. >> rose: welcome to our program. this evening writerss talk about writing. we begin with salman rushdie. >> initially a thought i want to write about that period. and i thought if i am going to tell that truthfully i have to make all those people real including myself and that means telling the whole story. because i think to the reader, the interest is always the same. you have to see characters on the page that are vivid and that you're interested in and you want to know what happens to them and you care about what happens to them. so in a sense it's

novelistic. i have to write it in the same way i would write a novel. i have to make people come alive on the page and make them people that you would care about. and that so happens-- with me. >> and we begun with stanley fish and roger rosenblatt. >> writing has four purposes, at least to my mind. to make suffering endureable, to make evil intelligible, to make justice desirable, and love-- and so when he talks about what words can do to reality, i think there's no more important thing in the world. >> rose: and we conclude with nicole krause. >> i always thought that memory is a kind of imaginative act, that is a willful act. when you think about how we look back on our lives, we willfully cancel vast portions of it and choose to illuminate singular moments in order to create a narrative. but it is something of a fictional narrative and i think something of that will, something of that inventiveness of memory has always moved and interested me. so if pie bks, all three

of them have been about memories, in that particular interest. >> rose: writers on writing, when we continue. >> funding for charlie rose was provided by the following . >> additional funding provided by these funders.

and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> from our studios in new captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: salman rushdie is here, he is as you know the critically a claimed author of books that include midnight's children. his latest a children a book called luka and the fire of life it was written for one of his sons, like his first children's book haroon and the sea of stories. i'm pleased to have him here at this table again. welcome. >> it's always great to be back. i thought when you were coming, this is going to be a conversation about writing novels, about the memoir that you are working on, but we'll save that. because all of a sudden i got fascinated by children's

books. >> well, it's a great age of children's books for a start. there's an enormous amount of wonderfulfully gifted writers working in the field. but in my case it was just simply the consequence of having children. and until hi children i wasn't that interested in them. and my older son whose middle name is haroon. >> rose: who is now like 31. >> who is now 3 -- but when he was a kid he said to me y don't you ever write books that i want to read. what do you say to that. and i thought, you know, there's so much in other forms of people write for their children. and i thought about, you know, john lennon's wonderful song, beautiful boy that he wrote for his son. and paul simon wrote a song for his son, and so on. and i thought if i'm any kind of a writer you should be able to write a story to please your own child, for goodness sake. and out of that came haroon and the sea of stories. which he actually helped me with. and i got one of the best pieces of literary-- that i ever had, where i showed him

the first few chapters. i thought i better check that this was going to take. >> rose: he was about 9. >> he was about 11. and i said what do you think of it. he said yeah, it's good, dad. and there was a little unenthusiastic. i said good, it's good. he said yeah. me people might be bored. >> rose: and de like-- which character de like? >> he liked-- he liked, well, he liked the relationship between the father and son. >> rose: in fact this was a story of a boy who travels to the magic realm to find his father. >> well, that's in the first one he's trying to, his father has lost the gift of telling stories. >> rose: right. >> and he has to go back to the source, the sea of stories to try to restore it. in this one, the younger brother, in both cases the children have to save the father. the father is pretty useless. >> rose: that's true of both books. >> true of both books. >> rose: the theory of children trying to save their parents. >> yes. that sense is preed pal, not trying to kill their father, maybe if they were 15 it

would be a different story. but in this one the father is older, because this is a child of his old age. and at a certain point he's fading out so it is the fire of life so to speak. and his son knows because his father has always told them that just like one step to the right of the world we live in is this other world world of magic and enchantment, and if you can get into that rld without, one of the great treasures in that world is the fire of life itself. and if you can steal i, an ancient story, the story of the fire, you can save your father's life so he is trying it do that. while being plagued by an attendant spirit who looks exactly like his father but is actually the angel of death. you know, death coming to suck the life out of his father, is literally filling up with his father's life. and thus becoming a measure of how great the urgency is. >> what was his name. >> nobo daddy. which i have to confess is not a name made up by me it

was used by william blake, in fact, who used it as a name for god. blake wrote poems in which he complains about god, the absent father who is never there. what help are you. and i used it as more a figure of death. >> now what did your son think of that character. >> that's the best bit. i thought that it might be too scary. i was worried. but in fact it turned out to be his favorite character. and it made me think, maybe this kid has a little bit of a dark side and coy sort of push it. >> yeah. >> so, it ended up that this anti-father, you know-- . >> rose: was his favorite character. >> was his favorite character. >> rose: so your second son is milan. >> yes. >> rose: so milan comes along and says okay, dad, he has a book, where is my book. >> yeah, he read the first book. he must have been nine and a half, ten, something like that. and immediately began the campaign. you know, about the injustice of his life. about his brother had this treasure. and he didn't have anything. so where was his book. and what he didn't know is

that when i wrote the first book i actually enjoyed the experience of writing it so much thathe moment he was born, hi it in my mind. i thought let him just grow up a bit and maybe i'll write a book for him. so i already had the form, but i allowed him to feel that he pushed me into it. >> rose: why did you enjoy the form? >> there's something very liberating about the pureness of storytelling. if you can reduce everything you're doing to the pure line of the narrative, it's a wonderful freedom for a writer. and you know one of the things that happens is that whereas in an adult novel, an enormous amount of what happens can be interior to do with what haens inside, in this kind of book, you have to show who people are, what they're feeling w what they're thinking, and why. and you have to show it entirely through what they say and what they do. so everything is eck terrie terrierized. everything becomes outside. >> rose: but wluka and the fire of light is also about mortality. >> yes.

i think that's the engine. the engine is this question about what happens if you are in danger of losing your father, you know. and so i mean i think these days kids are much more grown-up in some way, certainly than i was when i was 13 years old. and they can face all kinds of very tough questions. >> and that's an interesting period between 13, 14, between sort of childhood and something else. >> i agree. i think that's very interesting. this period between yes, it's borderline. and i think some of the most interesting writing now is set in that borderline. obviously there's-- but there is sara pullman's books which i think adults read with just as much pleasure as children. there's books like mark haden's book, the curious incident of the dog-- and then there are some interesting journeys the other way, books that started out as adult books that require a second readership amongst younger readers. and so i've been very interested in how blurred that borderline is beginning

to be and how much interesting work there is in it. >> make one other comparison, haroon, wluka is haroon younger brother. >> yeah. >> they are linked. >> they are linked. it is the same little family at the centre. same father, the story teller rashid and his wife who have this relationship where the father is all head in the clouds and airy fairy and unrealistic. and the mother is sort of, the mother is the one that says that life is real. and you have to save it she's-- i mean she's-- what was rashid known as, the shaw what because he is an oral storyteller. if people like him they call him the ocean of notion. but if they don't he is the shaw of blah. >> so luka, he encounters the father's ghost. >> yeah, and then he has to set off on this quest through the magic world, in the same way as the classical quest narratives, facing different adversaries, having to overcome a whole series of obstacles and trying to final hae get to

the center, the inner sank tomb of where the fire is. >> you want people to say this is not a sequel to this. these are companions. >> i think that they stand alone. i very much wanted to write it as a stand alone book but they're related, yes. i mean in the way that this is a-- maybe an arrogant comparison but in the way that through the looking glass and allison's adventures in wonderland are not, one is not a sequel to the other. but you know, you can read rough the looking glass without reading wonderland. but they're related. and so in that way, i think they're related. >> there's also a video game. >> yeah. because you know, the video game in our time has used many of the techniques of the classical quest narrative. the wol business of levels, you know, and saving and proceeding to the next, is very like what happened, for example, you take myths like weio wonderful, the hero arrives in a village to killed monster. he kills the monster grendel and immediately isaced

with a bigger monster which is grendel's mother. so having, you know, as it were, having destroyed one level, he has to go up to another level. >> to a bigger challenge. >> to a bigger challenge and video games, i think the people who device them have carefully studied the quest narrative and they know that you use this structure, and because the structure is not only about killing dragons and overcoming obstacles, it's also about personal growth. the boy grows up, as he overcomes the obstacles. >> rose: but back to this, it is always, always about storytelling. >> yeah, yeah, i mean i think there's a momenin luka where he, in a kind of slip of the tongue refers to something as the only a story. and actually this demon figure tells him off and says you of all people, the son of a story teller, you should know that there is no such thing as only a story. and he says man alone, man alone is the storytelling animal. he says do rats telltales. do porpoises have narrative purposes, do elephants

elephantasize, no, they don't. man alone burns with books. >> rose: it's always about children saving the parents. it's always about that. >> first of all, it's more fun, isn't it. parents say to the child, boring story. other way around, more interesting. but also i think it's because there is a sense, adult sense i think in which we feel that our children are in some way our salvation. >> the writing of these backs in the end was about the joy of your life. >> yes. >> absolutely. and i would hope -- >> the thing that brought you the most joy at the end of the day when push comes to shove, whatever your -- >> no question. as a result they were the two most voyful books that i've ever written. they were the most fun to writbecause, you know, because they are written out of love. they are acts of love. >> i understand that milan got first look. >> yeah, yeah, no, nobody was allowed to see it until he approved it. yeah. so if he said this doesn't work, i don't like this. >> i would have-- i would have been in bad trouble. >> did he ever say it. >> no, he didn't, no, he was

very-- as i said, i needed him to reassure me on certain points along the way. and i fortunately got the reassurance. and though one or two things which are in the back because he more or less forced me to do t he has a dog called-- and in the book, in the book, in the book the boy luka has two pets. he has a dog called bear and a bear called dog. and -- >> a bear called dog. >> that was a family joke. >> and we got, he got a labrador. it was his decision to call the dog bear. and so i used to say obviously your next pet has to be a bear, you have to call it dog. so every time you say bear, the dog comes. so from a family joke, it is something that got into the book. >> so is rashid you. >> you know, he's two people. he comes from two people. i mean yes, of course he's a comedy version of mean,-- me, you know, but he's also a kind of comedy version of my dad. because my father was the first story teller in my life. an when my three sisters and i, when we were little, he would tell bedtime stories.

he was very good at it. and the way that i first heard some of the famous stories of the east, you know, sin bad the sailor a ladin, ali baba, was in his versions of them so he was my shaw of blah, if you like. and so rashid in the story is both of us. is a little bit both of us. >> do you fear growing old? >> the diminishing power of age? >> i'm not crazy about it, you know. i have to say, there's that great line of woody allens when he was asked if he was happy that he would live on through his movies. he said no, he would prefer to live on in his apartment. (laughter) and you know, that's my opinion. i'm not in favor of-- favor of growing old. but i don't mind it either. i mean i think you just have to accept what there is. and there is a point as an artist, this point in a life when you'veone a lot, where you do have to look harder for the next direction. you have to make sure you're

not just repeating yourself and find fresh challenges. >> rose: so why did-- why have you come now to writing memoir? >> just t was instinct, you know. the truth is after everything that happened around satanic versus happened, those years, you know, there was a bit of me, theres with a writer bit of me that was sitting on my shoulder that kept saying you know, good story. >> rose: i'm sure, take notes. >> take notes. and but then for a long time at the end, of that period, i didn't want to write about it. i thought i would just come out of it you know, i don't want to put myself back into it. i want to go back and do the day job. i want to write novels. and i just thought there's going to come a time when you feel ready. and i'm just going to leave it to instinct. >> and instinct has spoken. >> instinct spoke earlier this year, something just said okay what do you want to do next. you know, i had finished this book. i said what dow want to do next. and i found myself thinking well, maybe it's time to tell that story. i'm doing it. i have written, i guess, my guesstimate, i have written out a quarter of it.

>> rose: but it's a memoir of just that time. >> no, it's a memoir of life. >> yeah, because initially i thought maybe i just want to write about that nine year period but then i thought if i'm going to tell that truthfully, i'm going to make all these people real, including myself. and that means telling the whore story. because i think to the reader, the interest is always the same. you have to see characters on the page that are vivid and that you're interested in and you want to know what happens, that you care about what happens to them. so in a sense it's novelistic. i have to write it in the same way that i would wte a novel. i have to take people and make them come alive on the page and make them people that you would care about. and that so happens was me. >> rose: right. >> but in a way one of the reasons for waiting was to feel that i would have the proper writerly distance from the material, that i could approach it like that. i can approach it like a writing task. >> rose: so therefore the question, how now do you see that incredible period,

perhaps differently than you saw it, and what do you know about it that you might not have known as you were expericing it? >> well, you know, the thing that i instinctively felt at the time that i think nobody else really saw was that this was not an isolated incidence, you know. a lot of people treated it as if it-- even people, either people on my side or against. >> rose: i don't think people understood it until they came along with you and then said okay this is something that exists. and what is it about. >> but very few people wanted to see it as one incident amongst many. you know, it was seen as an isolated thing. and one of the things i tried to do at the time was to try to point out there was a larger problem, you know, it wasn't just me, that the attacks on other writers, on individual freedoms, and so on, inside this radical islamic world, there were very wide spread. and often using exactly the same language that was used against my book.

but much less publicized because they were happening in arabic in arab countries. >> so what did you find out and without talking about a particularly individual, i know that chris hitchins has said to me that when he thinks about his life, one of the proud moments is he was there for you. >> well, the thing that i feel very moved by is the way in which pie friends moved closer to me, you know. and stood beside me and helped me through that. and christopher hitchens was one of the people who undoubtedly did that. and certainly at the point when there was a key moment when i finally was able to get the meeting with president clinton which was the first time that the american administration had ever really taken an interest, christopher was very key in pushing for that meeting, talking to people he knew inside the administration, and helping it happen. he wasn't the only person. the british government was trying. >> rose: tony blair was responsive too. >> blair was trying to make it happen too. the british ambassador, you know, et cetera. so there were a group of people but of my friends,

christopher was, you know, he's very connected in washington and he used everything he had in order to try and bring about what he felt needed to happen. and i mean you notice your friends in need. your friends-- . >> rose: you have also said something very interesting. it is that your sense of respect for the brave people who stood in line to buy satanic versus that they somehow had a kind of courage. >> i think there was a, you know, a general very wide spread reaction amongst just ode people. that they didn't feel like being told what they could read and what they couldn't read by a priest, a fanatical priest in a far away country. and i think that people did stand up for that book as a point of principles, not just readers but people working in book stores, people working in publishing companies. you know, there is a collective act of principles and i feel very proud to have been involved with that. >> rose: and islam itself today. >> i know, that is a big

subject. >> rose: but i think for me answering one sense i think the interesting thing is the war inside islam, not between islam and the west but if you look at what happened in iran after the last election, you could see that a whole generation of young people, you know, rejected that very conservative, repressive, inhibiting regime that they are are stuck with, you know. and i think if you look across the muslim world you will see that you see a younger generation that really doesn't want that world. you know. >> and they want a -- >> they want a modern islam. >> they want a more open society. they want a society in which they can be the people they choose to be, rather than the people, rather than being forced into the very narrow world that they -- >> there is also this thing that always perplexed me. said as the west versus islam, which is like geography versus a religion.

doesn't make sense. >> it doesn't make sense. i mean i think that there obviously is a kind of radical islam that is opposed to an idea of the west. and which is to attack it. >> what idea of the west is it that that wing of islam is opposed to. >> imperialist, oppressive, you know, and a power center that they need to overthrow. it's about power, though. it's in the end about power. the purpose of grou like al qaeda is not to bring about a whollier world, it's to bring about a world that they're in control of. it's not about faith, it's about power. so i just have an objection to religions that still have this apparatus of power. and which try and force themselves down people's throats as being the only truth. >> but are you equally offended by the whole notion of proselytizing for religion? >> i'm not in favor of it,

no. i mean i think, you know, i'm more in the hitch ij-- hitchens,-- camp than any other. >> rose: is that atheist or agnostic. >> i would say atheist, yeah, but we all have a slightly different take on it. my take on it is that which is unlike, for example, hitchens, that i think if you happen to be religious and it happens to bring you nourishment and solas and inspiration and whatever, that's your business not mine. >> rose: right. >> and i don't see that it's my business to tell you that you are an idiot, you know. i might think-- . >> rose: or as countries christopherson says if it gets you through the night. >> but when it becomes what is happening in our time is the religious sensibility is moving into public affairs and into politics and trying to determine the way in which an entire society should shape itself and what path it should follow, then i have a quarrel with it. >> rose: how will this play itself out. is there an end game. >> well, i have always felt, in many of these ancient

myths that i try to use in luka and the fire of life, many of the an shouldn't traditions suggest that there is a moment when human beings outgrow the gods. you know, the nordic myth of the twilight of the gods. after that, there ain't no gods any more. it's just up to men to deal with their own lives. even in the greek and roman myth they have moments when the gods stop meddling in humana fairs. they step back. and they say now it's over to you. i see that as being related to in a human life, to the process of growing up. that you know when you are young, even when are you adolescent, you need parents. you need figures of guidance. even if you are rebelling against them, doesn't matter, you still need them. but there is a point at which you move from that to being able to make your own life decisions and your own choices. and you make your own way in the world. and i see that, that religious experience as being part of the childhood and adolescence of the human

race. and when we grow up, hopefully, we grow out of it. >> rose: this book is called wluka and the fire of life. salman rushdie, thank you. >> twhau. >> great to see you. >> always great to see you. >> rose: the great writer nathanael hawthorne once say easy reading is damn hard writin stanley fish and roger rosenblatt both writers and teachers know this all too well. they have written books on the craft of writing and the powerful urge that drives so many of us to take on the task. joining me now are stanley fish, his new book is called how to write a sentence and how to read one. and roger rosenblatt author of unless it moves the human heart, the craft and art of writing. i'm pleased to have both of them here at this table. what is it about good writing that makes it good? >> i like plain writing, restrained writing. and writing that depends on the strength of the known. a lot of writers talk about

the strength of the verb, the strength of the adjective. the reason i like the known is that emmerson called it the speaking language of things. and i try to teach my writing students that if you find the right known you won't need three adjectives to describe it. if you need three adjectives to describe t you probably got the wrong known. so there are a lot of little things in it. eventually i go wide in the book, as you know. but a certain particular small thing, anticipation over surprise, invention over imagination, things like that. that makes good writing. >> i'm attracted to sentences but as i say not the-- you wonder as you read them and how could someone who uses the same language i do, produce that and i can't. and those are the sentences i tend to collect almost as if you might collect videos of great athletic moments.

and those are the sentences i try to share both with my students and with the readers of this book. >> rose: how do you write a sentence? >> well, there are ways of imitating the form. and that's what i try to teach in the book. that is, you can take sentences apartment you can first begin by understanding what a sentence is. my mantra is a sentence is a structure of logical relationships. which is as i say it, not very helpful. but as i develop it through exercises, i think helped my students and readers to know when sentences are cohering and when they are falling apart. and then we study the sentences of great writers which cohere in surprising ways. so surprise also is one of the values that i admire. and we can both admire and imitate at least the form of great sentences. although often when the immigration-- imitation is on the table and put next to the original great sentence, there is a lamentable gap.

>> rose: tell me about sentences beyond the known. >> well, you know, actually learned a great deal from reading stanley's book. because i never thought of the sentence as the particular unit, the central unit. know like him i appreciated them. the kick i got out of the book, apart from the instruction, was it reminded me of what a crazy lotus literary types are. stanley quotes a sentence of john updike talking about ted william's last home run, a home run at his last at-bat. the sentence is it was in the books while it was still in the sky, okay. i admire the sentence. here is how crazy it gets. it is a little impresis, is the home run that is in the book or the fact that he hit a home run in his last at-bat. that wasn't in the books. because-- because it was really the contempt he showed the crowd after he ran around the bases. and you start to get into language like that and i

think oh how grateful i am for a book like that. >> that's a great remark. because the seven closed nature of the sentence-- that is it goes from the moment to immortality in cooperstown and it excludes the audience and it exclude those who like updike were present during the day. and that's just perfect as he said for ted williams. that's great. >> rose: i interviewed ted williams about what he was thinking as he rounds up the bases. and he said i thought for a moment, i thought for a moment i might tip my hat. i decided not to. >> well, i'm glad he decided not to. >> it was the whole history of contempt. >> rose: that's right. he was driven forward by his history. and here is john updike talking about the satisfaction that he gets from writing. here it is. >> what is the satisfaction for you? >> it's turning reality into words and then out the other end comes a kind of reality in the readers' mind.

but it's the flux of life as it goes through you and goes by around that you can actually find some words that will fix it and make it understandable to others who are far away or maybe far in the future. that's the excitement for me. >> i was thinking about this subject after i wrote the book. and so what i am about to say is going to sound neater than it would if we were just talking off-the-cuff. but i came to the conclusion as updike indicates, that writing has four purposes, at least in my life. to make suffering endureable. to make evil intelligible, to make justice desirable, and love possible. and so when he talks about what words can do to reality, i think there's no more important thing in the world. >> well, i certainly agree in general with both you and john, and updike the way i put it in the book is you know the sentence is an

organization of items in the world. and that organization and the items you select and the way they are ordered will produce extraordinarily different worlds. but my view of what writing is for is much less exalted than yours, or i suppose much more aesthetic. i think that the point of writing is to produce great sentences that you can then look at, as you look at a-- . >> rose: so for you writing is the thing itself, not the poer with of the thing. >> i think that, yeah, i think-- one can't deny, of course that writing-of-all kinds has power, and there are many historical moments when great events-- but i am not sure that writers themselves, even those who have what we might think of as a political purpose have that in mind. i think what they want to do is -- >> but actually i agree in terms of the purpose but i

do think craft almost automatically becomes something bigger than itself in the writers that the three of us would agree are the wonderful writer. i take this title of mine, unless it moves the human heart from a poet, ad hope who is, i paraphrased it. it is that your writing will not matter unless it moves the human heart. and the heart that you must move is core rucht, depraved and desperately wicked. and i changed it a bit to say and desperately in need of your love but the sentence after sentence, word after word, the precision with which you look at the sentences in your book, then as they mound up create a whole new universe and a better one. >> you also quote at the beginning of this mark twain. the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. it's a difference between the lightning bug.

>> it's what i teach my students. we are in the lightning business. and i will do every kind of trick i can, i'm sure stanley does the same thing to push them toward that right word and to know the difference between the word and the right word. >> and you said i think i never fail to say we to my students because i do not want them to get the idea that you ever learn how to write no matter how long you've done it. >> every other writer feels the same as i did. every time you sit down to write something new you go huh? have i ever done this before. how do you drive this car. then when you get in it you start to remember things that you have learned in the past. but these writing programs are not professional schools the way law schools or medical schools or professional schools. they're amateur schools. and my mfa program which i-- in which i teach at stonybrook southampton. >> rose: master of fine arts. >> master of fine arts,

is-- these programs are burgeoning all over the country, a bunch of people in the same boat in a very touching situation given the fact that there is no profit, there is nothing guaranteed in this venture, all over the country just learning to put in family terms beautiful sentence after beautiful sentence after beautiful sentence. >> but there is a difference between your students and mine. which accounts for some of the differences in the two books. my students aren't the students who are eager to write and know that there is something in them that compels them to write. my students are the people who are scared to death of writing, whether they are undergraduates or these days second and third year law students or graduate students. writing has become for them simply the sight of anxiety. they don't know what to do. they don't know, even at the basically level of a phrase or a clause, what it is that they are supposed to put together. >> that's why i admire both you and your book. and i had a similar experience teaching at harvard's kennedy school one year when i couldn't get

anything out of a class. they were all brilliant kids. or they weren't kids, actually, but people who were world leaders and were going to do something important in the world. and i couldn't get them to find something original in themselves. then i had this idea of just an exercise. and i closed the door of the classroom and i closed it again and i closed it again until they got used to the sound of a closing door. and i said now, start to write. no throat clearing, start to write. and one, a gay man wrote about his partner leaving, and the partner said we didn't click but the door clicked. and another, a wonderful woman who had not written really anything interesting in class to that point began her piece in my father's house there were no doors. she had grown-up in trailers, on navy bases. and then came another person entirely and that moment of excavationas worth all those years of teaching. >> rose: all right. this is ian mcuing who talked about how novelity of

the author. >> when a novell teacher tells you how to write it and the learning curve is long and slow, beginnings are often very difficult. but somewhere past the halfway mark, maybe two-thirds of the way through, you have learned it all. you know the truth, you know where you are heading. you still have the opportunity for surprises along the way. but you're finally in control. you've learned how to sing this particular song. and i think i'm not alone in this. lots of nell il-- novelists feel this those days when they come, 500 words, 800 words a day, it's a secret. it's yours. it's building and just where you want. that is the real pleasure. when people say why do you write. >> i want to say then how you cannot. i mean-- how you cannot have this-- how you can live without wanting to record, investigate life on these terms. >> yet at the same time i'm always craving to reh the end. oh, if i could finish my life will be free.

>> why dow write? >> i write because i have to. it is in my dna. i wanted to be a writer since i was 12, when i became a writer it was meant to be. >> a write for the pleasure of figuring things out, a. and b, explaining to other people. i don't know why but i love to take perhaps complex or controversial ideas and simply lay them out, as an acceptable way as possible. >> is that the same joy as teaching. >> it is the same joy as aching. although teaching is harder. because when you write it's you and the words, and your project. when you teach there are those pesky students. >> yes. >> we both know, they're not always coop rattive. >> but i don't write the way stanley writes. i don't-- i rarely know what i am thinking before i start to write. i don't have something to explain to somebody.

and-- says that his method of writing is like a car at night and can only see as far as the headlights illuminate. up to a certain point that's try and then when you hit the middle of the book your mind can't help it and comes to the end. but i'm closer to that. the idea of living in the mystery, dwelling in the mystery, and then discovering what you said when you look back. >> one of the old notions of writing and certainly creative writing is write what you know. is that true? >> i take a different, slightly different tack on it. from shelly from the defensive poetry, saying it a little differently from shelly. but what he said was we must learn to imagine what we know. and that is a very important idea it seems to me. because if you only write what you know you wind up saying something in different words. but roughly you will have the same beast. if you learn to imagine what you know you start to dream

into reality. and then something else happens. then you, then you turn the world in to a swift world or shakespeare or jane austen. >> so write what you imagine. >> write what you plan. >> i would say again this is the difference between the kinds of writingment but for me i would say it is write what you want to know, that is you know that there is a problem out there, or a puzzle, some feature of today's society that you want to figure out what's going on. and so that moves you forward. >> here's your's on exactly the same ground. >> rose: who was it that said i don't know what i think until i see what i write. >> i don't know but it's true. and i often don't know what i feel until i write it. sometimes i write a sentence and i look back and i think did i say that, and i did mean that. and have i always meant that. >> rose: there was also this notion that how do you know when it's finished, when the

piece is finished? >> i can't speak for others. for me writing is a lot like music. i go through the various movements and i know when i have a feeling of when it's over. when i have said that i can say. >> rose: you just have a feeling. is that what you do. >> it's easier to know when you are finished than it is to know when you've begun. i got a piece of advice early on and i'm sure others have both given it and received it. eliminate the first paragraph. >> that's funny that you say that when i was a literary editor i used to do that with people and it almost always worked. >> yes, it works, you know, i remember the book that launched my career was a book on milton's paradise lost. and there's a cancelled paragraph. not quite the equivalent of virgil's cancelle cancelled-- flying-- but still t exists somewhere. >> rose: well, what is interesting here is that you quoting-- said never, when you start out it is like driving at night, can't see

beyond so are you in search of something. you don't know where. >> that's right. >> rose: and you are in search of answers to something you want explained but you don't know the answer when you start. >> you know a little bit of the answer and then the surprise that roger talks about so eloquently in his book, comes out when suddenly what you have written raises a question that you weren't aware of before. and you see the path going somewhere else and you must follow. >> that is mbe the mystery, of the sentence, as stanley says, it's certainly the mystery of words. why, we hit on a form on which to express ourselves. and the selves that we express are different. we don't know where they came from. sometimes we admire them. sometimes we're scared of them. >> rose: how to write a sentce and how to read one, stanley fish. unless it moves the human heart, the craft and art of writing, roger rosenblatt. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> rose: nicole krause is hear. she is one of the most critically acclaimed young

novelists around any where. her third novel great house was recently nominated for a national book award. rebecca newberger goldstein of the "new york times" calls the book a high wire performance only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve and you hold your breath and she does not fail. i am pleased to have nicole krause at this table for the first time. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: and you just told me that for a two-week period in 1995, you are an intern on this program. >> i was. and i had fond memories of it, brief as it was. >> rose: so tell me how having having done the history of love you came to this book. how were you shaped by it, what did you want to accomplish? in one case you had a book, in this case you have a desk. you have multiple characters. you have connected tissue there in which there are stories and a narrative. >> yeah, well, as one writes, of course, you discover something about how your mind works this is my third book so i knew by now

starting out that what interested me, the way i like to write is to really become lost. so in a way the more material i have, the more voices, the more stories, the more stories within stories, the more possibility there is to discover things, to lose my way but then sort of find myself surprised. so i began writing lots of different stories, with characters in very, very different places in time and space. and i also, you know, i started as a poet. and of course the basic unit of the poem is the metaphor. and the metaphor is thrilling because it's two very, very remote things that when they form a third thing, when a bridge is formed between them, there is this amazing, we love them because it gives us an illusion that all things are connected somehow. that things, many things have meaning. and i think i write like that i love to take these stories, and on a large level to make metaphors out of them, to make these kind of underground connections echo, symmetries, joints that hold the whole together. so i started knowing that

about myself. >> rose: you also have said, i think in an interview that i read, that a lot of novels are about memory. >> yeah. i'm often told, as one is often told what one's books are b as naturally one should be, because the readers often do have a sense of that in a way that you don't. they give you a reflection. >> rose: and for them looking at a piece of art, it's true, how they see it is their own thing, not yours. >> and i think that's absolutely right. a book say conversation and i think it's 50% of the author and 50% the reader and you meet in the middle. but i guess what i would say about memory, is i would wish to somehow shift that a little to say that i'm interested particularly in the remembering mind. and what i mean by that is i have always thought from my first novel which was about a man who loses 24 hours of his memory and has to start a new life, has to make a coherence out of what is evident will. i always thought memory is a

kind of imaginative act, that it is a willful act. when you think about how we look back at our lives, we willfully cancel vast portions of it and close to illuminate singular moments in order to cret a narrative. but it is a fictional narrative and i think something of that, something of that inventiveness of memory has always moved and interested me. so if my books, all three of them have been about memory it has been that particular interest opinions so what does the book in the history of love and the desk wa, do they stand for. >> the book within the book, well, i've always been a great reader. i love reader, from a young age i have been addicted. and i think naturally though i think my books are about many things, naturally they are also going to be about literature, about the books that i have loved and that have affected me. in the history of love you have this lost book within a book, also called history of-- which nobody reads. and sort of goes unpublished except for very, very few copies. and yet those who find it, those who find it, changes

their lives in some way and connects them it brings them, moves them toward each other. and i think this hopeful sense of the ways in which literature can connect us, that was what that book was for me. >> rose: you have said that novels are a structural blueprint of the mechanisms of an author's mind. >> yeah. >> rose: and so what do i learn about this structural blueprint of your mind? >> that i like to create a lot of chaos, a lot of-- various kinds of material and stories and different ways of telling stories. and then out of that, nothing gives me more pleasure than to find the coherence in it all. to, when i'm writing for a good year and a half of writing the novel i have absolutely no sense of how these stories will connect. i only believe they will and sense they will. >> you had these four different stories in your mind. and you are writing a novel. and you do not know how these stories will connect. >> no. >> rose: and you only find out how, how did you find that? >> slowly, piece by piece.

for example in that story when i returned to it, that story that i opened up in the novel, the first thing i did was to put two words in the front of the story. and the two words were your honor. now with those two words, in a way that voice came to life, that character nadia came to life. they're now almost the first words of the book, begins with talk to him. and then your honor. yeah. and i knew this that moment that nadia who was speaking, this writer, that she was filled with guilt. that she was to confess herself, that she was to unburden herself, to expose herself in some way, that she needed to be heard. i didn't know who that judge was. i didn't know if it was an official judge, if a courtroom, where. i simply knew that about it it took me pages and pages, not quite as many pages as the reader who only finds out maybe three quarters of the way this book, who your honor is, who she is addressing it took me a very long time and i had to believe that somehow i would figure that out, that some sense would be made of it. >> rose: how did this person who was an intern on this program for two weeks in

1995 become the novelist she is today? wrning oh, that's a question i don't know how to answer except that i wanted so much always from a very young age to be a writer. i wanted to be a poet, as i mentioned to begin with. and at some point that interest shifted, one day when i was 25, i don't know, maybe five years after i was intern on the show. i was living in new york city. hi come back from graduate school at oxford and come back to new york. and i felt let's try this thing this novel thing. i mean i have read so many of them. i wonder if i could write one. and i found within the first pages of writing man walks into a room, that i loved the form of the novel. i loved the feeling of this long project, that in a way, the messness of it, maybe that is what i am trying to describe about the project as well, this sense of not knowing, the unsernt of it. and also the sense that the novel by necessity, by definition, i think, is imperfect. it always has failing, always shortcomings maybe

because it is so poorly defined as a form, you can only say it is a very long story with a beginning and end between two covers but we can't really say more about what a novel is. but i gives the writer tremendous opportunity to kind, privilege to redefine the form every time she sits down to write it. >> rose: back to my question about how do you go from here to here, and you went through ticks, first, you went through poetry. and i love the story of you actually was it joseph brodsky doing a lecture and you wanted them to look at some poems you had written. and lo and behold. >> braz enly i said-- and lo and behold the next day-- he goes over for a number of hours with you about the art of writing poetry. >> yeah. and that meeting h such a tremendous impact on me for so many reasons. to begin with, he told gave me a reading list. hi just turned 18 years old. i don't know what i was reading, probably trash.

he told me read, for example, the beginning of herbert who is a polish poet who i think has guided my sense, until now, what kind of writer i wish to be. go read-- the nonvisible cities, and also just this sense of how serious a product of writing should be. i started to read beckett around that time. i can't remember, but beckett has-- if i am forced to have just one favorite writer, my desert island writer i think would be beckett. >> rose: why. >> well, his plays, of course, a work like end game i think is the closest thing to a perfect work of art that i can think of. but his novels, the darkness of it, i never have known a writer who has made so much of the absurdity of the human condition, at the same time with this incredible human, this incredible lightness of touch. on the sense, on the one hand these bleak existential monologues and at the same time an exuberance to them. how do you have those two things, the bleakness, the

sense of the absurdity, and tremendous energy and humor. >> someone said but, this is about you s that su have enormously good spatial sense. what does that mean? >> well n a small way it means i never lose my way in a foreign city. and i'm the person in my family who always knows where everybody has dropped their keys or put their hat. i remember -- >> where things are. and say for some reason i have a memory for that. what it means in my work, i think, and i do think it is in a way strangely, my father started out as a structural engineer. and now he is an orthopedic surgeon. it does seem to me that he loves architecture, it comes from a genetic passed down. >> engineer to an orthopedic surgeon. >> he did. you should have him on the show. but i think something about the sense of how i see things in space guides me as a writer. and how i put the parts of the novel together. i really do think that novels are just houses it wasn't an accident that this novel became -- >> and you're building rooms.

>> i'm building rooms, building from the inside so that it's almost like, in this intuitive way of writing, here is the door nobody, but now i need a door so then i build a door, but i have to open the door. and now i built a whole room and another room and another room. so slowly, slowly, years into writing the book, as mi backing away, i suddenly see what the whole house looked like whatted whole structure looked like. >> you have read the plays of harold pinter, i have a few, of course, i have seen them performed too. >> does that have an inannounce on. >> i don't think he has had an influence. i love to claim -- >> he and beckett were friends. >> yeah. i liked him but i guess he is not one of mine, do you know what i mean. >> rose: you've also said that writing is like, how would you say, writing is similar to excavation. >> yeah. it wasn't very long ago i read about a paleontologist, they walk over the same bit of land because they have a sense for whatever reason, a sense of, that there might be fossils there. and they will walk and walk

and walk. and then looking for tiny-- and if third instinct was right f they find it and begin to dig theynearth an entire dinosaur fossil. and i do feel writing is a little bit like that. for me at least. i'm pursuing these accidents and intuitions and if they were right, i unearth something that was before it a complete miss trae to me. >> you also have said in that series of interviews i read that one said to you that the writing process doesn't get any better. meaning there is no silver bullet. >> yeah. that was philip roth who said that to me, yeah. actually one day when i was starting out this novel, i was speaking with him, i met, i was lucky enough to meet with him and i had such a hard time, as ailes have a hard time. and i still haven't gotten used to that and i remember that he walked into the cafe and the first thing he said

was, how do you write a novel. how does one do that. 128 or 29 novels. and he seemed so, at one time terrifying, at the same time such a relief to hear that someone with such a, so fine at what he does. such a great writer who is still somehow doesn't-- this never gets easier. i remember when i left that meeting he said to me resign yourself to to this. >> what dow love most about it? >> i love the freedom it affords me. i've never found freedom like that anywhere else in this my life. this chance, every time i sit down to work, to write, a feeling to become anyone. literature as a reader and a writer gives you the chance, i don't know anything else it gives us this, to step into the conditions of another life. to feel what it is to be another person. to get inside that mind. i love that and i love how it also gives me freedom to become something. and then become myself. to express things about

myself that perhaps i couldn't in any other way. how did you write an old man-- i feel like i am him. he's me. i mean we are such a natural character -- because it gave me a chance to say thins about myself, about life that i think i couldn't otherwise have said. >> it's great to have you here. >> thank you. >> nicole krause, the book is called great house. every critic that i know has written with great enthusiasm for talent, the things that we have been talking about but also for the pictures and portraits and characters and the connection that she pays, so thank you very much. >> thank you.

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ow! of course. thank you. i'd call her honeydew goodbody, not lisa. the very fact that she is called lisa proves that she exists.