Writing: Philip Roth on writing Anne Frank fan-fiction · 4:57pm Jun 29th, 2014
Summarized, with a slant for our purposes: Roth tried writing about Anne Frank, but found he'd just been reminding people of her existing story, instead of writing a new story. So he rewrote it in first person, then rewrote that back into third person.
INTERVIEWER: Do you ever take long chunks that have been dialogue and make them into narrative, or the other way around?
ROTH: Sure. I did that with the Anne Frank section of The Ghost Writer. ... When I began, in the third person, I was somehow revering the material. ... It was the tone appropriate to hagiography. Instead of Anne Frank gaining new meaning within the context of my story, I was trying to draw from the ready store of stock emotions that everybody is supposed to have about her. ... I tell you, no one who later complained that in The Ghost Writer I had abused the memory of Anne Frank would have batted an eye had I let those banalities out into the world. That would have been just fine; I might even have got a citation. But I couldn’t have given myself any prizes for it. ... It often happens, at least with me, that the struggles that generate a book’s moral life are naively enacted upon the body of the book during the early, uncertain stages of writing. That is the ordeal, and it ended when I took that whole section and recast it in the first person.... I didn’t want this section to appear as first-person narration, but I knew that by passing it through the first-person sieve, I stood a good chance of getting rid of this terrible tone, which wasn’t hers, but mine. I did get rid of it. ... Rather straightforwardly, I then cast the section back into the third person, and then I was able to get to work on it.
Which, in this context, is an interesting way of putting it, because that's the exact opposite of what happened to The Diary of Anne Frank: the book had no moral life while it was being written, as it was a teenager's private diary. It was only after she had died in the Holocaust that the book took on a moral life, which life was knowingly enacted upon it after it was certainly and irrevocably finished.
The Diary of Anne Frank was written in first person, and being the diary of a teenage girl who was well, a teenage girl. Her father censored it extensively after the war, and it took a long time for it to be released in its entirety. That is beside the mail point of the excerpt.
The main point of the excerpt is that stories can change significantly between incarnations though altering key elements such as the person, and that different persons evoke different feelings. For example, third person is best used for when one wants to project their own feelings onto something by making themself the narrator and cutting out the input of the characters. I do that in stories with a greater emphasis on what I want to say rather than what the characters think and feel, such as in clopfics, or in stories where the emphasis is greater placed on the world or deeds as opposed to psychology. This is my default writing mode. It's easy and allows for skimping on inner life. Second person is like first person but more focused towards the audience. By using second person pronouns primarily, it invites the reader to assume the headspace that the author desires. It works best in stories with relatively little choice or character complexity. I have only used it twice. Both times, I did it in order to put my readers in a place where they could experience the protagonist's ordeal almost as active participants. This is the most intensely personal POV, but it offers unparalleled projection. Then there is first person. I don't like writing for this one all that much to be honest. It requires that one really know and develop their protagonist. I find that it focuses on the character to the exclusion of all else, making that no matter what happens, everything feels like a report or window dressing compared to the inner monologue and feelings of the protagonist. For a way of showing a character, but not necessarily inviting the audience to play as the character, there is no substitute.
Man, this is so relevant to me personally, because I have the same struggle when writing, well, Celestia stories. Some of my favorite fanfics of all time focus on her, and it's incredibly difficult for me to get out from under their shadows and write something fresh about her.
Thanks for posting this BH.
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To be fair, this isn't exactly true; the diary itself was revised by Anne Frank herself before her capture, with her re-writing many of the entries with an eye towards eventual publication. She DID keep a diary, but she later on was indeed writing the diary with an eye towards others eventually reading it after the war.
Some of the racier stuff WAS cut originally - but at the request of the publisher, not her father. And later on, the racier stuff was put back in.
But the idea that it was a wholly "genuine" diary isn't exactly true; it was edited for publication, and it was rewritten with an eye towards publication by its original author before she died. Indeed, she rewrote it in part to better present what it meant to be hiding from the Nazis.
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Well, yes, what reasonably bright and ambitious teenager doesn't write their diary with at least half an eye towards it being revealed to a wondering posterity, years in the future? The fact that this is what actually happened, and all so horribly, is yet another sad irony of this case.
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When people ask themselves the question, "So, what was it that drove the Titanium Dragon to serial genocide?" I really hope that they don't look to my livejournal for answers.
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Sadly, the internet being what it is, I actually believed you up until the word "Jewnicorn." I don't know if I should feel like an idiot or for the internet and its many... imaginative deviations that would lead me to simply assume you weren't lying.