Robert Plunket on the “big secret” of making art
“Every artist does it.”
The latest issue of Apartamento includes a fascinating interview with the novelist Robert Plunket, whose two novels—My Search for Warren Harding (1983) and Love Junkie (1992)—were recently republished by New Directions, and whose author bio reads:
Robert Plunket lives in a trailer park in Englewood, FL, where he enjoys collecting old quilts and raising succulents from scratch. For many years he was Mr. Chatterbox, the gossip columnist for Sarasota Magazine.
In the interview, the now eighty-year-old Plunket does not talk about being Mr. Chatterbox, alas, but he does explain how he started writing My Search for Warren Harding, a comic novel about a neurotic, closeted historian’s attempts to pry a batch of bawdy personal letters from the twenty-ninth president’s (fictional) former mistress in the Hollywood Hills. (Ann Beattie called it “an amazing, audacious, impossible-to-forget novel.”) And in describing how he started the book, Plunket divulges a “big secret” of writing a novel, which might also be a big secret of realizing any kind of creative project, and which seemed worth sharing with you all today.
Some context: When he began the novel, Plunket was working for the New York State Council on the Arts, going into an office every day and wondering, as he put it, “Is this all there is? I don’t want this to be the rest of my life. Could I write a novel? Is that possible?” He continues:
I had no idea how to write a novel, absolutely no idea. And I did not intuitively have a storytelling sense. Then I realised, I’ll use somebody else’s novel, and I’ll paraphrase it. And I chose The Aspern Papers.
This is a clue to Plunket’s “big secret,” which he goes on to explain in the following exchange: