Some questions about my writing habits and other stuff

If you want to ask me a question: greif.jj@gmail.com

Have you always been a writer?
Am I a writer? I’m not sure. I’m still learning. I admire a good craftsman (craftsperson?) who makes such perfect pots and pans that all of them can actually be used. I try to write books. My publisher rejects them half the time. I have at least a dozen rejected books in a drawer. I don’t even earn a living with my books. I have a regular job: I am a journalist in Paris.
There’s one thing I have always been, on the other hand, at least since I was six years old or so. That’s a reader. I have read The Three Musketeers and Treasure Island so many times that eventually I saw myself as a character in a novel. I told myself stories, based on what had happened in school, except things turned out much better for me than in real life. I made up extraordinary adventures. I didn’t put these mental constructions to paper because I was lazy.
Besides, reading Oliver Twist and a famous French novel about another sorry urchin convinced me that you couldn’t become a writer unless you grew up a poor unhappy orphan. I had two parents and two brothers, we were neither rich nor poor and I was reasonably happy. It took me forty years to understand that I had the right profile after all. When I was born, my father was in Auschwitz, so I was nearly an orphan. Then, when he came back, he told me awful stories about gas chambers. Learning about humankind’s terrible cruelty made me quite unhappy. We were really poor compared to people today. Hey, we didn’t even have a TV set!

Where and when do you write?
Say I am standing in front of a class. They want to know whether I write in an office on a computer, or in a Starbucks on a notebook with a fountain pen. I tell them: “Look, I’ll show you where I write,” and I show my head.
As I carry my writing gear everywhere, I can write at any time: when I shave, in my bathtub, in a train. My favorite time for writing is when I run in the morning, as I am all by myself and won’t be interrupted by a phone call. I must take care to jot down what I’ve written as soon as I come home, otherwise I forget it. Last week, I ran with a cap on my head because it was raining. I noticed it helped my writing. Maybe the cap prevented my ideas from flying away, like the lid on a jar.
Then I transfer my jottings into the computer. If I am on a train, or vacationing somewhere, I transfer them with a pen onto paper.
The real work is not in the writing, but in the rewriting. I spend lots of time juggling with the words, on the computer’s screen or on paper. I certainly rewrite every paragraph between ten and twenty times (this paragraph: fourteen times). I also rewrite in my head when I run. I rewrite because the text doesn’t please me when I read it. I read and re-read it a hundred times. So, as in the preceding answer, there is more reading than writing. Knowing how to write begins with knowing how to read.

How long does it take to write a book?
I answered this question in the Fighter FAQ, but The Fighter is a special case, as I wrote it twice. Here I am going to give a general answer. I’d say that for a book that’s neither too long nor too difficult, I might spend three months in front of my computer, more or less. But then, before these three months, there are months of researching and document reading and subconscious preparing. Besides, I usually work on several books at the same time.
There is a story about the great painter Picasso. Some of his drawings or paintings seemed to be made very carelessly. A lady (or a gentleman, if you prefer) was standing in front of one of those in an art gallery. Picasso was there. “One million dollars!” the lady exclaimed. “But tell me, Mr. Picasso, how long did it take you to make it?” The painter smiled. “Sixty-two years, Madam.”

How many books have you written?
This seems an easy question. You’d expect me to give you a definite number: 15, or 267. Actually, the answer is: I don’t know.
I wrote 25 or 30 computer books, including three for an American publisher, Peachpit Press. Should I count them? When I sign books in a French book fair, there are sixteen or seventeen different books in front of me.
I still have a few copies of three out-of-print books at home. Should I count them? What about all those books in my drawers? What about my next book, which is written but as yet unpublished?

What is your favorite book?
When they see all my books, kids in French schools often ask me which one is my favorite. I hold some of them in my arms, I cuddle them and I say: “They are my children… I love them all the same way.”
Sometimes, the question is about other books. I usually mention foreign authors, whom the kids don’t study in school: Cervantes (who wrote Don Quixote), Dickens, Kafka. What are you saying? Dickens isn’t a foreigner? Well, in France he is. There are authors whom I like but can’t recommend to you unless you’re a very good reader: Montaigne (a wonderful French writer, who lived at the same time as Shakespeare), Joseph Conrad, Tacitus (who wrote about the Roman emperors).

Did it really happen?
I have written a book about Marilyn Monroe. The French title is Moi, Marilyn, which means I, Marilyn. Does it describe her real life? Well, I don’t know. I have read several biographies that differ in many ways. I trusted my common sense to choose the likeliest version for various episodes of her life. Marilyn herself told or made up many contradictory versions of her childhood.
I wrote books about my parents. I interviewed them, then also their friends. I discovered that they had withheld some important events and lied outright at times. So it’s often very difficult to know what “really happened.”
Reality vanishes with every passing second. On the other hand, what is printed in books doesn’t change. Achilles’ heel is as fragile as three thousand years ago. The Three Musketeers will be four forever. If it never changes, I think we should consider it more real than the so-called reality.
When I tell a friend something that happened to me when I was a child, I choose the version I wrote in my book Sans accent, as it erased all my previous memories!

What’s the message?
A familiar saying among writers is: “If you want messages, ask Federal Express.”
I say the message in my books is: “If you want to know what happens next, turn the page.”
It certainly is not: “Gee, war is bad,” since thousands of writers have been sending this message for thousands of years without any success at all. War lets people become famous heroes—or unknown heroes—and gather stories that they tell for the rest of their lives, so I guess they enjoy it secretly and will go on doing it.
I do believe that people would become less stupid if they read more books. Thus my message.