On this, the birthday of Nobel Prize winning novelist
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I'm sharing with you the article written by The
Writer's Almanac. Why this one? Because the way that Marquez pursued learning
writing is a marvelous study of great writers and thinkers. For all writers and readers-- Enjoy!
* * *
It's the birthday of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist
who said, "I've always been convinced that my true profession is that of
journalist." That's Gabriel García Márquez (books
by this author), born in Aracataca, Colombia, on this day in 1927. He's the
author of one of the most important books in Latin American literature, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
He once said, "I learned a lot from James Joyce and Erskine
Caldwell and of course from Hemingway ... [but the] tricks you need to
transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable, into something
plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it
straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.''
He worked for a newspaper in Bogotá for many years, writing at
least three stories a week, as well as movie reviews and several editorial
notes each week. Then, when everyone had gone home for the day, he would stay
in the newsroom and write his fiction. He said, "I liked the noise of the
Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in
silence, I wouldn't be able to work."
He learned to write short stories first from Kafka, and later
from the American Lost Generation. He said that the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis "almost knocked
[him] off the bed," he was so surprised. In one interview, he quoted the
first line ("As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he
found himself transformed into a gigantic insect") and told the
interviewer, "When I read the line, I thought to myself that I didn't know
anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have
started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short
stories."
It was from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf that he learned to
write interior monologue, he said, and he prefers the way Woolf did it.
And it was from William Faulkner, he said, that he learned to
write about his childhood surroundings. Just after college, he went home to his
early childhood village
of Aracataca, a place he
hadn't been since he was eight years old. On that trip home, he felt that he
"wasn't really looking at the village, but . experiencing it as if [he]
were reading it." He said: "It was as if everything I saw had already
been written, and all I had to do was sit down and copy what was there and what
I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into
literature: the houses, the people, and the memories." And he said:
"The atmosphere, the decadence, the heat in the village were roughly the
same as what I had felt in Faulkner. . I had simply found the material that had
to be dealt with in the same way that Faulkner had treated similar
material." His birth town, Aracataca, is the model for the fictional
village Macondo in One Hundred Years of
Solitude.
It was from his own grandmother that he learned the tone he used
in One Hundred Years. His
grandmother told stories, he said, "that sounded supernatural and
fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness . what was most important
was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at
all when telling her stories and everyone was surprised."
For a long time, he had tried telling the fantastic stories of One Hundred Years without believing in
them. He said, "I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them
myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told
them: with a brick face." And he said, "When I finally discovered the
tone I had to use, I sat down for eighteen months and worked every day."
One Hundred Years of Solitude begins, "Many
years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to
remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
His other novels include of Love
in the Time of Cholera (1988), The
General in His Labyrinth (1989), Of
Love and Other Demons (1994), and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005).
He started a journalism school in Colombia in 1995. He reads most of
the important magazines from around the world each week. He says that he really
only feels comfortable in Spanish, but speaks Italian and French. And he said
in a 1980s interview: "I know English well enough to have poisoned myself
with Time magazine every week
for twenty years." He writes from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., but says he can only
"work in surroundings that are familiar and have already been warmed up
with my work. I cannot write in hotels or borrowed rooms or on borrowed
typewriters."
He said: "One of the most difficult things is the first
paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph and once I get it, the
rest just comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the
problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in
my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book
is going to be."
And he said: "Ultimately literature is nothing but
carpentry. Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as
making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard
as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic
and a lot of hard work involved."
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