Max Porter

aspects of play or joke or essay or screenplay or whatever it is, this tendency I have towards hybridity, partly because it yields to me this sort of energy.

And I think because I want the reader to be all the time caught up in a kind of self-conscious awareness of what these literary forms and techniques are, especially as you move between them.

So I don't think I'll ever lose that.

I mean, the novel I'm working on at the moment is a more conventional novel.

it has a beginning and an end and things happen and it's more or less in the realist mode there are no ghosts actually there will be ghosts

There's no mythic character.

There's no sort of playing around in the membrane between the magic and the mundane and stuff like that, which have been my habits thus far.

But I think I have to listen quite carefully to that project and ask it what it tells me to.

And also ask when I'm, as a reader, bored.

And that must mean that that's, to answer the question, that's an editorial interruption.

And I think I do edit as I write, perhaps more than other people, because it was my job.

So I'm very impatient with anything that seems to me formulaic or a cheat or a kind of pre-existing formulation.

So say I'm describing two bodies or I'm describing the progress from A to B of a physical entity in space or something like that.

If I'm like, this is just...

this is just from the you know this is just from the you know the Ocado drop down click and buy link of ways you describe a person I need to do more than that I need to stop I need to sort of model it differently in my mind or it might be that I don't need this and it's more interesting if the reader doesn't know how they got there you know so I'm all the time asking myself those sorts of questions in quite a self-conscious way but also I believe in editing I sort of worship at the church of the editorial culture I believe

to edit one's own work, to write relatively editorially, to be editing other people's work, to always be keenly aware of what is happening with language.

Trying to keep the technical and the emotional in conversation, I think, is important for readers and writers.

Dagger in the heart.

Yeah.

And, you know, they do.