I think what Rick was looking for in the portrait was the person who is the writer. And the person who is the writer is not necessarily the person that presents themselves. So, he was looking behind the sociable gesture or the sociable person for, I think, the person who does the writing, who is often a quite secret self and mysterious and unknown even to the person who does the writing. That is, you know, the place the writing comes from is somewhere different from your social self.
When you’re a writer you have to discover how your own imagination works and how you can recreate on the page something that will stir the reader’s imagination in the same way. Of course, because it’s language that’s very, very much to do with rhythm and with cadence and things like that and I don’t make a distinction between how important rhythm is in say poetry to how important it is in prose as well. And I think of almost everything I write, including the short stories or novels or even a piece of non-fictional prose, I think of that as being, when I’m writing it, as being something that will be read aloud, and read aloud in the reader’s mind even if they don’t think that that’s what they’re doing.
I grew up in a generation where our visual imagination was absolutely stimulated and decided by film. And so almost always, I think, when I’m writing, I see what’s there as if it were either a still from a film or an unfolding piece of action in the film.
