” I don’t like placing other writers much and avoid the temptation to do so when asked, though I don’t mind admitting my immense admiration for Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow, and Doris Lessing.
INTERVIEWER
I know you’ve done your share of interviewing. What is the first question you ask someone?
DRABBLE
Oh dear. I never know how to begin. I find it to be a very difficult job, actually. I’m rather a bad interviewer because I never ask people things that they don’t want to be asked. As soon as they look annoyed or nervous, I never persist.
INTERVIEWER
I read your interview with Doris Lessing and I thought that many of the things that came out of it could have been said about you as well. You quote her as saying, “In writing novels, we bring into being what we need to be.” Can you comment on that?
DRABBLE
In a sense, the fiction creates the reality, but it’s a very complicated relationship. I think if you imagine a certain kind of person, then that person comes into being. You become that person. Or at least this kind of person becomes a possibility. But you have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person. The fact of going in a certain direction has something to do with what you imagine as good or proper for yourself.
INTERVIEWER
But it also seems to me, that as far as you’re concerned, the kind of person you are has as much to do with fate or accident as it does with self-creation.
DRABBLE
This is what is so interesting about life: choosing to be something and being struck down while you do it by a falling brick. The whole question of free will and choice and determinism is inevitably interesting to a novelist. Perhaps I go on about it more than some. Are your characters puppets in the hands of fate or are they really able to make free choices? I think we have a very small area of free choice.”
Margaret Drabble
Published
How my heart sings 