Luc Sante
Luc Sante is a critic and writer who immigrated to the United States from Belgium. Sate has written for the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, New York Times, Harper’s, Granta, The Village Voice, Vogue, and more. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship among many other accolades.
Published 07/31/17
Published 07/31/17
Howl: What is your writing process like?
Sante: Writing is the last stage in a project, preceded by a lot of accumulation of material--research or memory or semi-random gathering--and usually a fair amount of procrastination and gnashing of teeth and apparent inability to even think about the project (which often seems to mean that some subconscious process is going on). And then I only do, really, one draft. Every sentence leads to the next, which means that until I have sentence x right, sentence y does not exist. Of course I fiddle a lot afterward with word choice and word order and dropping in new bits and taking out wrong turns, but once I've gotten the main sentences in order, the piece is effectively done.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Sante: I guess I just covered that. I do reread a piece or book endlessly, from the nearest landmark or from the top, and I'm always finding things to fiddle with.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Sante: Oh boy, well (the obvious): read. Read all kinds of stuff, not just what you're naturally drawn to, and not just literature, for that matter. Familiarize yourself with every possible language--by which I mean the languages of English: official, trade, legal, ethnic, regional, age-specific, baseball, fashion-magazine, military, hepcat, obsolete, liturgical, etc.
Howl: You've mentioned that you are a veteran of several high school lit mags. What were your experiences on those lit mags and what did you take from them?
Sante: I just recently found an issue of my high-school lit mag to which I contributed the cover, a story, two poems, and an inside illustration. That was the apex of my career. I was still doing visual work then, maybe more than writing, so I dropped the lit mag (and its rival) when I became art director of the yearbook instead. In college, though, the lit mag was my main extracurricular, and those were stormy days. A host of matters literary and decidedly not resulted in a schism halfway through my junior year. I was in the losing faction, and I remember breaking into the magazine offices to liberate a box of the last issue in which all factions were represented. We're all friends now, kinda.
Howl: You've written book reviews, magazine articles, film and photography critic pieces, and more. How do you adapt your signature style to the various types of writing and audiences?
Sante: With occasional exceptions, I consider everything I write to be continuous, a stream. Pieces I write for magazines will prefigure or spin off or comment back on books I've written or will or may write. Weirdly, I'm still doing essentially what I started doing in the early 1980s, in a completely different world. (There's a fraction now of the magazines and like venues there were then, and about ten times as many writers trying to get paid, and payment across the board has fallen sharply, even without adjusting for inflation.) I write books, but I'm still writing a lot of short pieces for magazines, art catalogs, and the like--I'm lucky, and I'm also lucky at my great age that I have a certain freedom to pick and choose my topics. And some pieces are reviews, some are essays, some are memory pieces, some walk the line between fact and fiction, and some tumble all the way over. So my rhythms change, and my vocabulary adapts to the circumstances, but it's all very much the same process.
Howl: What excites you about literary arts today?
Sante: I wish I had a better grip on the present state of things so I could give an informed answer, but I'm afraid that, while I admire many individual young writers, I don't have a favorite trend or phenomenon.
Howl: What books are on your To-Read Shelf these days that you're excited to read? Anything you've read recently you'd like to rave about?
Sante: Right now I'm reading So Much Things to Say, the oral history of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens. I've been interested in Jamaican music for 35 years, so it's instructive, and the alternation of very different voices is excellent. I'm rereading Donald Barthelme's stories, in the original collections because that's how I read them as a teenager--he electrified me, utterly changed how I thought of writing. I hope to get back to House of All Nations by Christina Stead--it's huge and daunting, but compelling, and her novel The Man Who Loved Children is one of my favorite books ever. I'm also consuming a pile of French pulp detective novels from the 1940s--there's an essay brewing there. And I'm slowly, bit by bit, making my way through the immensity of Frank Stanford's epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, which is mind-blowing.
Howl: Why do you feel writing is your creative medium of choice, if "choice" is the right word?
Sante: As I noted above, I did a lot of visual work when I was a teenager, and at 18 felt I had to choose between media. What decided me is that I got a scholarship to Columbia, where I'd hoped to study with the poet Kenneth Koch--which I did (and his classes expanded me hugely as a writer, although, ironically enough, they also killed my verse-writing dead forever). Anyway, I've always thought that what made me a writer, more than anything, was learning English as a second language between the ages of seven and ten. Getting to know every individual word in the language, its habits and eccentricities, and every idiom, every turn of phrase--English is so much more malleable to me than my native language, French, which is deep and emotional and instinctive but not honed. Learning English later gave me the extra-extra-large box of crayons to play with.
Howl: What do you feel makes a story -- fiction or non-fiction -- "good" in your view?
Sante: What makes a story is the writing. You can take an excellent premise and ruin it in a thousand different ways, but the challenge is to start with a dull or otherwise unpromising idea and make it compelling. That was what was so great about the old (pre-1990) New Yorker: you would find yourself, almost despite yourself, being totally engrossed in something about geology or agriculture or mental institutions or the military unit charged with identifying bone fragments from WWII (as late as the 1980s)--subjects you might never approach in any other context. It's a matter of rhythm above all, and a controlled but expansive vocabulary, and an avoidance of cliché, and the feeling that the writing is somehow emerging as one, long, drawn-out exhalation.
Sante: Writing is the last stage in a project, preceded by a lot of accumulation of material--research or memory or semi-random gathering--and usually a fair amount of procrastination and gnashing of teeth and apparent inability to even think about the project (which often seems to mean that some subconscious process is going on). And then I only do, really, one draft. Every sentence leads to the next, which means that until I have sentence x right, sentence y does not exist. Of course I fiddle a lot afterward with word choice and word order and dropping in new bits and taking out wrong turns, but once I've gotten the main sentences in order, the piece is effectively done.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Sante: I guess I just covered that. I do reread a piece or book endlessly, from the nearest landmark or from the top, and I'm always finding things to fiddle with.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Sante: Oh boy, well (the obvious): read. Read all kinds of stuff, not just what you're naturally drawn to, and not just literature, for that matter. Familiarize yourself with every possible language--by which I mean the languages of English: official, trade, legal, ethnic, regional, age-specific, baseball, fashion-magazine, military, hepcat, obsolete, liturgical, etc.
Howl: You've mentioned that you are a veteran of several high school lit mags. What were your experiences on those lit mags and what did you take from them?
Sante: I just recently found an issue of my high-school lit mag to which I contributed the cover, a story, two poems, and an inside illustration. That was the apex of my career. I was still doing visual work then, maybe more than writing, so I dropped the lit mag (and its rival) when I became art director of the yearbook instead. In college, though, the lit mag was my main extracurricular, and those were stormy days. A host of matters literary and decidedly not resulted in a schism halfway through my junior year. I was in the losing faction, and I remember breaking into the magazine offices to liberate a box of the last issue in which all factions were represented. We're all friends now, kinda.
Howl: You've written book reviews, magazine articles, film and photography critic pieces, and more. How do you adapt your signature style to the various types of writing and audiences?
Sante: With occasional exceptions, I consider everything I write to be continuous, a stream. Pieces I write for magazines will prefigure or spin off or comment back on books I've written or will or may write. Weirdly, I'm still doing essentially what I started doing in the early 1980s, in a completely different world. (There's a fraction now of the magazines and like venues there were then, and about ten times as many writers trying to get paid, and payment across the board has fallen sharply, even without adjusting for inflation.) I write books, but I'm still writing a lot of short pieces for magazines, art catalogs, and the like--I'm lucky, and I'm also lucky at my great age that I have a certain freedom to pick and choose my topics. And some pieces are reviews, some are essays, some are memory pieces, some walk the line between fact and fiction, and some tumble all the way over. So my rhythms change, and my vocabulary adapts to the circumstances, but it's all very much the same process.
Howl: What excites you about literary arts today?
Sante: I wish I had a better grip on the present state of things so I could give an informed answer, but I'm afraid that, while I admire many individual young writers, I don't have a favorite trend or phenomenon.
Howl: What books are on your To-Read Shelf these days that you're excited to read? Anything you've read recently you'd like to rave about?
Sante: Right now I'm reading So Much Things to Say, the oral history of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens. I've been interested in Jamaican music for 35 years, so it's instructive, and the alternation of very different voices is excellent. I'm rereading Donald Barthelme's stories, in the original collections because that's how I read them as a teenager--he electrified me, utterly changed how I thought of writing. I hope to get back to House of All Nations by Christina Stead--it's huge and daunting, but compelling, and her novel The Man Who Loved Children is one of my favorite books ever. I'm also consuming a pile of French pulp detective novels from the 1940s--there's an essay brewing there. And I'm slowly, bit by bit, making my way through the immensity of Frank Stanford's epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, which is mind-blowing.
Howl: Why do you feel writing is your creative medium of choice, if "choice" is the right word?
Sante: As I noted above, I did a lot of visual work when I was a teenager, and at 18 felt I had to choose between media. What decided me is that I got a scholarship to Columbia, where I'd hoped to study with the poet Kenneth Koch--which I did (and his classes expanded me hugely as a writer, although, ironically enough, they also killed my verse-writing dead forever). Anyway, I've always thought that what made me a writer, more than anything, was learning English as a second language between the ages of seven and ten. Getting to know every individual word in the language, its habits and eccentricities, and every idiom, every turn of phrase--English is so much more malleable to me than my native language, French, which is deep and emotional and instinctive but not honed. Learning English later gave me the extra-extra-large box of crayons to play with.
Howl: What do you feel makes a story -- fiction or non-fiction -- "good" in your view?
Sante: What makes a story is the writing. You can take an excellent premise and ruin it in a thousand different ways, but the challenge is to start with a dull or otherwise unpromising idea and make it compelling. That was what was so great about the old (pre-1990) New Yorker: you would find yourself, almost despite yourself, being totally engrossed in something about geology or agriculture or mental institutions or the military unit charged with identifying bone fragments from WWII (as late as the 1980s)--subjects you might never approach in any other context. It's a matter of rhythm above all, and a controlled but expansive vocabulary, and an avoidance of cliché, and the feeling that the writing is somehow emerging as one, long, drawn-out exhalation.