Álvaro Colomer already knew everything about the confluences between reality and fiction, those who have read ‘Although they walk through the valley of death’ (Random House Literature) know it. But this time, the writer and journalist has earned a doctorate in the subject. AND … He has done so in ‘Learn to write: Methods, disciplines and talents of the great contemporary authors’ (Debate), a book unique in its style and until now unexplored in Spanish.
When asked about their writing styles, more than a hundred authors have told Alvaro Colomer how they write, what their quirks, neuroses, customs, eccentricities and creative singularities are: that Pere Gimferrer uses the muse, Jordi Soler draws his cards before writing a novel and Irene Vallejo covers everything with post-tips, that Elmer Mendoza apologizes for the murders that he is about to commit or that Arturo Pérez-Reverte He is the ultimate loud writer.
Go, see and tell
“Someone had to tell all this,” says Álvaro Colomer with that Barcelona gentleman’s humor that makes him unique among authors. Interfering in other people’s offices is very journalistic, deep down very like Álvaro Colomer, who always has one foot stuck in reality and fiction, not in vain he traveled to Iraq, El Salvador and the United States and did more than 200 interviews for document his aforementioned ‘Even if they walk through the valley of death’.
This time, Álvaro Colomer wonders to what extent the writer’s romantic clichés are obsolete, hence the need to look into the realm of intimacy, where the writer displays all the eccentricity and singularity of what Leonardo Padura calls “buttock hours.” The result is a book that portrays the way of working of Spanish-speaking writers during, from veterans like Ida Vitale or Raúl Zurita to the very new Mario Obrero.
The result is grouped into four large blocks of work corresponding to the usual steps in any writing process: the writers gathered in a first section dedicated to inspiration; another dedicated to writing; a third focused on correction (Elvira Navarro’s anecdotes here are wonderful) until the manuscript publication phase, a section where testimonies as sincere as that of Eva Baltasar, who assumes that an author always needs a committed editor.
A detail of the book cover.
“Except for Galindo, and a couple of others, no writer looks strange anymore,” says Colomer, on the other end of the phone, and with a wink to the journalist and novelist Juan Carlos Galindo, who likes to take maximum care of his outfits. “The place of eccentricity is reserved for the writer’s home or studio, which is why it is important to know the circumstances in which the works were created.” That is why Álvaro Colomer dedicated just over an hour to discuss these issues with more than one hundred authors. «It is a dialogue, it is a very old debate. If Fernando Aramburu says that he reads his novel to a cactus, in reality what he is telling you is that you have to read aloud or when Elmer Mendoza asks God for forgiveness, he is telling you that he is putting on the devil’s mask,” explains Colomer.
‘Learn to write’ aims to provide a documentary record of the way of working that Spanish-speaking writers—and a Lusophone added at the whim of the author, Gonçalo Tavares—had in the first third of the 21st century. The interviews that gave rise to the texts originally published in Zenda magazine were carried out between October 2020 and November 2023, and those that resulted in the unpublished pieces added to this volume are dated in the first third of 2024.
There is everything, absolutely everything in these pages: Luna Miguel claims that she masturbates before writing, Aixa de la Cruz says she has replaced coffee with yoga, and Javier Cercas understands creation in a slow process similar to the one Unamuno described about oviparous and viviparous writers: the former need to lay an egg and hatch it for days, while others let it flow. He declares himself a member of the second group.
Working-class authors
The search process raised paradoxes, but brought interesting findings. One of them, gender according to generations. «There was a moment when I thought: if I only choose very old writers I can’t achieve parity. Because there are only guys. There is Cristina Fernández Cubas, Soledad Puértolas or Ida Vitale. But the proportion was very short. But as you go down the age frame, the opposite phenomenon occurs. Or I’m going to say that men disappear, but many more women appear with much more strength.
According to Colomer himself, all these nuances lead to changes in the figure of the writer. «For example, both Guadalupe Nettel and, I don’t remember, but well, several others comment on it: that neither admits that they stop writing to make purchases. And yet, they do. Sara Table for cooking. “Juan Tallón is the only one who mentioned that he stops to cook or shop.” One more touch is added to this panorama. From the ancient writer who wandered thinking about his work, contemporary literature assimilates a different type of author, a product of his own social and economic context. This is how Álvaro Colomer explains it: in a simple way and without fuss, but with a view trained in field work.
«This is not in the book, but it appeared in conversation with Cristina Rivera Garza Marta Sanz. They differentiated the figure of the heir writer from before, those that I mentioned at the beginning from Cortázar or Camus, who are the ones who sat in the café in Paris and started looking at the stars, because they had the whole fucking day free, from the writer today’s worker, who doesn’t have time for anything, because they divide it between the manuscript, journalism, and classes. And that is the difference between what they call the heir writer versus the worker writer, which I think is also a very important difference because writers today are no longer the rich people they used to be.
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