James Salter likes sentences that taste good.
Salter has been the guest of the UW creative writing graduate program for the last couple of days. At a lunchtime chat scheduled for the creative writing grad students today, Salter talked about his early writing career, WWII, and what it's like to be a writer.
He said that he didn't particularly strive or worry about trying to write beautiful sentences; not because he doesn't like them. He felt some authors' sentences were very beautiful (like Updike), but he liked his sentences to give dignity to the work overall, to be submissive to the work.
He began by saying that a person is who they are and their writing also holds the quality of who a person is. "You may go to a psychiatrist or counseling if you're having some problems, but in the end, you are who you are, and as a writer, this holds especially true."
Salter was a senior in high school when the announcement came over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. He said the country turned its complete attention to the war effort. He eventually joined the air force, because one of his friend's cousins was, and "he looked real good," Salter said. After the war was over, he was sent to Manila, instead of Europe where he really wanted to go, and he remembers standing on the stern of the ship and reading the banner that said "Welcome home, heroes." "Of course, we were going the other way," he joked.
When asked by a student how difficult or easy it was for him to sit down and write, Salter said that the hardest part for him is to sit down. "Writing is a difficult task," he said. "There were a group of painters around where I lived in New York state at the time, and when we'd get together in the evenings, they were always fairly happy, because they were able to get a little something done." He talked about his early years of writing in a house that had a big table, "I loved the way the top of the table felt," and there were windows and light and he could look out over the garden. He would get up early in the morning and begin writing in that room. "I wrote everything in long hand so I was very quiet and didn't disturb my wife." He remembered those halcyon days as the best time of his writing years, but said, "it gets harder to remember how things really were. After all, the past becomes a fiction eventually."
While he was in the service, he had been thinking about a book that he'd wanted to begin writing. One day he suddenly visualized how the story would be written, and he wrote about a page and a half of notes about it. He'd risen to a position of authority and so every night he began to type out his story. A fellow soldier wondered what he was doing every night typing, and asked him, "What, are you writing a book or something?" Salter said, "Oh, no."
He also talked about the circularity of writing, and how sometimes you have to let something percolate for a day, a week, a month, even thirty years. An editor had asked Salter if he would consider re-writing an earlier published book. At first he said not really, but then reconsidered. He also said that sometimes you can write on something until you just can't anymore. He quoted Collette, saying "You never quit writing something, you abandon it."
If you've never read Salter, try him out. His phrasing is magical and his stories stick to his ethical choices about what he wants from his work.
