentrate on what matters in his art.

He does it because he knows the whole thing's gonna blow up in his face if he doesn't.

If you're married, and your wife wants a new coat, and you write some bad fiction so that she can have a new coat; you and your wife are not goin' to get along very well, anyhow.

So don't do that; let her go cold.

The children are hungry; give 'em a peanut butter sandwich.

Don't go down and buy 'em some roast beef by writin' bad work 'cause you're gonna lose those children anyhow.

You'll be so dissatisfied with yourself that the thing is gonna blow up.

Most writers is gonna blow up anyhow so perhaps it doesn't matter.

They're self-centered people and well-avoided.

People would do well to stay away from writers.

They have interests that sometimes interfere with their, I won't say decency, but with their conduct.

It'd be a good idea to stay away from 'em.

They're not gonna tell you anything anyhow.

Young people would do well not to pay any attention to styles, and fads unless they interest 'em, and concentrate on doin' the very best they can with whatever talent they've been able to muster.

The best thing to do in all accounts is go your own way, work very hard at your craft, be true to whatever precepts you've formed, and everything's gonna be all right or it won't.

But I know nothin's gonna be all right if you do it any other way.