Françoise Sagan on the power of laziness
A timely reminder from the author of Bonjour Tristesse
Prolific writers have always fascinated and intimidated me. The Anthony Trollopes and Charles Simenons and Joyce Carol Oateses of the world: How do they do it? For a long time I assumed the secret was a great wellspring of self-discipline that they could drink from unceasingly, like hamsters at the sipper. But what if the secret is a deep underlying laziness?
It’s a theory I’ve been mulling over since last week, when I revisited a book of interviews with the French writer Françoise Sagan (1935–2004), who wrote her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, when she was eighteen and went on to publish an additional nineteen novels, three books of short stories, nine plays, two biographies, and several collections of nonfiction. (I was thinking about Sagan because of the new film adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse, which looks almost unbearably sultry—has anyone seen it?)
I’d call twenty novels and a dozen-plus other works pretty prolific—but you don’t have to read much about Sagan to realize that she was not a possessor of tremendous BDE (Big Discipline Energy). She wrote Bonjour Tristesse “in two or three months, working two or three hours a day,” she told the Paris Review the year after it came out. And she certainly didn’t adopt a hustle mindset after that. I loved this exchange from her book of interviews, published in 1974: