- Long as anyone will give me to write something.

You have to take it away from me.

And that's not good because I mean, you go back to the 19th century and there are plenty of writers who seem to be able to just turn it out and without worrying about gnawing it to death like a bone.

(upbeat ambient music) Hello, I'm Tom Wolfe, and in just a moment we're gonna be joining the University of South Carolina Writers Workshop where a guest is a journalist who if I know him at all, is gonna, first of all, belabor a lot of young students with some medium rare slices of his anecdotal life.

And then he's going to either do or intend to do something that will actually be of some use to writers starting out in this strange business of either journalism or fiction or anything else in which you suddenly put your ego on the line in print.

- One thing I wanted to know is the new journalism or the more personalized type of journalism that you write, isn't it really kind of returned to the type of journalism that was written before the wire services came into effect?

I mean, wasn't there more personalized journalism then, and then the wire services changed it and then now it's moving back into a more personalized style?

- Well, that's true, if you go back to some of the newspapers that were published before the Civil War, you'll really find some wild prose, not always good, but often wild.

And the kind of Tennessee School of Journalism that Mark Twain writes about, where the, in the lead paragraph is about the scoundrels and bush whackers who are now part of this just reputable town that we live in, this kind of, it was really very colorful.

And the telegraph itself as an instrument really introduced bureaucracy to journalism.

(Tom chuckles) It cost so much to send things by the wireless.

It then began this idea of concise journalism.

Concise journalism is often absolutely impenetrable.

These marvelous, condensed 12 word leads, it takes about the next 10 paragraphs to explain what this lead said.

Often repetitive writing is the clearest and the easiest to read and saves time in the long run.

I mean, Hemingway is a good example of that, Hemingway has a kind of biblical habit of saying things such as, "We walked through the woods and there was snow on the branches and the wind came through the branches and the snow fell from the branches down onto the woods, and it was cold there because the wind was coming through."

Well, it's a little, I'm doing a bad parody of Hemingway, but there is something very effective about not being concise if it's done with a purpose.

And if magazine journalism in the 60s made any impact at all, I think it was partly because there were writers who began to say, "Well, let's just forget some of the conventions of style and journalism and try to do something different, or at least try to use some of the freedom that you find in fiction."

- I wanted to ask Mr.

Wolfe, in your long marvelous descriptions where you use a long string of adjectives to describe something, is this something you really, really work a long, long time on or does it just come naturally to you?

- It's something I work on to tell the truth.

I think the greatest, the most important trick in writing is to make it appear spontaneous.

Writing is an extremely artificial medium when you think about it, you're taking sounds and you're turning them into little symbols on a page, that's artificial to begin with.

And then to make them read as if they have been spoken or thought spontaneously, I think is one of the supreme tricks in art.

And it's such a struggle for me to come up with that sort of thing effectively.

That was much relief to see that other people have been through the same thing.

Celine, for example, if you ever read "Death on the Installment Plan" or "A Journey to the End of the Night", it seems like you're listening to a man who's just come in off the street and he's telling you the story off the top of his head.

He really introduced slang to serious French literature, he is kind of the Mark Twain in a way of French literature.

And it turns out that he spent four and five years polishing the spontaneous, (Tom chuckles) these spontaneous utterances.

And so it's tough.

I think if things are going well for you in writing, and I say a particular morning, a particular afternoon, sometimes marvelous rushes of words will just fall into place.

And other times you just kind of have to put your head in a vise and make them come out.

- After you've worked hard at getting them spontaneous, do you know when you've reached the point?

I mean, is there a time when you know that it finally fits together and it's after your hard work, it's the spontaneity that you were looking for?

Is that something developed over.

- But very seldom do I feel that, very seldom can you trust your judgment the moment you've written something.

I'm sure everyone who's written has this feeling of going to bed very proud of something they've written and then getting up the next morning and realize it was absolute, the most stilted, stiff, cumbersome thing was ever put down on paper.

I think that after a couple of days, you can only fool yourself so much, you begin to see the, you begin to see where it goes, where it goes off.

And of course, sometimes you can over polish.

I'll take as long as anyone will give me to write something, you have to take it away from me.

And that's not good, 'cause I mean, you go back to the 19th century and there are plenty of writers who seem to be able to just turn it out and without worrying about gnawing it to death like a bone.

And you can, sometimes you can over polish.

Sometimes I think there's a virtue in leaving some original roughness in a piece of prose.

And you can see this in people who wrote at great speed, and you can see it in Zolon, you can see it in Balzac.

And it's not all bad the rough edges.

The first piece, magazine piece, the first long piece of any sort I ever wrote, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" was one I did extremely fast.

I look back on it, a lot of it seems very awkward to me, but I have a feeling that if I had ever tried to polish that piece, it might have been like sandblasting, you know, you sandblast an old stone house, you end up with just a little round mountain just left.

(people laughing) It's everything is, all the features have disappeared in the polishing.

And I think that can happen sometimes too.

Sometimes it's best just to have somebody to grab it away from you, and be done with it.

- Wasn't it true that you hadn't really planned for that piece the way you'd written it to be published?

- That's true.

That piece was, as I say, my first magazine piece, I was working for the New York Herald Tribune, it was a strike which lasted four months.

And so I went to, I had to start doing some freelancing to, that strike was the best thing that ever happened to me 'cause it forced me to start writing at greater length.

So I went to the Herald Tribune or to Esquire and I sold 'em on the idea of a piece about customized cars in California.

And they sent me out there, put me up in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and when you arrive, there's a basket of fruit and a split of champagne on the table, and that was a grand life.

And I ran up about a $6,000 bill in the course of a month in this hotel.

And I came back and I couldn't write this story.

I was absolutely blocked.

I never realized that all writers blocks are nothing but fear.

It's either fear that you can't do it or fear that if you do it, it isn't worth doing in the first place.

I mean, that's also a real fear often.

And anyway, I couldn't do the thing.

And so Byron Dobell, who was then the managing editor of Esquire, called me up and said, "We gotta have the piece.

We have $10,000 worth of plates, color plates of these goddam machines that you're supposed to be writing about, these customized cars on the presses."

And I said, "Well, I just can't do it, I'm blocked."

And he says, "Well, look, just type up your notes and we'll give 'em to a competent writer to put into some sort of shape."

(people laughing) And I wouldn't have done the humiliating thing of typing up the notes except that I had run up the $6,000 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and I felt so guilty, I said, "Maybe they'll make me pay back to 6,000."

So I, with a heavy heart, eight o'clock one night I sat down and began typing the notes.

And I remember it began, it was in the form of a memo to Byron Nobel and said, "Dear Byron, the first place I saw customized cars was at a teen fair in North Hollywood, California, it was done in a very flat, straight out way."

And I began describing step by step what I had seen in my reporting.

And I was typing at absolutely top speed in order to get it over with.

And it was to just one person, so I had no self-consciousness about other people looking over my shoulder.

And I ended up writing 48 pages that night on the typewriter.

And I turned in, brought it over to Esquire about nine in the morning, and then went home to bed and got a call that afternoon from Byron to Bell saying, "We're knocking the Dear Byron off the top of your memo and we're running the piece in the magazine."

Well, that was really my start in magazine writing.

And many people go through this without knowing it when they write letters to friends.

And I think all of us have known people who are great letter writers.

And can just leave you in stitches, and they're great stylists and they have a flow and a rhythm and everything else.

The same person is assigned a paper in a classroom or just assigned to write an article for a newspaper, and this person will freeze up because I think when it's gonna be for a larger audience, you start thinking of all the teachers who may be looking over your shoulder, classmates, other writers, whoever it may be, whose opinion intimidates you, and people stiffen up.

When I read things by students sometimes, I cannot for the life of me comprehend where they have picked up some of the habits, some of the stilted over formal passive constructions that we'll get into 'cause they don't, I'm sure they don't write that way in letters and I'm sure they don't talk that way.

And they're not taught this either, you're not taught, I don't think anyone any longer teaches people over formal prose.

Nevertheless, it comes in almost like politeness into written language.

- Last night you talked a little bit about the literacy crisis.

I was wondering if you as a child had any kind of premonition that you were going to be a writer, and if so, did you have a teacher or something who was able to grab hold of that and develop it or inspire you?

- I went to a school in Richmond, Virginia where you really didn't need just one teacher to find you, the emphasis on writing was so intense that, looking back on it by what you see going on in high schools today, it was really quite remarkable.

In the sophomore year of high school, we had a course in formal rhetoric.

Now I assume that these courses exist in colleges today, I am not sure, but this was in high school and you were taught in a very detailed way, paragraph construction.

You were taught at least 20 figures of speech and made to use them in various combinations and this sort of thing.

And every course except mathematics involved writing.

And today, I find in many high schools only the English course will involve writing if in fact that involves writing and in history and of course of that sort, there's multiple choice examinations and so on.

- Have you ever wanted to write fiction?

- I have, when I was in college, if you were gonna be a writer, that was what you were going to do.

The novel, and I think it perhaps it's still true was one of the last great American dreams of completely turning your life around overnight was like striking oil or going out and finding gold.

And I'm sure there to this day, there are plenty of people who look up on the writing of a novel is the way they're gonna turn their lives around.

But also it was what you were, it was the goal you went for, certainly when I was in college was to, and everyone assumed if they were interested in writing, that they were going to write a novel.

And to this day, I feel like I should try to write a novel if only to answer the inevitable criticism of nonfiction writers that they're ducking, they're ducking the big one, they're going off on all these elaborate tangents to avoid.

Every time I finish a long book of nonfiction, I've just finished a book on the astronauts, I swear to myself, I'm never gonna write another book of nonfiction because there's so many obstacles built into the fact that you are trying to be faithful to what actually happened without embroidering.

God knows you get accused of embroidering enough even then.

I've had in my mind, I would like to do a novel someday.

I guess there's no used talk about it someday, much longer when you're almost 50.

A kind of vanity fair for our times.

For some reason, all the novelists in New York and for that matter in Los Angeles kind of avoid the task that Thackery took on or that balls act took on or the go-go took on of doing the kind of panoramic novel of life and styles of life in the city.

And that as a piece, as a kind of a piece of fiction to tackle does interest.

I have written one short story, and that was about three years ago appeared in Esquire, it was called a commercial.

It was about an athlete making a perfume commercial.

- You talked about getting accused of embroidering, and I've read explanations you've given about how you research and report and interview.

I was wondering if you could tell us, do you ever take liberties in your writing to maybe spice the story up?

And also could you talk about your interviewing techniques a little bit?

- Well, by spicing a story up, I've never done any of the following things of which I have been accused.

(Tom chuckles) I have never invented a scene, I have never invented dialogue.

I have never merged different scenes in order to come up with one scene that's a piece of dynamite.

Now there is a lot that is done, that you can do in terms of interviewing people about their thoughts, for example, which is a controversial sort of thing to do in order to have to use a device of interior monologue or of simply of point of view.

I'll give you an example from the work of someone else, John Sack is a writer who did a book called "M", he went to Vietnam with a company which trained at Fort Dix, he started with him at Fort Dix, went into Vietnam.

And after each piece of action, such as a skirmish of some sort, he would then interview various soldiers about what they were thinking at the time of the action.

When he wrote it, instead of saying, "After the battle, I asked sergeant, so-and-so what he was thinking, and he said this", he puts the thoughts into the action itself.

And I've done that also, I did in the electric Kool-Aid acid test of, I have a long scene in there of Ken Keye's paranoia while he's hiding out in the jungles of Mexico and thoughts running through his head, which I obtained from, these thoughts I got from interviewing Keesey, from reading his letters to Larry McMurtry that he wrote at the time and from tapes that he made while somewhat twisted in a paranoid fashion from marijuana sitting in the jungle smoking and writing.

And putting these things together, I felt I knew what he was thinking at that time.

No, obviously this is not, cannot be called absolute truth, there's no way known to record someone's thoughts on the spot.

Nevertheless, I think it's an important thing to do in nonfiction as well as fiction to get inside of people's central nervous systems in that way.

If someone does an autobiography, it's immediately accepted.

If somebody is writing their autobiography and they tell you what they were thinking at a particular moment or what they said at a particular moment, everyone accepts it as gospel truth.

So I figure what I'm doing in that case is writing part of that person's autobiography for him.

I'm putting down the thoughts that the person had at that time, as well as he can remember it.

Obviously people cannot remember all their thoughts and also they tend to leave out the humiliating parts as Orwell.

Orwell said, he never read autobiographies because people never put down the real story of a man, which is all humiliation.

So that can be, I suppose could be called, well, reshaping the truth a little, but I don't know any other way to get at it.

- Mr.

Wolfe, I wanted to ask you what you went through to get your first book published.

Did you have an agent and how many publishers did you have to go through?

- I'm trying to remember now.

I did have an agent, and I my first book was a collection of magazine pieces, and very few people were interested at all in publishing it.

Collections of nonfiction usually did very poorly.

For that matter, collections of short stories were hard to publish at that time.

And finally many publishers would say, "We'll publish your book of short pieces if you'll also sign a contract to do another book on this, this or this.

And maybe we'll publish that second book first and then we'll publish your collection."

And this I realize was just meant that the collection wouldn't be published at all.

And finally, Ferris, Strauss and Jeroux seemed genuinely, Henry Robbins was the editor there at that time, seemed genuinely interested in the collection without insisting that there'd be this other long piece with it.

And then the agent in this case, my agent's name, Lynn Nesbit, was very useful to me, I mean, she was the person who I would've been, I think crushed by the first two or three rejections and she just kept pushing on until she found somebody who was interested in doing it.

And I think for book and for publishing a book, an agent is very useful.

For publishing articles, I don't think you need an agent to get an article published.

You probably do to get a short story published these days, I mean, if you're not known, just because you really need a, there's so few short stories published.

You really need someone, a friend in court, either an agent or a teacher or someone who is known by the publishing house or the magazine who will vouch for you and say, "This person does have talent or whatever it may be."

But in nonfiction that isn't so, you can just kind of, it's really fairly easy to get a piece of nonfiction published if the idea is good.

- How would you do that in New York now?

- I think the way, there really is a very specific way to go about it.

This is, again, nonfiction, this wouldn't hold true for short stories.

If you are interested in a particular magazine, look at the masted, let's say Esquire.

Go down the list to the assistant editors, nevermind the top man, go down to one of the lower, the junior people, not a contributing editor 'cause a contributing editor is just a writer, it's just an honorific title.

So someone has a title like assistant editor, and write them or call them and propose the idea, even if you've already written the piece.

Propose the idea, see if they're interested.

Don't tell 'em you've already written it, because they like to feel they're having a hand in the creative process and that they're kind of just, and they're guiding you.

And if they're interested in the idea, they'll tell you right away.

And then you wait a decent interval and send in the pieces if you're following their instructions that you.

Or actually it could save you a lot of grief 'cause you may know whether they are interested or the sort of things that they might like, the reason you go to a junior member of the staff is that the junior members of a staff of a magazine are in competition with one another to discover new talent.

That's one of the main functions of a junior editor is to discover new talent.

The top editor is above that, he's is taking more of the large view of things and he has a lot of things on his mind.

But the younger editor will really be looking for new talent.

And it's really not nearly as hard as you think.

The idea you come up with though has to be something that you, if you're not known, has to be something that you have unique access to.

In other words, there's no use proposing a profile of Cyrus Vance.

Well, actually there's no use proposing that anyway, no matter who you are.

But because they could get a lot of people to do that, and it's a kind of an obvious idea.

But if let's say there was something happening at Fort Jackson, God knows there must be lots of things happening at Fort Jackson, I don't know what they are.

And you knew about it and you knew the people involved, whatever it might be.

Now this is this sort of thing if it had, if it really had interest would be the sort of thing they would say, "Go ahead, you do that story, you are there, you know about it and take a shot at it."

And I think a lot of people feel they just can't get through the door so they don't propose the good ideas that they have.

And it is much, I think it's easier to do than you think.

- You've spent much of your career looking at the personal lives of other people.

I believe I read somewhere that you even work seven days a week, and I was wondering if you've had a chance to have any personal life or if that's your life has been your work?

- When I look at my personal life, sometimes I feel very, very sad.

Usually, I get these questionnaires in which you're supposed to list vocations and hobbies.

And all my life I've wanted to be able to put down hunting, paragliding, water skiing, spear fishing, and, or at least something that shows I get away from it all and go out and do, so I have a little daring do.

I finally with one of them became honest and I put down as my hobby, window shopping.

And that's really about the only thing that I tend to do that is apart from either working or making believe that I'm working or finding ways to avoid, seemingly useful ways to avoid working.

And when I put this thing down about window shopping, they wouldn't run it.

They thought I was making my little joke.

I think that's the real reason I stay in New York is that it's, to me it's the eternal state fair.

The fair is always on, the high point of the year in Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up was when the state fair came in September.

And you could take 60 cents to the state fair, 12 nickels, last you all day long.

Get those snowballs with the raspberry flavors, take a ride on the Ferris wheel.

And I window shop.

From Columbia, South Carolina, this is Tom Wolfe thanking you for joining us for the University of South Carolina Writers Workshop.

(tranquil ambient music)