Manhattan

Li com interesse esta micro-entrevista a Kevin Brockmeier, no blogue de livros do New York Times. Gostei particularmente da descrição que Brockmeier faz do seu método de escrita:

«I can’t remember who said that writing a story is like cleaning a kitchen floor: you begin with one small square of tile, which you sweep to its borders, making sure you’ve removed every speck of dirt. After that, you scrub the square with a wet cloth, treating the deeper stains. Then you buff it dry. Then you move on to the next square and repeat the process. When you’ve finished with the second square, you return to the first to see if it needs any additional attention. And so you continue, square by square, until you’ve cleaned the entire kitchen floor.
The idea here is that people will object, “But that’s not how you clean a kitchen floor at all — first you sweep the whole thing, then you mop the whole thing, and then, finally, if you have to, you return to the spots that need additional work,” and you can say: “Which is how writing a story works, too. You’ll never achieve anything unless you attack the whole of it in one go and address the small problems later.”
Except that I really do treat a story square by square, sentence by sentence, attempting to remove each minute speck of dirt, so that when I finally reach the end I can look back and see a shining white floor behind me. On a good day, I can finish a single manuscript page of writing this way — sometimes more, often less.
What else? I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page. I think of the title as the target toward which I shoot the arrow of the story. Then, title in place, I broach my sentences one tiny piece at a time, termiting away at them until I’m satisfied that they present the right effect. Often I become attached to certain simple words — city, song, half, pocket, dead, ceiling, house, silence, wound, light — words that call little attention to themselves, that have nothing antique about them, but that seem to trail a thousand centuries of stories behind them, arriving in a great dust cloud of possibilities.»

Mas o que me impressionou mais, confesso, foi a fotografia do escritor (assinada por Ben Kraln):

Eu também costumo empilhar livros em colunas periclitantes, ou em espessas muralhas no topo das estantes, mas nada que se compare com isto. Cá em casa há uns quantos arranha-céus de papel em certas esquinas, enquanto Brockmeier, mais corajoso, não tem medo de sorrir à sombra de uma ameaçadora Manhattan de hardcovers e paperbacks, em vias de lhe desabar em cima, como o céu sobre as cabeças dos irredutíveis gauleses.

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