Connie Willis: "Every story basically takes your whole career to write" (entrevista)

Com onze prémios Hugo e sete prémios Nébula tanto para romance como nas categorias de ficção curta, o nome de Connie Willis é incontornável na ficção científica moderna - com uma carreira literária de várias décadas, a qual inclui sucessos assinaláveis como Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, o díptico Blackout/All Clear, e inúmeros contos premiados. Em entrevista a Carl Slaughter para o portal Diabolical Plots, Connie Willis fala sobre a pesquisa e o trabalho subjacentes a cada história, e sobre outras curiosidades da sua carreira na ficção científica. Um excerto:

Carl Slaughter/Diabolical Plots: I can’t say I’ve ever read a short piece of speculative fiction more consistently sophisticated than Inside Job. How long did it take you to write? How many revisions?

Connie Willis: I rewrite constantly (which is why my novels are always late), and I put in loads of work on every single piece I do. My two-volume novel Blackout/All Clear took eight years to write, Doomsday Book took five, To Say Nothing of the Dog four. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Every story basically takes your whole career to write, both in the skills you acquire and where the stuff comes from that the stories are about. “Inside Job” took a year or so to write, but acquiring the stuff that went into it (including my fascination with Mencken and admiration of him, my hatred of fake psychics and mediums who prey on people to get their money, and my decision to have the heroine be an actress who’s too smart to be in Hollywood) all took years longer. If you really want to know how long the story took, you’d have to include my reading Postcards from the Edge and all Carrie Fisher’s other books (that’s where I got my too-smart actress from), my reading Inherit the Wind and The Great Scopes Monkey Trial and lots of other books about the Scopes evolution trial which Mencken covered, all of my reading of Mencken’s stuff and biographies about him before I ever decided to write the story, and the original story (about a fundamentalist group who were trying to raise their dead evangelist from the grave in Baltimore and accidentally got Mencken), which led me to go visit Mencken’s grave way back in 1982. That original story never got written, but it’s what led to my writing “Inside Job.” Some famous writer said, when asked how long it took him to write a story, “My entire life,” and that’s pretty much true.

As to revising, I can’t answer the question, “How many revisions?” because I rewrite as I go, rewriting lines and then scenes and then, once the story’s done, the whole thing till it does what I want. I love the scene in Stranger than Fiction where the professor tells Emma Thompson, “You realize that now your ending doesn’t match the rest of the story?” and Emma says, “Yes, so now all I have to do is rewrite the book to match the ending.” That’s pretty much how it is with me. After I write the ending, I have to go back and make the whole thing match.

A entrevista completa pode ser lida na íntegra no Diabolical Plots.

Fonte: SF Signal