Hernan Diaz Has No Draft Two

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Hernan Diaz about his novel, Trust.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: How do you take ideas about abstract ideas, like loneliness, and make them into something compelling and in story form that is not didactic in terms of everything you were thinking about conceptually?

Hernan Diaz: Maybe I started with the ideas to some extent, like the more disembodied ideas, to call them somehow, because I’m loath to call them like philosophical ideas, or conceptual, points or whatever. So, let’s call them sort of these disembodied ideas for lack of something better. And maybe there is an element of that. But I would like to stress a couple of things. The first thing is emotion.  I read, to feel things and I write to feel things and hopefully convey to readers the things that I’m feeling as I’m writing. That is probably number one, tied with a sense of formal rigor, like emotion alone, I’m not interested in that, like a scream on the page, that’s very unappealing to me. Equally unappealing is some kind of heartless formal engineering experiment, that leaves me literally cold. So that’s the first thing for me, to try to find the emotional aspect of whatever it is that I’m writing, but also try to do it as beautifully as I can. These two things are paramount, there’s nothing more important than those two, not even story trumps that to my mind. There are so many things that I read that, you know, aren’t diegetic or plot driven, and, but they have these things, and that’s enough. For me, that’s all I need. If in addition to that, you know, you are telling a story, because I like to be told stories as well. But, again, I think everything has to be in service of this kind of first dyad that I mentioned, of emotion and formal rigor. And the story for me happens in language.  I’m not like a platonic writer, by which I mean that I don’t have an ideal story that is floating in some kind of essential ether that then is manifested and incarnated in more or less contingent form on the page. For me, the story really grows sentence by sentence. I’m a writer of sentences. I’m not a writer of stories, which I think is a distinction that I hope to remember because I’m going to use that some other time. If that makes any sense.  I just said it off the cuff and I feel that that makes a ton of sense to describe what my processes is.  As I write, ultimately, I want this scene or this chapter or even the whole book, if I’m lucky, you know, to go to this point and there will be a million detours along the way.  I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but I don’t draft.  Again, I’m writing sentence by sentence and I’m editing all my sentences as I go along. So, when I’m done, I’m done and I keep editing like a crazy person forever but it’s not that then I go on to draft two;  there is no draft two.

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Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels translated into thirty-five languages.  His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations.