INTERVIEWER: By that time, had you developed regular...

INTERVIEWER: By that time, had you developed regular writing habits?

McEWAN: I’d be at work by nine-thirty every morning. I inherited my father’s work ethic — no matter what he’d been up to the night before, he was always out of bed by seven a.m. He never missed a day’s work in forty-eight years in the army. In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I’d type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems like a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer’s memory — like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes.

INTERVIEWER: In the introduction to “The Imitation Game” you write about your envy for busy filmmakers with their urgent meetings, always speeding around in taxis.

McEWAN: If week after week you do nothing but commune with ghosts, and move from your desk to your bed and back, you long for some sort of work that involves other people. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve become more reconciled to the ghosts, and slightly less interested in working with other people.

Ian McEwan. The Art of Fiction, n.º 173. Paris Review, Verão 2002, n.º 162. Entrevista de Adam Begley (adapted).

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