Michael Silverblatt on trying to write as stammering
We begin writing in the language of the inner self
The late Michael Silverblatt hosted Bookworm, on the Los Angeles radio station KCRW from 1989 until 2022, and recorded over 48,000 minutes of conversation with many of the English-speaking world’s major writers. This is taken from “You’ve Done It Again, Michael,” published after his death, in the journal N+1.
In speaking with David Mitchell, whose number9dream and Cloud Atlas had both been short-listed for the Booker Prize, and who like him had stammered as a young man, Silverblatt said:
Stammering is the language of the inner self. And it’s learning how to say what you have to, in disregard to anyone’s impulse to laugh at you for not knowing already how to say what you need to know.
Don’t you think . . . that we all stammer? That is to say, before we encounter truth, before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say?
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