Salman Rushdie On Writing Non-Fiction

you mentioned Nicaragua Nam and one of my favorite books have you written if the Jaguars mileages about her comes out of a three-week journey to Nicaragua during the time of the funding Easter's talked about the process of writing reportage it's your only full-length nonfiction we'll give another book of essays but was did it feel very different writing fiction they are completely different I well I went actually I was in the middle of writing The Satanic Verses and and the book wasn't going I mean I was sort of stalked you know and then at the say at that moment coincidentally I was invited to go to Nicaragua and I just thought you know maybe it'll be good for me just to get out of my own head and go and look at some people with real problems no and and so I put it aside and went there and it had an enormous impact on me being there you know and and when I came back I couldn't get it out of my head and the only way of getting out of my head was to write and so it became this short Irish book um no it's very different because um well you have to have a standard of proof for a start you know I used to worry about when I read some of VS Naipaul reportage travel books I would worry about evidence you know I for instance there's in his book among the believers he has long interviews with senior ayatollahs in Tehran including some of the worst people in the world I have to luckily for example the kind of hanging judge and there these injuries are given direct twenty pages of direct speech directly quoted speech and then Naipaul said in interviews that he had not used a tape recorder and he didn't know shorthand but he has a prodigious memory well that's what he said he said he just remembered it you know and I thought you know if I'm reading an interview with Ayatollah hajjali I would like to be certain that the words being put in his mouth really came out of his mouth and so then the question of if there's no evidence you know there's no there's no note-taking and there's no tape recorder what kind of status does that text have you know and I worried about that therefore when I was in Nicaragua and I could see his point because for instance there was an evening when I was invited to dinner at the president's house so I would Daniel Ortegas house and most mode not all but most of the sudden Easter leadership sitting around the table about 20 or 30 people know and me and I thought you know if I put a tape recorder on the table it changes the conversation the way they're going to talk is going to be completely different if they see the Machine and clearly I can't be scribbling because I'd been invited to dinner no looks looks wrong so on the other hand I thought I've got to have the same reason because of remembering this like my poor thing I've got to have some kind of a record so how do I do so I invented a violent stomach upset and what I would do is every five or six minutes excuse myself and go to the bathroom and realize with the bus I'd like here for the feast and then go out there's a very sorry have a little more to eat that died to the bathroom again um but at least admit that I came up with a great sheet of a sheaf of scribbled notes which was useful and again there was a moment when I had an interview with the Aletta tomorrow who was at that point newspaper proprietor and subsequently became president of the Quran and then her son led the opposition yeah well the family is it's all those families to split right down the middle half the family is right-wing the other families left-wing here and they have a Sunday lunch when they all get together they're not allowed to talk about politics um she was I thought very slippery and I did use a tape recorder with with her and she was the only person who I actually caught in a number of lies and and I was very happy afterwards to have her could have her answers on tape you know because if you're going to accuse a very senior public figure of lying you better be able to play the tape you know if she comes back at you so so that's one huge difference it's just the question of evidence and how the process of writing non-techie knitted feel constraining or limiting to how in fact the reality many ways it's faster no but it's similar rules apply and if you want the book to be I mean you know this you're right you're writing about these gangsters and and dance girls for the book to be interesting to the reader they have to emerge as characters know so you have to in fact use a novelistic scale to portray them as people that can be understood or it responded to by the reader as real people so in that sense you know you're writing the same way except that the people actually exist on your case a bit did they actually exist or did you I made them all up no no no I me what I did it did you combine them I know I did it I found it and as I was writing the book I'd meet all these characters and then I would take notes I too would take frequent bathroom breaks well exactly and in India it's very easy to have stomach upset so then I came back to Brooklyn with this enormous mass of material and often there would be gaps in the narrative that is I'd have two fiends in the life of a character and I realized that I'd forgotten to ask the character about the intervening scene so I didn't have a complete narrative and I couldn't go back to that person because they might be in jail or dead or otherwise untraceable and then it would be really easy for me to make up the intervening scene I could do it just once but then I realized that if I did it just once then I could do it over and over again and then what would prevent me from just calling the whole thing a novel so I decided to stick with what I had and if I didn't have the complete life of the character order or the scene then I just left it incomplete because life's like that yeah incomplete yeah I thought the same thing I've been you know if you're in a country for a relatively short space of time the amount that you can know is is is finite you you you cannot know everything in the way that you would know if you spent years and years there no so so in the end then you have to just accept that and foreground it you have to say that what you're writing is partial and and not a encyclopedic you know and that there are gaps in it and I will be so you're writing a series of the image I use it is like a series of snapshots if no like there's this moment here there's a moment here there's a moment here it's not like the full portrait I think you have to acknowledge it and that's another difference with fiction where you'd obviously don't need to make those acknowledgments and you can fill in the gaps but you're writing your memoir right now or photos yeah part of here we were um and well that's nonfiction that is no greater truth yeah I know well I mean look first of all it never occurred to me when I was but I just wanted to be a writer and did when I became a writer it never occurred to me that I would write an autobiography it just seemed like the least interesting thing to do I had nothing to do with why I became a writer and then I acquired an interesting life yes which most writers frankly don't have some have more interesting life than others yeah yeah well this is up there you know and and so I find after all these years that you know there is a story to tell and I'm trying to tell it it's very strange it's very strange to do it because I'm writing about a lot of people most of whom are still alive but not all and not all of whom behaved well so in fact it's the pleasurable thing is to write about the people who did behave well no it's an in fact the difficult thing is to write about the other stuff because I sort of do one of the things I know is that I don't want to write this book as a kind of way of getting even in or settling scores because I think that's small-minded you know but there are there are parts of the story which wouldn't make sense except in in the context of people not being their best selves you know and and if it has to be - it's difficult how much have the book of the memoir is and set in Bombay and if about your childhood well yeah I mean I don't know because I'm written again you know um but I've written some of it but it it's not chronological for you ya know but I would say well I've written about a hundred pages and most of them are about backstory so I assume the book will be around 400 by Marshall yeah I don't know and it's a first draft so it could get longer or shorter or you know ask me again in a couple of years and as you get have you've done this so you arrive is where you write all this stuff yes you know from all over the place and uh and what gets into the book and it gets where it is is another question yeah then and if then you have the whole book and it's assembled and then that the hideous trench warfare of line editing yeah getting the thing and of course in nonfiction that's harder because there's because the truth issue is there which we which means you know obviously if possible want to not be sued for libel and so that that becomes and the more contentious the material the more likely it is that somebody will try to you if you just step over a line and of course again in America it's harder to do that but you're familiar with the phenomenon of libel tourism no it's why people go and Sue in England because you can definitely see there lots of money all of their attempts now in the English courts to limit to limit that in order to prevent this phenomenon let me say making face

Channel: NYU Journalism ARCHIVES

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Keywords: salmanonwritingnonfiction

Id: 0FZAQjICscg

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2011