Jonathan Franzen Interview: Advice to the Young

How do you succeed as a writer? Get useful, and humorous, advice from someone who indeed has indeed made it through the loophole – chart-topping American novelist Jonathan Franzen.

“If you hang out with me I would have a lot of advice. Although I would feel somewhat embarrassed about giving advice to the young writer,” Franzen begins. “The most important advice I have is to have fun … if you’re having fun there’s a good chance that the reader will too.” Having fun, however, should be in the sense that there’s still a kind of structure and focus to it: “Fun like you’re in a tennis court…That’s the kind of focused fun I’m talking about.”

Jonathan Franzen (b. 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His novel ‘The Corrections’ (2001) received widespread critical acclaim and earned him a National Book Award, a James Tait Black Memorial Prize and placed in in the final for a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Franzen is also the author of the novels ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’ (1988), ‘Strong Motion’ (1992), ‘Freedom’ (2010) and ’Purity’ (2015).

Jonathan Franzen was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at his home in Santa Cruz, California in January 2016.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken
Edited by: Klaus Elmer
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2016

Supported by Nordea-fonden

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[mannemo]

it's nice to hear him using a tennis metaphor here! i loved the tennis thread in the denouement in "Purity"....such an amazing writer

[tylerhendricks]

This reminds me of that Jordan Peele quote that went something like, "While I'm writing, I just follow the fun."

[Monkeighz]

This seems to me now the most important thing and yet so difficult to achieve because of all the things that come up to haunt you as you're trying to write.