The Forgotten Waltz begins with these words: I met him in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry. That is where I saw him first. There was nothing fated about it, though I add in the summer light and the view. I put him at the bottom of my sister’s garden, in the afternoon, at the moment the day begins to turn. It’s a simple-seeming beginning, but it is not. It is a tempo already firmly established. It is a series of small contradictions, nuance and shadow. Were these the first words that you wrote for this book? Does story take hold of you first, when you are writing, or is something else (the sound of a song, for example) at work?
Every book I write I am asked about beginnings, and I look back at my files and am no closer to an answer. Whatever way I begin, it is not large. I don't sit at the keyboard like a mad pianist about to launch into a Beethoven sonata (neither did Beethoven, for that matter). I pootle along. I rearrange things. I write something small and tuck it away. The 'first words' you read have been written and rewritten many times, as have all the subsequent words in the book. The trick is to keep them fresh. I think I did know what I wanted to write about - I knew a fair amount about Gina and Seán. But, at the beginning of the book, Gina does not know - or not yet. I wanted to catch that sense of 'nearly knowing'. My ideal is a text that that holds a sense of movement and ambiguity. All the fun, for me, comes from finding the right tone.
You are interested, you have indicated in previous interviews, not in the absolute good or bad of your characters, but in the arrangement and consequences of their flaws. What have you gained, as a writer, by keeping your eye trained on personal fault lines?
I think it is a more honest way to proceed.
1 Comments on An Interview with Anne Enright, last added: 9/19/2011
"Critics are like mosquitoes" -- GREAT!