In any case, at a certain point I got annoyed and gave one of them the magic formula:
First of all you need a computer, obviously, which is an intelligent machine that thinks for you— and this would be an advantage for many people. All you need is a program of a few lines, even a child could do it. Then one feeds into the computer the content of a few hundred novels, scientific works, the Bible, the Koran, and many telephone directories (very useful for characters’ names). Say, something like 120,000 pages. After this, using another program, you randomize, in other words, you mix all those texts together, making some adjustment, for instance eliminating all the a’s. Thus as well as a novel you would have a lipogram. At this point you press «print» and it prints out.
Having eliminated all the a’s, what comes out is something less than 120,000 pages. After you have read them carefully, several times, underlining the most significant passages, you load them onto an articulated truck and take them to an incinerator. Then you simply sit under a tree, with a piece of charcoal and good-quality drawing paper in hand, and allowing your mind to wander you write down a couple of lines. For instance: «The moon is high in the sky / the wood rustles.» Maybe what emerges initially is not a novel but, rather, a Japanese haiku; nevertheless, the important thing is to get started.
No one had the courage to report my secret recipe. But someone said, «one can feel that the novel was written directly on the computer, apart from the scene of the trumpet in the cemetery; that scene is heartfelt, and he must have rewritten it several times, and in pen.» I am ashamed to say so, but in this novel that underwent so many phases of drafting, in which the ballpoint, the fountain pen, the felt-tip, and many revisions played a part, the only chapter written directly on the computer, and in a spurt, without many corrections, was precisely that trumpet chapter. The reason is quite simple: I had that tale so present in my mind, I had told it to myself or others so many times that by then it was as if it had already been written. I had nothing to add. I moved my hands over the keyboard as if it were a piano on which I was playing a melody I knew by heart, and if there is felicitous writing in that scene, it is due to the fact that it started as a jam session. You play, letting yourself go with the flow, record it, and what’s there is there.
In fact, the beauty of the computer is that it encourages spontaneity: you dash down, in a hurry, whatever comes to mind. Meanwhile you know that later you can always correct and vary it.
The use of the computer concerns, in fact, the problem of corrections, and therefore of variants.
The Name of the Rose, in its definitive versions, was written on a typewriter. Then I would correct, retype, sometimes cut and paste, and in the end I gave it all to a typist, and then again I had to correct, replace, and cut and paste. With the typewriter you can correct only up to a certain point. Then you get tired of re-typing, cutting, pasting, and then having it retyped again. The rest of it you correct at proof stage, and off it goes.
With the use of the computer (Foucault’s Pendulum was written in Wordstar 2000, The Island of the Day Before in Word5, Baudolino in Winword in its various versions over the years), things change. You are tempted to correct ad infinitum. You write, then print out, and you reread. You correct. Then you retype according to your corrections and printouts. I have kept the various drafts (with the odd gap). But it would be a mistake to think that a fanatic of textual variants could ever reconstruct your process of writing. In fact, you write (on the computer), print out, correct (by hand), and make the corrections on the computer, but as you do so you choose other variants, in other words you do not rewrite exactly what you have corrected by hand.
The critic who studies variants would find further variants between your final correction in ink on the printout and the new version produced by the printer. If you really wanted to encourage pointless theses, you have all of posterity at your disposal. The fact is that the existence of the computer means that the very logic of variants has changed. They are neither a rethinking nor your final choice. Since you know that your choice can be changed at any time, you make many changes, and often you go back to your original option.
I really do believe that the existence of electronic means of writing will profoundly alter criticism of variants, with all due respect to the spirit of Contini. I once worked on the variants in Manzoni’s Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns) * At that time the substitution of a word was crucial. Nowadays it is not: tomorrow you can go back to the word you rejected yesterday. At most what will count is the difference between the first handwritten draft and the last one out of the printer. The rest is all coming and going, often dictated by the amount of potassium in your blood.
Joy and sadness
I do not have anything else to say about the way I write my novels. Except that they have to take many years. I do not understand those who write a novel a year; they might be wonderful, and I do admire them, but I don’t envy them. The beauty of writing a novel is not the beauty of the live match, it is the beauty of the delayed transmission.
I am always annoyed when I realize that one of my novels is coming to the end, that is to say, that according to its internal logic it is time that it (he/she) stopped, and that I stopped too; when I notice that if I were to go any further it would only make it worse. The beauty, the real joy, is living for six, seven, eight years (ideally forever) in a world that you are creating bit by bit, and which becomes your own.
Sadness begins when the novel is over.
This is the only reason you would instantly want to write another one. But if it is not there waiting for you, it is pointless trying to rush it.
The Writer and the Reader
However, I would not like these last statements to generate automatically another view common to bad writers—namely, that one writes only for oneself. Do not trust those who say so: they are dishonest and lying narcissists.
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list. It helps to remember what you have to buy, and when you have bought everything you can destroy it, because it is no use to anyone else. Every other thing that you write, you write to say something to someone.
I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today? My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive, and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense.
One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic. Even from a rigorously secular point of view. Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader.
A first version of this piece was written for Maria Teresa Serafini, ed., Come si scrive un romanzo (Milan: Strumenti Bompiani, 1996). The editor had asked a number of writers a series of questions, which correspond to the sections of this essay. In the meantime I also published my fourth novel, Baudolino, and consequently I have inserted into the present version some passages dedicated to this, my latest experience with writing fiction.
The translator is very grateful, for assistance with particular problems, to Tim Farrant, Ann Jefferson, Cathy McLaughlin, Giuseppe Stellardi.
UMBERTO ECO is professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. His collections of essays include Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels in Hyperreality, and How to Travel with a Salmon. He is also the author of the bestselling novels The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and Baudolino. He lives in Milan.
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Obviously, when I wrote this article, the term «globalization» already existed, and I did not use the expression by chance. But today, now that all of us have become sensitive to this problem, it really is worth going back and
