Write on, Didion!

Life Magazine Joan Didion became most prominent
in the literary scene after her book "Slouching Towards
Bethlehem."

By Antero Garciaand Sophia
Whang
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

According to the acclaimed author Joan Didion and contrary to
popular belief, politics is actually interesting.

“At first I thought politics was about stuff I just
wasn’t interested in,” Didion said from her home in New
York. “Then I started realizing it was a series of inventions
or fables that were in some ways intended to draw a screen between
it and me. The political process isn’t intended to be in
touch with the people with the electorate. As people become aware
of it, it gives them the confidence to be mad.”

In addition to her myriad of novels, screenplays and essays,
Didion has recently finished a sixth nonfiction book,
“Political Fictions.”

Before writing bestsellers and even before being an editor at
Vogue magazine, Didion was an avid writer as a child. But after
graduating as an English major at UC Berkeley, even Didion had to
overcome insecurities about writing.

“It takes a long time to work the nerve back up to try to
(write) yourself because it seems as if everything has already been
done as well as it can be done,” Didion said. “When I
got out of Berkeley, I was too intimidated to try writing myself.
It took a couple of years to get up the nerve to make the
plunge.”

As an accomplished writer, Didion has already made more than a
few plunges. She has no rituals to get herself into the writing
mode, but she wakes up every day with the motivation to work. She
even works on weekends.

“Basically, you just have to sit at the computer or the
typewriter and do it. What you gradually learn to do is not panic
when it doesn’t come at first,” she said.

When she used to live in California, she and her husband John
Gregory Dunne used to take long drives to Santa Barbara in order to
overcome the panic of hitting a wall.

Life Magazine Joan Didion became most prominent
in the literary scene after her book "Slouching Towards
Bethlehem."

“I think learning to write is the process of learning not
to panic, to let it kind of flow at its own speed,” Didion
said. “It’s also a process of learning that if you hit
a wall, it’s usually for a reason. Something’s wrong in
what you’re doing but you might not know exactly what it is
yet.”

This process applies to both fiction and nonfiction writing, and
Didion notes she gets equal pleasure out of writing both genres.
“Democracy” was one fictional novel in particular that
Didion had difficulties writing.

“Sometimes you’re working on a novel that’s no
fun at all, like “˜Democracy.’ It just never took
off,” Didion said. “Some novels I have a good time
writing. You get a real rush of energy in everything you see or
hear or think about and everything just leads into the
novel.”

While novels seem to come together on their own, Didion feels
that writing theses is much more difficult because of the required
degree on analysis.

“Writing a novel is like a dream process,” Didion
said. “You don’t plan it and you don’t analyze
it, it just starts coming.”

Since her most recent book “Political Fictions” is
not actually fiction, there was a greater degree of analysis needed
than for a novel. She followed the presidential elections from 1988
to 2000 which made her skeptical about political processes.

“I got to the end of the 2000 election, and everyone was
talking about Florida as if it were some kind of out-of -the-blue
phenomenon that didn’t have anything to do with the
process,” Didion said. “It seemed to me that it had
everything to do with the process and it was exactly what I had
been looking at since 1988,” she continued. “I decided
to pull these various pieces together in a way that lead up to
Florida.”

Her experiences in politics include spending a week in the White
House press room in 1984, which initially made her question the
media’s accountability. She was surprised to find out that
press conferences were a series of staged events meant to be
reported in a certain circumscribed way. “I actually believed
that the reporters had developed some sources and talked to them,
and really been in touch,” Didion said. “No, there is a
briefing every day. This is a kind of shocking thing to me because
essentially what they were reporting was not stuff they had learned
by actually reporting anything. It was stuff they had been told by
sitting in the White House press room. They were being told the
administration’s story, and then they preceded to retell
it.”

While she challenges political authorities and the media, it is
only through writing that she is able to do so. “Writing is
like an act of aggression. I’m not a very aggressive person
personally, but I tend to be more aggressive when I sit down with a
piece of paper in front of me,” Didion said. A part of her
philosophy on aggressive writing is the ability to change
people’s perspectives on her subjects.

“You hope you can change people’s perspectives.
There is that line of W.H. Auden’s ““ “˜Poetry
makes nothing happen.’ Sometimes I feel writing makes nothing
happen but you keep nagging and hoping it will.”