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INTERVIEWER
You’ve said that one of your commitments in writing is strict attention to the individual sentence.
HEMPEL
Yes. Writing conducted at the sentence level has always made perfect sense to me. Allan Gurganus put it very well. He was sitting on a panel on The Novel with Stanley Elkin and several others, and there was all this talk about theories of novels and he said, “There are those of us who are still loyal at the level of sentence.” That’s the great attraction and motivation. That’s what gets me in, writing or reading. Though it’s unlikely you’ll write something nobody has ever heard of, the way you have a chance to compete is in the way you say it. Now I’ve been writing for almost twenty years, and I still feel the same way. That is how I assemble stories—me and a hundred million other people—at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line. |
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