Kirman: As someone who is both a writer and a critic, how do you keep from being overly critical of your own work?
Gilmour: I'm really, really critical of it. That's why it took me six years to get this book out. The truth is that I don't have a huge natural gift for writing. I have a reasonable gift but I don't have a huge gift. In the year that I spent reading Chekhov short stories I really saw what a real gift was. I have to work really hard. Oddly enough, broadcasting and television came to me really, really easily. I went in there to audition one day and nine months later I was the host of the whole show. It came to me really easy. Now some people, my ex-wife says, will look upon doing TV as easier than writing a novel. She always takes my side on that. I'm not sure about that. I think that what I have is I have a reasonable talent as a writer but that I have to work much harder than most people so every book that I write has to be rewritten six, seven, or eight times.
The reviews that I am writing now in the
National Post, I guarantee you they are written four times from beginning to end -- I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I just have to; I'm just not good enough to get it down fat and good. I have to work like a sonofabitch. But I have a visceral sensation too, a crap detector which I really trust. Whether it's a paragraph from a novel or whether it's a book review, when it's right I can feel a sensation of relaxation in my stomach and when it's not I feel like I have a very mild case of the flu. The second I get a sense of a mild case of the flu, and that's what happened when I was trying to re-read
An Affair With the Moon, I got it a few pages in and it never went away, and that's how I stop myself. And as I've gotten older too I've understood that spinning fancy phrases at the expense of someone else's work is really bullshit, and a really bullshit way of making yourself look smart.
Kirman: What do you mean by that?
Gilmour: Sometimes when you're writing a book review or you're doing a film review you come up with a really fancy condemning phrase. And let's say that phrase is more extreme than it ought to be, in other words the book may be problematic but it may not be that problematic. But here you've got this really fancy-pants put down and you think "well, I don't really mean it but it's such a good piece of writing and it makes me look so smart and I'm going to put it in anyways." I confess that when I was writing film reviews occasionally I would do that; I would overstate the case, fall in love with my own phrasemaking and keep it in. I don't do that anymore, I really don't do that anymore. I had an epiphany about that; and I thought "that's really bullshit; if you're going to make yourself look good at somebody else's expense then you really are a cheapskate" And so I've stopped, and I don't know if you notice but my tone in my National Post book reviews is more thoughtful and it's cooler in the sense that it's not so heated up and so full of me trying to make an impression on the reader as opposed actually talking about the book. Sometimes you forget, "it's not about you pal, it's about the book."
